F.E.A.R 2

I've been on a little bit of a F.E.A.R kick again and about a week ago I played through F.E.A.R 2: Project Origin.  It actually took me a long time to finish because I'd play for an hour or two and then not touch the damn thing for about a week.  So a game that could have been finished in a single lazy weekend ended up being stretched to maybe a month or so.

The game starts out just before the ending of the first game where you play as a team going to get some scientist woman.  You have a couple of gunfights, the town explodes and you end up in a hospital where you've been experimented on and then there's a dude on a radio telling you how fucked you all but he also has a solution.  So you go to him, he gets murdered and from there you have a bunch more gunfights and then you get a girl pregnant and the game ends.  It took me so long to finish the game that I don't really remember the plot very well but I feel like I have the core parts of it right there.  The story is sort of dull and uninteresting and none of the characters are memorable aside from Alma so I just sort of tuned the whole thing out while playing

In terms of game play it's more of the same as F.E.A.R 1.  Rooms of dudes that you kill with slow mo vision followed by corridors of "scary" set pieces.  Instead of doing anything new with the core game play F.E.A.R 2 now lets you pilot giant robot suits in certain areas which, while fun, goes against the games tone a little bit.  Also everything looks and feels all streamlined and modern which I feel works against it.  There's a sort of charm about going back and playing the first one, that same feeling you get when you sit down to play something like Deus Ex or Half Life and the modern presentation, while probably a good idea at the time, sort of hurts the overall feel of the game when you replay it in 2017.

Once again, the game fails to be scary in any regard relying heavily on jump scares and lots of blood to try and get the fear pumping but falls flat on almost every occasion.  You can tell it's trying really hard but because it looks and plays like a modern shooter now all of the scariness feels even less effective.  The robot suits that I mentioned before pretty much put the nail in the coffin on any chance of it having any scary sections because nothing says horror quite like a giant invincible robot suit with machine guns and missiles mowing down hundreds of dudes who are walking out of doors in single file.

Still, it's not a bad game and if you need something easy and mindless to play then F.E.A.R 2 is a fairly decent option I guess.  The game is just so sort of "meh" that I promise you won't be remembering that lazy weekend play through about a year from now