Gaming FEAR 3 Review

The difficult third chapter in the FEAR series has landed. We take a look.

http://www.bit-tech.net/gaming/pc/2011/06/30/fear-3-review/1

 

Nice review chap... actually just slogging through it at the moment.

The one thing I can attest to.. is that the game is far from scary, sure there are some SUDDENLY moments within the game itself, such as Alma moving down a travelator gawping at you with eyes wide open Fallout style. Quite freaky. But other than that... it's fairly good fun. Definatly worth it if you're a slug-fest player like me!

 

Wow. Personally I find it so incredibly dull I stopped playing after the first few intervals. Destruction is toned down tremendously and the weapons all feel the same making the firefights less interesting, don't like that you have to unlock all the cool actions by completing silly objectives (e.g. stay in cover for 120 seconds), story just doesn't grab me like the first game did and I guess that is because I miss the really cool voicemails that gave you alot of background info. I haven't played Project Origin though so that might be the reason I'm missing out on some of the details.

 

****ing Run or F.3.A.R.king Run?

 

LOL

 

I was scared shitless playing the first game, too much to actually ever finish it. Call me a coward, but I don't like being spooked. The little girl was seriously creepy.

I might actually give this a try.

 

Very dissapointed that its not as scary as I heard the first game was - I never played F1 or F2.
This is just another FPS - having said that, am enjoying it.
Doom3 still remains the scariest game Ive played!

 

Developer says own game is best, CVG 'reports' this as news shocker.

 

Good review -- thanks. Not sure how I feel about the more arcadey aspect. It seems to me that we've already got quite a lot of achievement-heavy arcade shooters out there. In all probability I will wait til Deus Ex: Human Resources for my next major game investment (it comes out just in time for my next paternity leave!).

But I'm interested in your assessment of the first FEAR game as not deciding what it was and 'hotfooting between styles'. I didn't quite finish it (accidental uninstall when about 3/4 of the way through); however, one of the aspects that I thought was most effective was exactly that alternation between styles and the fact that you never quite new whether you were being set up for a guns-blazing ambush or for a scary hallucination or (in quite a few cases) simply an empty room with a few bloodstains. So perhaps it could be cast as a strength of the earlier game rather than a weakness?

 

I really enjoyed the first game and busy with the second one and I guess I will have to give this a try as well I just really hope it won't be too much of a let down compared to the styles of the first two games.

 

Agreed.

The reason why Doom3 is so scary is because it's dark, forces you to always be disarmed while using the torch and enemies appear from behind walls and under floors and basically anywhere really, so yeah, easily scary.

FEAR3 just tries to be scary but there is no real element of danger, in Doom3, if your reflects wasn't fast, you'd actually die from not responding fast enough to the threat that has just jumped out at you.

That being said, System Shock was the scariest game i've ever played, i was 14 at the time mind you

 

Thanks for that review. To hear that the story has been given such a backseat is disappointing... I actually quite liked the progression in FEAR, FEAR2 and the addons.

I had this on preorder, and cancelled it a couple of days before release. Glad I did, now - will wait for it to hit the bargain bin in a few months.

 

It's not that I didn't like the way FEAR alternated, just that it became very obvious once you got past the first three or four levels how it was going to work. Every level would either be SHOOTY or SCARY and nothing but that - and the two aspects were polar opposite. You had long drawn out dread (where you quickly realised you would never be hurt) and you had awesome gun fights (where you would never be scared). There was no blending of the two, which is what I like to see in Monolith's other games, such as Condemned - where the action IS scary and the scary stuff CAN be actiony.

It was basically a case of FEAR being made of 1 and 1 and, while I really like the number 1, what I'd really like is the number 2.

 

There was something I was thinking of a few days ago when playing FEAR3, I often wonder if we've played games so much that it's now fairly difficult to scare gamers. I mean since playing Silent Hill 4 (Going on 6 years now) There are no games that spring to mind that have given me a true sense of fear and utter-gutwrenching "SH*T WTF WAS THAT!?". FEAR3 tried its hardest and failed because it's given me a shotgun... Amnesia never really freaked me out either, played the water part and went "Wow! Invisible enemy... how odd..." Doom3 did it's best on the first part to freak me out!... and failed.

I just wonder if, as gamers we've evolved past the point of games that are scary either from events or from enviroments. Afterall, most media is directed at us as scary... really isn't. *shrugs*

Just my thoughts really.

 

@ BRAWL

You need to play Amnesia The Dark Descent that will make you drop turds in your pants

 

It honestly didn't bother me chap... I'm immune to scary games after seeing Silent Hill 4 scare ten bells out of me with "Crying Wardrobe Baby" as me and my best friend refer to it!

I'm just curious as a gamer to wonder if we have gotten past the point where games can be in anyway terrifying. Fear3 isn't scary because you're never technically alone... You've always got your ghostly brother floating around doing cool things with his psychic shizzle... Silent Hill 4 you WERE alone, even with your companion you were alone... it didn't matter if you had your best mate sitting next to you, you were alone... it played on that feeling and I just think it's numbed (probably just me) us, as gamers against things that are designed to be scary!

 

Hard to scare people? Play Amnesia.

 

The discussions here remind me of mackandmesh.

 

Doom 3 was scary for precisely the first 32 minutes and interesting for precisely the first 33 minutes.

 

So does this one also have terrible mouse lag and acceleration, lack of proper key customisation, a tiny field of view that gives motion sickness and makes you feel like you're playing the game through a magnifying glass, a console-style UI, a plot that removes any and all mystery and instead fills things up with a bunch of horrible, cliched action-movie-stereotype characters, a ludicrously brief campaign that can be finished in 5 hours the first time through, and clunky, dumbed-down combat that requires all the reflexes and skill as Killzone or Gears of War?

The gunplay in the first FEAR was a matter of finesse, relying on careful management of resources, leaning, understanding enemy tactics and positioning, paying attention to audio cues, and using the right weapons in the right situations, while at the same time integrating the slow-motion to allow for systemic culling of enemies without cheapening or dulling the fights. The sequel slowed down the action so much and made the AI so much more dull that you could play through the game easily without ever touching the slow-mo button, trundling along like you were playing goddamn Halo, with all the fights in extremely close quarters so as to make weapon selection painfully unimportant... and then when you switched it on, finally, the slow-mo was so overpowered that you could frequently use it as a "win button" rather than something to help even overwhelming odds.

And then, of course, there's the story, characters and atmosphere. Now, FEAR wasn't really anything special as far as its plot went, but it kept things almost entirely ambiguous, avoided obvious exposition dumps and let you piece things together at your own pace as the game went along. Evidently this was too challenging for focus testers, so for FEAR 2 Monolith decided to make the story as obvious, banal, and stupid as possible, all the while throwing the player in with a bunch of annoying and borderline racist characters who wouldn't ****ing shut up with their bad one-liners for even a minute. And while FEAR got its atmosphere right, relying on haunting ambient soundscapes, building tension which was as often resolved in false climaxes as it was in genuine scares, FEAR 2 replaced it with overdone modern horror movie garbage, an awful Hollywood soundtrack, oversaturated, blurry effects, and cheap jump scares. I never understood the "it's not scary if I can't die" complaint, either. Why is dying in a computer game scary, especially one where the quicksave key is just a second away? It's the anticipation that's scary, and the reveling in horrific sights and sounds, not a "game over" screen.

If this "F3AR" follows the trends of FEAR 2 then it sounds to me like the derp is strong with it indeed - I mean, we've already reached the point where an FPS is "dated" if it doesn't have a ****ing cover system (which exists not as an extension or refinement of features, but solely as a compromise for clunky gamepad controls and idiot players who don't know how to take cover without button prompts), and FEAR 3 evidently lacks the atmosphere and tension of the first game, so why does anyone still care about this series? It died more or less with the second game, yet we're going to congratulate FEAR 3 for being yet another boring, generic clone? Do we even have standards for shooters anymore beyond "herp i cun hit man wit bulletz"?