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Mediocre

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 9 / 22
Date: March 23, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Not sure why everyone made so much fuss over this game. It was kind of predictable and boring at times. It's basically like all the other military type of games, run around in a city, shooting other soldiers, and occasionally you get some weird acid flashback thing going on. Then at the end you shoot a scrawny naked crack whore and fly away in a helicopter.

whoopeee......

Excellent Single Player Game but a Mediocre Multiplayer

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 6 / 13
Date: October 19, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Words cannot describe how creepy and atmospheric this game is. The developers obviously worked hard to provide a good story and have taken linear gameplay to an entirely different level, making it unique and fun. This game is scary and fun and you will be jumping in your seat as you're playing it.

Avoid the multiplayer. Slow motion deathmatch lags and my rig surpasses the system requirements. Be prepared to get obliterated in one shot kills and the unarmed attack is the single worst feature. There are far BETTER multiplayer games out there and this is DEFINITELY NOT one of them.

It would have also been nice to see a coopertive multiplayer included as it would have been a blast to play with your friends as a team.

Get the game for the single player, its WORTH the money for that alone but unless you have alot of time on your hands for the multiplayer, avoid it altogether. Its definitely NOT worth it.

All in all I rate this game a 5 for the single player and a 2 for the multiplayer.

Bland environments, lame story, good AI.

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 6 / 13
Date: November 04, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Try this as a test:
1. Find some reviews of F.E.A.R. that have screens.
2. IGNORE the foregrounds that show flashy effects and character models and just look at the background environments
3. Now go find screens of Quake 4, Doom 3, HL2 or just about any other newish shooter and compare their environments.
4. Shake your head in stunned disbelief about how everyone says this game has the best graphics.

You'll be spending 80 percent of the game looking at those environment graphics which are dull, dull dull. And I'm not some teenage kid who plays so many games that only the very latest graphics will do. Just show me some stuff I DON'T SEE EVERY DAY is all I ask. Newsflash for Monolith Productions--some of us have jobs and have to look at corporate offices all day, maybe sticking us in that same environment for 7 hours isn't the best choice.

A huge part of why I enjoy video games is for the escapism and sense of exploration. F.E.A.R. just doesn't give a fig about any of this. The environments are so generic it affects the game play--I constantly couldn't tell if I'd entered a new area because it all looked the same. That leads to a lot of wrong turns and backtracking through levels. Playing Quake 4 after this was like jumping 3 years ahead.

Also, all the other criticsms here about the story are right on target. F.E.A.R. tries to be kind of a shooter Silent Hill--which would be great if it succeded at all in those terms (please, somebody make a good one!). But the story is really an afterthought tacked on top of a game that's really just a series of firefights. If you're expecting supernatural monsters to play any appreciable role in this game you'll be dissapointed.

You should only buy this game if enemy AI is your first priority. And then only if you plan to play it on the hardest difficulty settings where the AI is most active. Gamers looking for any sense of exporation, escapism, or storyline should look elswhere. I really wanted to like this game. Shooters with supernatural themes are my favorite. But F.E.A.R. ignores the biggest reasons of why I play video games.

Loved it!!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 3 / 4
Date: October 27, 2005
Author: Amazon User

See Gamerguy above-ditto.
I loved this one. The first game that has ever genuinely scared me. I have to take breaks as well, creeping around in the dark waiting for things to scream/shoot/jump out at you gets intense after a while. Very cool. Hasn't gotten monotonous yet, they manage to mix the scare factor with the FPS very well so that you rarely see a transition coming.

Great game, but you will only play it once.

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 3 / 4
Date: November 06, 2005
Author: Amazon User

The storyline is FEAR is genuinely disturbing for the early part of the game, but it is obvious that the developers run out of tricks by level 3...

Not to worry though, because the game then goes into John Woo overdrive mode, with over the top gun battles, complete with Matrix style slo-mo and explosions, shattering glass, and enough blood to paint the town red. You also have limited hand to hand combat moves, so you can also take the enemy out with some great kung fu moves (this is recommended for some of the hard to kill baddies, because they will otherwise seriously deplete your ammo).

The other really cool thing about this game is the enemy AI. At one point, I knocked over a shelf, thus cutting the path of the AI. I didn't expect the enemy soldier to crouch down and crawl underneath it through a gap! Better still, when I died and had to pass through the same area again, it became clear that this behavior was not scripted - the enemy soldier was really thinking about how best to get into a good firing position and tried a different tactic because this time the shelf did not go over!
Another thing the enemy AI do well is to use cover properly. They will lean out of cover and suppress you, rather than just dumbly run at you in numbers (as they seem to do in most other FPS games, particularly the Doom/Quake franchise games).

Another surprising trick the AI have is the ability to flank you - they will go though several rooms and appear behind you if you start camping behind a barricade.
The AI also talks to each other, so you can hear what the AI is thinking, which is another cool game-play touch. Generally, it really feels as if the AI soldiers are working as a squad, and this makes the game a little more strategic than other FPS games.

There are a few glitches though, and many of them are already covered by previous reviews - low number of unique locations and not much variety in the enemy graphics.

The other big issue is a few plot holes, like,
- If the enemy soldiers are controlled by a psychic commander, why do they have to talk to each other?
- The motives of the two main central characters in the game are never really explained, and although your part in the story is explained at the end, the back-story of how you are embroiled in the main arc of the story is not explained at all.
- The other central character doesn't even know who you are till the end, so it all seems a little unbelievable that it is all down to chance.
- The last thing said in the game is `distinctly Half-Life 2, and seems to make no sense at all' (except perhaps to set us all up for the sequel, where perhaps some of it will become more apparent)

Although several reviews state that this game requires a fast system, it works very well on my modest system (radeon 9800 pro, 1GB memory, XP2800 processor). As long as you don't use maximum quality textures of maximum lighting effects (neither of which make much of a difference over medium settings), you should be ok.
As with many graphically intensive games (Far Cry, etc), I strongly suspect that it is memory that is the limiting hardware factor and not the graphics card or processor - if you see stuttering or slow graphics (and especially if your hard drive light seems to be constantly on), it is most likely that you need to upgrade from 512Mb to 1GB of main memory. Modern games seem to require 1Gb, irrespective of what the hardware requirements on the box are.

Despite the glitches, there is really nothing as good out there at the moment. FEAR is not as good as half life 2 or Far Cry, but those are benchmark games and unlikely to be beaten.

FEAR is better than the nearest other game out now - Quake 4 (a game I have also played to the end and cannot recommend because I found it very disappointing... apart from the cool graphics, everything else is just plain bad - no AI, poor storyline, poor game balancing (mostly far too easy, with a few die-retry choke points that are just impossibly hard and become annoying), and lots of level retracing, which simply makes the game boring).

If you want a game wth longevity, then FPS shooters are probably not what you want - all of the recent FPS games I have played (Pariah, Quake 4, Brothers in Arms 2, some of Call of Duty 2) seem short, and Fear is no different. If you want to play the best FPS out there, and don't mind too much if it only takes 2 or three days to complete it, then this is the game for you. The advanced AI in the Fear game engine may be the redeeming feature though, especially if we start to see community levels and total conversions (heres hoping!).

Best first-person shooter I've played, scary and good plot

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 3 / 4
Date: March 03, 2006
Author: Amazon User

This is by far my favorite first-person shooter. I'm a horror fan, so I would say I even like the story line better than Half-Life 2, and I loved that game as well. Here is my two cents:

Graphics: Fantastic and not quite as system-intensive as you may believe. I have a geForce 6800 GS, 1 GB RAM, and an Athlon XP 64 X2 3800+ processor, and I can run the game on medium to high settings and still get close to 65 fps.

A.I.: Some of the best AI I've ever seen. Enemies will flip over couches and cabinets to hide behind. If they're taking too much fire, sometimes they'll hold their gun around the corner and fire blindly at you. They'll try to flank you. Good stuff.

Levels: Some people think that the levels get boring and repetitive. I say it's all in your perception. If you're easily bored with similar settings, then yes, it might get old for you. But I didn't have that problem at all. Why? Because I felt that the game did an excellent job of slowly adding new elements to the gameplay to mix it up. Either you found a new kind of weapon, or you met a new kind of enemy, or a different kind of terrain and needed to use new tactics, that it kept things progressing in a steady and fun manner. Also, a few players complained that at times the game forgot about the horror aspects and focused solely on first-person shooter. I would argue this was done intentionally. Just when I had kind of forgotten about the scary stuff because I was too busy mowing down dozens of soldiers, one of the baddies would appear out of nowhere and scare the living daylights out of me. I think this kind of pacing was done on purpose.

Horror: If you're the sort of person that scares easily, then the impact of this game will that much more impressive. I would play this game only at night with all the lights off, and it would create a very eerie atmosphere. At first, I was actually hesitant to move the character further down the hall because I was afraid of what would pop out next. I had to remind myself it was just a game. I literally got chills at certain points.

Plot: I loved the plot. I didn't think the ending was a letdown at all. I thought it wrapped up all the points nicely. And it's multi-layered. So at first it may seem like explanation A is what happened, but if you think about it more, it really could have been B or even C. In fact, I'm going to play the game again to see what else I missed.

Other: You can set the difficulty level on the fly without having to save or restart. Makes it easier to get past really difficult points.

At Best....It's As Good As Half Life 2

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 5 / 10
Date: October 19, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I play this game with a PCI Radeon 9250 graphics card, 800x600 32-bit color resolution, with 1 gig ram and 2.8 ghz processor and i am still pleased with the gameplay and graphics (obviously i know the game is more capable than these setting with a better computer)..but the point is..even with a mediocre card...game still plays great. Great graphics, gameplay, awesome AI. It's as good as Half Life 2.

If you can get over the "system hog" aspect you have one of the best FPS titles to date

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 5 / 10
Date: February 09, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I loved this game, had a blast playing it. It's intense and scary and the action rocks, the sound is fabulous, the experience is awesome! I have to laugh at those giving it low marks, heh.

I've *never* seen a PC Game released here without some Napoleon Dynamite saying the game sucks because their machines don't work correctly. They must go online and tell us all how great their computers are, list their system specs and whine about how badly the game that won't run on it sucks. Go now, look at any PC Video game here and you'll see what I mean. Really... go now and look. I swear, I think some of these lazy kids think that "troubleshoot" is a "Quake" term or something.

One of these dummies called "F.E.A.R." "Overhyped", and began his whining by telling us how superb his PC is, and yet he can't max the game's settings. Oh, he played the game all the way to the end--- it was good enough for that, but he couldn't push the graphics to "may-as-well-be-real" settings so game sucked.

For the record, the game *is* a system hog, it is one of the cons of this title, but this *doesn't* spoil the game unless you feel that your machine *must* run it on the absolute highest settings. My own computer isn't new--- 3 years old, I think. And it isn't as powerful as the ultra-machine that guy has, but good enough to run the game, settings maxed, not that you need that to enjoy this game--- unless you're a spoiled brat.

I was able to run the game at max until I decided I wanted to play my own music, and ran iTunes. Then I had to set them to medium which, as I said, unless you're a real hard-on about graphics, isn't a big deal. Also it's a good idea to turn off anything that runs behind the scenes in your OS, like an antivirus program or whatever.

I love the gun fighting in this game. It's like nothing I've experienced. Bullets can hit and destroy pretty much anything. Bodies are torn apart or slump on the ground; and the silence of the aftermath contrasts so sharply with the chaos. Gunfights in "F.E.A.R." rock!

Part of the reason for that is because the weapons that you have in the game feel powerful, like weapons should. You have the standard choice of guns--- a pistol, machine gun, assault rifle, shotgun, rocket launcher. There's also a scoped, burst-firing rifle that's a dead ringer for the Master Chief's battle rifle in Halo 2; a particle weapon that burns the flesh off of monsters; and a few others.

"F.E.A.R." is a game that's heavily influenced by Japanese horror movies, most notably "The Ring" (yeah that's a Japanese flick we stole and remade in America). "F.E.A.R." uses a lot of the same visual tricks to scare you that you've probably seen before in movies, like the split-second appearance of a ghostly apparition when you least expect it. This game can really keep you on your toes.

You may think other titles are better, but don't be a fool. If you're "just not digging `F.E.A.R.'" because FarCry is a better game to you, don't waste our time. That's not a review. That's like Roger Ebert saying he couldn't give "Godzilla" thumbs up because it wasn't "King Kong".

And if you're problem with "F.E.A.R." is that it's too short ("In less than 8-9 hours the game was finished", boo-hoo) I can give you a little hint on how to make the game last longer: get a life.

The most obvious problem you're gonna have is that, yes, it will most likely ask a lot of your system. If you can overlook this, I think you'll really like it. For me the bad things were that environments and enemies are recycled a bit too much and the plot doesn't tie up as well as it could have.

However, this is a game that will thrill you one moment and scare you the next. It has some of the greatest gunplay I've ever experienced--- incredibly intense and one of the creepiest games ever made.

Many thakns for reading my worthless opinion.

FAIR Levels get too stale and repetitive after awhile

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 4 / 7
Date: October 20, 2005
Author: Amazon User

While this game has some of the best AI out there, the linear gameplay gets a bit tedious after awhile. Map levels are a bit closed off. Incorporating a couple of wide open levels would have been nice.

This game looks and feels great but theres no real incentive to replay it because of it being so linear. Multiplayer is ok but a bit laggy.

All in all. its fun for the most part but definitely not worth the full price.

Finally, the experience I've been longing for!!!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 4 / 7
Date: October 24, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I haven't read any reviews from anyone on this game...why? Because I've been too busy playing it. I just received it last week in the mail and up until then using the demo to appease my hunger. The actual game is much scarier then what the demo portrayed. The only chance I really get to play my games is at night time and because people are sleeping, I need to use headphones. So basically I'm playing this game (as I do every other game) at night time, by myself and with headphones...my gosh, what a perfect formula for F.E.A.R.; with that combination, the game is so freakin' scary that I actually have to take breaks. If you've seen the ring or sixth sense, this uses similar formula. You'll see shadows, things move or even ghosts (i.e. of a little girl or that man with blood around his mouth). They'll say whisper type stuff or you might hear the little girl's laughter around the corner only to find out nothing is there. Probably my biggest fear in this game is worrying about my flashlight's batteries running out; I just don't want to be in the dark like that....it's creepy.

O.K. so the game is creepy and gives you goose bumps, but is the action part any good? Probably one of the best I've seen. Imagine Max Payne 2 meets Counter Strike Source and then inject steroids to it, that's what the action is in this game. You have that slow time but I thinks it's more user friendly then in Max Payne and depending where you shoot, the ballistics of your weapon will act accordingly...you'll see bullet marks and craters in the walls or floors. Bodies will fall with head bobbing uncontrollably while I fill it full of lead. It really seems like my guns are so realistic, that I almost feel sorry for these guys I'm shooting up. The game can be kind of gruesome at times, and there is a lot of blood, especially in those scenes where you become like spirit possessed and start seeing stuff like bloody hallways and stuff. The environment is also pretty interactive...one of the things that freak me out the most is when I'm in a room and its kinda dark and my elbow or arm bumps something because it makes a noise and then I feel like I'm not the only one in that room. Overall, wherever I'm at, I always feel like something is watching me, it's pretty crazy...I've really never felt this way in a game. I own tons of games, HL2, DOOM 3, Farcry...you know the usual suspects...granted they are all different in their own rights, this one is way out on left field. I can't explain it all without writing a dissertation but you have to see for yourself (and the demo doesn't count, it doesn't do the game justice).

On the technical side of the games, the cool thing about it is the controls really are not complicated at all. Even remapping your keys are easy because it will tell you if you try to remap a key already used and ask if you want to proceed. Doing the slow motion, shooting, reviving your health, even fighting are all fluid in the game. The cool thing about it all is in the beginning the screen will flash with how to do something and what key to use...it will even give you tips before you go into battle. The engine behind this game is a revamped engine used from NOFL 1 and 2 and Aliens Vs. Predator 2. The monolith/havoc engine has in my book always been one of those overlooked but superior engines. AVP2 was one of my favorite games of all time, because of the scare and the fluidness of the engine. This one keeps the same winning qualities and improves upon it ten fold.

Probably one of the most valuable additions to this game that every game should have is the testing performance option. You can really tweak your setting perfectly with this option. I have an ATI 800XT PE 256mb video card, I set everything to the max and ran the test and had 20% of frames below 25fps, I kept on tweaking until I was down to only 1% of frames below 25fps, 42% frames between 25-40 fps and the rest at above 45fps (this is with resolution maxed, graphics maxed and cpu setting high (not maxed) and AA at 2x and Anisotropic Filtering at 8x). The game is a system hog if you want it to look good, but it's worth it.

I haven't beat the game yet so I'm not going to talk about the story, if it's good or not, but so far I'm engrossed and it doesn't seem complicated. I play this game in 1-2 hour increments and every time it's like being part of a movie, I can't wait to see what happens next and I can't believe I'm a part of it. I just can't get over how addictive this game is and how it's not frustrating (good job play testers...we don't want another Farcry incident on our hands). Best of all it doesn't feel like "work" when I'm playing this game, just pure emotions of fun and FEAR.

The only negative I can say about this game is its requirements are pretty steep. If you don't have a decent PC with a good video card, this game is going to be sucky, the effects, sounds, graphics, and gameplay really make the game. Be prepared to upgrade (if Battlefied 2 hasn't made you already-another great game) if you really want to experience this game the way it's meant to be.

Bottom Line: If there is one thing I have to say is check this game out for the gaming experience, this is the real reason why we game; I can bet you won't be disappointed. This game is golden in my book.

My system:
AMD 64 3500+
1GB RAM DUAL CHANNEL MODE
ATI X800XT PE 256MB
Audigy 2ZS Sound Card
300GB SATA HD

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