Once upon a time, I saw a friend playing F.E.A.R. on the Xbox, and I remember thinking “This is kind of creepy”, of course I was a couple years younger at that time. Here comes F.E.A.R. 2, and I decide to go out and get the first one so I can play the second one right after it. So after playing the game fully through, here’s what I have to say about it.

F.E.A.R. is in fact not a horror game, but a first person shooter with paranormal and horrific undertones, you’ll run into the occasional freaky occurrence here and there but it’s more shooter than anything else. That being said, the game is still pretty creepy with random occurrences of ghosts or demons popping up and voices being heard. However you don’t feel this creepiness throughout the game, actually when you are in combat, you feel none of it, the paranoia becomes fun for a while.

The scariest or creepiest parts of F.E.A.R. lie completely in the sounds, and the lighting. Even when you are not in combat there is intensive music playing, and often you’ll find yourself jumping at bit at sounds of yourself moving and sounds of the environment. There were many times throughout F.E.A.R. when I jumped because of my own shadow, it’s unnerving.

The combat is your standard FPS configuration: run, duck, shoot, rinse and repeat, but F.E.A.R. does have some notable weapons. Aside from the regular submachine gun, the usual pistol, and the typical shotgun (which you will use a lot), there is a particle blaster, a repeating air missile gun (my personal favourite), and a nail gun. The gunplay is fun but horribly repetitive, and it’s very possible to become bored of the firefights by the end of the game. Monolith does occasionally through in a mech or a super solider fighter here and there but it’s again the same kind of fighting.

The graphics are good for their day and age, though there are some performance issues like frames per second drops during graphic intensive times, but overall F.E.A.R. plays well. The environments are overly repeated and sometimes it feels like the developers simply copy and pasted parts to make a level. However, one thing this game does excel at is it’s level design, there are times (often in later levels) where the path isn’t so clear, and you have to look around a bit more to find the right way to go, but this is vanquished by the linearity of the levels, there is only one path, and if you stray from that path you will either a. die, or b. hit a wall.

Despite all of the game’s flaws, the story is wonderful, even if it is broken up into minuscule pieces until the end of the game. This was something I had a problem with, there was no even flow of story coming. Throughout the levels you’d find pieces of data that act as background information for the game but you never really get a full blast of what’s going on until the end of the game.

If my judgment sounds straying it’s because the game has lots of up points and down points. F.E.A.R. is a great game, but with some fixing it could be much better. Overall I’d call it an average title, so if you have nothing else to play, you can pick up F.E.A.R. and not be disappointed, but if this game was still at retail value I’d say it wouldn’t be worth a full buy. I heard F.E.A.R. 2 is more polished than F.E.A.R. 1, so I will have to check it out and report back.