On the Subject of FEAR 2

Monica Bellucci

I've been looking forward to this one. The original FEAR was the Crysis of its day, pretty much impossible to run at max detail on anything available at the time. It might have been a stunningly blatant Ring rip-off, but it had its fair share of shocks, and an oppressively creepy atmosphere punctuated by frantic firefights with impressive AI opponents.

Perhaps my favourite aspect of that game was the ending. Rather than winding up with some tedious boss character, the sort where you think "why didn't that thing just go out and kill everything itself rather than wasting time with all this tech company conspiracy bollocks?", F1's finale was surprisingly melancholy. Well, until the nuclear explosion.

It was slightly tricky to keep track of F1's storyline, scattered as it was between discarded Armacham laptops and voicemails. But at least there was a story, unlike Valve's piss-poor attempts to obfuscate Half-Life 2. Of course if you were following the story it was just Ring without the video tapes. And a high-tech underground vault instead of a well.

But fast-forward past all the non-Monolith-developed expansions and "Project Origin" name wrangling, and now there's a proper, official sequel.

Let's get the bad things out of the way, although they will probably be more numerous than the positives. Which isn't to say they outweigh them, however.

• What idiot thought it would be a good idea to letterbox the PC version to 16x9, when most monitors are 16x10? The same idiot that thought it would be more "cinematic" if they added, or rather forced you to put up with...
• ...film grain. And no option to turn it off. Maybe in the rumoured patch. Note to developers: film grain doesn't make you feel like you're in the game, it makes you feeling like you're watching someone else play it. On shitty 8mm film.
• Autosave. Fair enough, but there's no way to manually save the game. You have to rely on the predefined chapters if you want to replay a section of the game.
  
• Achievements. Not really a "bad thing" in themselves, rather just another symptom of the overall consolitis.

With that of the way, it's time to consider the things F2 does right. It looks very nice, in the same clean, industrial style of the first game. It also runs very well, and I suppose that's largely due to it being console-friendly.

One point which I feel deserves special mention, is that the game has not crashed once, so far. It's sad that that should be the exception rather than the rule, but it has been absolutely bug-free in the time I've spent playing. Top marks.

The story is... hmmm... well, Monolith have attempted to distance themselves from the 3rd-party FEAR expansions, but I don't feel they achieved anything remarkably different with this game. I only played Extraction Point and not the widely-panned Perseus Mandate, but I did find F2 to be a little less subtle, and a little more in-your-face than the first game. There are many points in F1 where not a lot happens, except for the tension being cranked up. F2 tends to throw as much as it can at you, all the time. Firefight followed by Alma vision followed by firefight followed by specters followed by firefight in a mech followed by etc etc.

One interesting comparison is provided courtesy of the stealthy assassin bad guys. In the first game they appear (in narrative terms) without warning. You're in yet another office environment when suddenly there are Predator-style refractive things jumping around at amazing speed. When they appear in F2, it's after seeing one from a safe distance, shortly followed by a special appearance in a cutscene. So it's not like you're not ready for them. That, and they're a lot easier to spot, even if they feature more sophisticated, pretty rendering. The end result is that they really become just another foe rather than the "oh shit, it's an assassin" moments of the first game (at least until you figured out that slide-kicks would one-shot them).

In general the gameplay felt very much like Half-Life 2 in the sense that you're constantly moving forward, never sticking around in any one location for any time. I suppose the first game was like that too, and maybe I've just been spoilt by Far Cry 2. It's not really a complaint, just an observation. It also feels like a waste, because there are some very nice environments in F2, not to mention 11GB of game data, which seems like a lot for what turned out to be a roughly 8 hour game for me. So yes, it was too short. By roughly a factor of 2.

As for the ending, well, it was ok I suppose. There is what really amounts to a boss encounter unfortunately, although it's a boss encounter crossed with the stupid bit at the end of Far Cry 2 where you end up fighting your "buddies". So that was less than ideal. The conclusion to the story itself could have been better, too. The idea of your character ending up trapped with Alma in her private hell is good, but they had to spoil it with the ridiculous psychic rape and talking foetus. Yeah, it's pretty much as bad as it sounds. No subtle melancholy for F2, that's for sure.

Still, the firefights were good enough, if no different to the first game. The frights were a little less effective, maybe thanks to (over-)familiarity with most of the tricks in Monolith's big book of scares. There were some good bits, although not much beyond what was in the demo.

One thing that I found disappointing was the Wade Elementary section. There's lots of intel lying around to tell you about the testing that's been performed on the little kiddie-winks, how they were split into different groups and ultimately how there's a huge underground testing facility beneath the school. That's all great, but I kept waiting for the "scary freaky kids" to show up and provide a landmark gaming moment. Unfortunately they never did, and it all just turned out to be backstory for how Armacham were trying to find potential candidates for project Harbinger, which is essentially how your own character fits into the situation.
Definitely a missed opportunity there, Monolith. You know where to find me if you need some tips for FEAR 3.

Thought for the Day: Veronika Zemanova Megapost

I really didn't intend for this one to be a megapost. "12 will do", I thought to myself. But you know how it goes when it comes to pictures of attractive women with big tits, there's no such thing as "enough".

On the Subject of Mass Effect

Bar Rafaeli

Mass Effect is an odd game in hindsight. I really enjoyed playing it, but now that I'm looking back on it I find it hard to pinpoint what exactly made it compelling. The combat is awkward, with it's over-the-shoulder 3rd person view, team orders that I rarely used and which were pretty frustrating when I did and character skills which I hardly ever bothered with. Graphically the game veers between impressive and fairly lame. The characters are done well, some of the environments are good, but then you get dumped onto a planet in the little tank thing and suddenly it's like playing something out of the 90s.

Really, it comes down to the storytelling. The story itself may be fairly standard sci-fi wank involving ever-popular robotic species and ancient civilisations, but it's told in a very engaging, and very polished style. The voice acting in particular is first-rate, probably the best I've encountered (which isn't really saying much). If you don't stray from the primary missions then it has a great deal of page-turning appeal.

It's not perfect, and some of the supporting characters veer from bland to annoying. Eventually I was longing for a dialogue option that would let me shoot the human woman who you pick up at the start of the game in the head. Also you know, deep down, that the game isn't going to allow you to do the "wrong" thing, so while it can be fun to act like a bastard and crank up your "renegade" status, it doesn't really change anything. I'm not even sure what the point of the paragon and renegade tracks was, I think I've read you get some special ability that's activated by them or something, but I ended the game at about 50% on both, with no obvious impact on my character.

Another aspect of the game which could use some serious work is the side missions. They're useful for bumping up your level and for kitting out yourself and your team-mates, but there are only about 3 models of "dungeon" in the whole game; a "mine" dungeon, a "research" dungeon and a "warehouse" dungeon. Oh and I suppose there's a "spaceship" dungeon for the relatively rare boarding missions. But in each case the layout is identical each time that location appears. And they're very small, taking all of 5 minutes to clear.
Fortunately there's more variety in the locations visited in the primary missions.

The character design interface could do with some work, too. Assuming you bother to customise your character, it has an irritating habit of producing faces which look fine in the close-up view within the design interface, but which go on to look fucking awful in the actual game. Mostly it's the camera's short focal length, which gives the image a slightly fish-eye effect which isn't present in cutscenes. So you end up having to put the eyes artificially far apart to make them look right in the game. Also I found it virtually impossible to make a decent-looking female character. Someone needs to put some R&D into proper hair systems for games, because the sculpted plastic look that's so common in RPGs is overdue for a next-gen update.

The fact that there's a lot (and I mean a lot) of dialogue to plough through might seem like a bad thing, but I found myself exploring all of the branches wherever possible. The downside is that it hurts the game's replay potential. There may be a fair variety of classes to choose from, but the thought of having to sit through all the interminable chat again really puts me off. It was fun the first time, but now I know what everyone's got to say, what's in it for me?

Perhaps that's why I find the game slightly difficult to classify now. I was keen to get back into it at every possible opportunity to find out what happens next, but now that I know what happens next, I really have little motivation to do it again. Maybe I'll wait a while, and then choose a class that's significantly different from the tank I played this time. I ended up fairly overpowered really and my team-mates contributed very little to the success of the missions, which is perhaps why I didn't need to bother with the team controls. There were occasions where both my team-mates were dead (never permanently) and I'd go on to clear the area single-handed before returning to resurrect them. I might as well have not had team-mates, except that they're often necessary for cutscenes.

So overall, a polished, fun game. Might be one to pick up cheap given it's limited replay value but still definitely worth a first run.