F.E.A.R - Fuck Everything And RUN

[JongleJingle]

Spooky girls, big guns and screaming clones. That's what it's all about.

I fuckin' love this series to death, from it's gunplay and enemies to it's level design and music. F.E.A.R 1 and Extraction point are probably my favorites in the entire series. F.E.A.R 2 is okay I suppose, nowhere near as good as one but nice enough to pass mediocrity. F.E.A.R 3 and Perseus Mandate, I cannot recommend in good faith. Absolutely terrible and buggy ass games that don't follow the series roots at all.

What are y'all thoughts? Favorite game in the series? Should Monolith have stopped the series at 2?

 

[Foreign Merc]

F.E.A.R 1 is easily the best entry entry in the series, 2 is alright and 3 is hot garbage.

Should Monolith have stopped the series at 2?

They did. 3 was made by Day 1 Studios, not Monolith. They didn't do the F.E.A.R expansions either, it was TimeGate Studios (who were also involved in the making of Alien: Colonial Marines).

But yeah, 1 is definitely worth playing. The level design is very good, the AI is awesomely scripted and the guns are fun to use. What more could you ask for?

 

[Quijibo69]

I loves these games. The 3th one I could never finish because of mandatory co-op on one of the bosses . It felt like Resident Evil 7 was going to be F.E.A.R 4 at one point then they kind re-wrote it for RE.

 

[Whatevermancer]

Extraction Point is probably my favorite, cause it doesn't drag out for too long in the middle with the boring samey office block levels. The horror elements are also more interesting and unusual that in the first game, I still remember that scene where as you walk through a corridor and the walls start floating away. Or how you walk to a door to open it, but it's closed, so you turn around and realize that you're not in the same location as you were before.

The story is hilariously bad, though.

Edit: oh, and I never played Perseus Mandate, part 2 and 3, but I heard that they are bad.

 

[Cyclonus]

Fantastic expectations. Amazing revelations.

 

[JongleJingle]

I wonder how a Monolith driven F.E.A.R 3 would go. Would it go the same, or would things go different? I would say different, mainly cuz Monolith probably had something bigger in mind for 3.

It sucks Monolith currently can't change from a third person studio to a first person one. Apparently the Monolith discord says they don't have the resources to do so, despite the Middle Earth games selling like hot cakes. They also have an unannounced project in the works; it sure as shit better be something new or recognizable, and not more Middle Earth shit. Monolith does best when they get total creative control over something.

 

[Quintex96]

I absolutely adored the first one and it's expansions. Although whenever it is discussed, people are often overly harsh on PM and a lot more lenient on 2. PM is a lot weaker than 1 and EP but it still has it's moments and manages to have a non shit boss (super soldier with bullet time like you)

2 has one good level (the school) the rest of the game is generic console fps that is inferior to the original in everyway except it looks a little prettier.

There is no FEAR 3

The sequels biggest shortcomings is constantly going back to Alma. Mistakingly thinking that the spoopy ghost girl was what was selling games and not the exceptional combat and reactive AI (I know it's all smoke and mirrors before you @ me, doesn't make it and less fun to play)

The direction the Sequels should have gone with is having a new paranormal threat each game with a different FEAR team, similar to what PM tried but entirely unrelated to the Alma incident.

 

[Pumpkin Girl IRL]

Third one is a guilty pleasure of mine, although it helps I played as the vampire dude, and supposedly cackled as much as he did.

Fear 2 was great. Amazingly colourful, even if the scare factor wasn't as strong.

Fear gave me a phobia of ladders for fucking months.

 

[Duncan Hills Coffee]

I played F.E.A.R. 1 for the first time recently. I really enjoyed the shooting; it's got some of the punchiest guns I've ever seen in an FPS, and the feeling of blasting a soldier to smithereens with a machine gun was so damn satisfying. Some of the scripted scare sequences were also effective, moreso than I thought they would be because they aren't just cutscenes, no you can actually die in some of them which makes the sequences carry weight gameplay-wise. Beyond that though I kinda found it hard to get into. The environments were kinda drab and I found myself getting lost because everything looked a little too samey. The story was also weird and disconnected, but I wonder how much of that was because I had the twists spoiled for me a long time ago.

I would like to replay it again on a higher skill at some point. The shooting was very fun and I'd like to see if a replay would help change my opinion on the story especially, because part of me thinks I might have skipped some crucial pieces of information.

 

[JongleJingle]

Honestly I do think the Nightcrawlers in Perseus Mandate are a great idea; mercs that are better than the mall cops you fight, but on par with the Replicas you fight. I kinda wish they had more personality and variation though. Maybe their own mech/ a whole bunch of technical units?

 

[Win98SE]

FEAR's AI is a thing of beauty.

It's a great system in the sense that developers essentially just program individual "actions" that have a list of requirements for performing them and a list of "post" states of said action. The planner strings together actions to reach the intended "goal" state of the AI. If you want the AI to shoot, you set its goal state to "shooting" and the planner goes through the list of available actions and finds the ones that ultimately lead to the goal state being achieved. In the simplest case, the NPC shoots immediately. But consider a more complex example where the NPC has no ammo: The action "shoot" has a requirement for ammo. No ammo means reloading, no extra ammo means looking for another gun in the environment, looking for another gun means jumping through a window to get to one, etc etc, and all of that happens just because some bit in the game logic says "NPC SHOOT NOW!!!!!!!!!" There's no need for level designers to spend a shitload of time scripting stuff like the window jumps in some of the office levels because it all comes down to the AI planner using a scoring system to find the most efficient set of actions to accomplish a goal - in some percentage of cases they'll use the windows, but in another they'll take a slightly different route. People call FEAR's AI emergent but it's actually very simple on a technical level, infinitely easier to work with than state machines that most games use. There are certainly limitations to the approach, but done correctly the results are unmatched.

Oh, and the game is good too.

 

[Cheese-Loving Citizen]

I absolutely love F.E.A.R.. It's one of my favorite FPSs of all time, next to Half-Life and Doom. I wish more games gave you the ability to do stuff like this:

The only thing that disappointed me is how little single-player custom content there is. I would put a ton more hours into the game if there were more mods and custom maps. But alas, modders for the game are scarce, and IIRC, the public SDK that was released lacks documentation and doesn't work with the GOG and Steam version. Shame.


And anyone who shits on the VK-12 deserves to get red-misted

 

[LightDragonman1]

Ah F.E.A.R. Still my all time favorite FPS game for good reason. It really is the kind of game that we don't see much of anymore.

Seriously, it has arguably the best firefights in any video game, helped by the superb AI (it still beats out the majority of AI in present games for that matter), and I even think that the story is also surprisingly well written too. Essentially, the game is a combination of Hard Boiled, The Ring, Scanners, and Elfen Lied, all wrapped up into one game (points if you understand why I mentioned those four).

As for the sequels, yeah they don't come close to matching it. 2 was made specifically with consoles in mind first and it shows, what with just how weak and non-impactful the shooting feels, alongside the AI being dumbed down. And we all know how 3 turned out, though in that case, the devs kind of realized that it had no reason to be made, and just rolled with it. At the very least, the shooting feels stronger in 3 than 2.

 

[Dom Cruise]

I played the original on Xbox 360 way back when and honestly I didn't like it too much, the environments got really dull and repetitive, it's actually kind of comical to me to have such an advanced for the time graphics engine and use it to depict endless office spaces, if it wasn't for the ghost stuff it'd be the most generic game ever made.

It just seemed bland to me when compared to Monolith's prior games No One Lives Forever 1 and 2, now those are awesome games, easily some of the most underrated games ever made, I wish Monolith was still Monolith and not another "in name only" dev.

 

[LightDragonman1]

The environments are a bit generic, true, but the way the levels are designed is for a reason, as it facilitates the AI soldiers being able to do much of their advanced maneuvers and the like. Besides, for me at least, the gunplay is the main highlight.

 

[Cheese-Loving Citizen]

I think the ghost stuff and horror is the weakest feature. The only time I jumped in my first playthrough was the ladder double combo early in the game and the first time the Replica Assassins were introduced. Everywhere else is just eh. The "gunfight, horror, gunfight" formula of levels also doesn't help much for the horror.

Monolith should have out-sourced the ghost girl stuff to the Japanese. They'd know how to handle that.

 

[Foltest]

I played the original on Xbox 360 way back when and honestly I didn't like it too much, the environments got really dull and repetitive, it's actually kind of comical to me to have such an advanced for the time graphics engine and use it to depict endless office spaces, if it wasn't for the ghost stuff it'd be the most generic game ever made.

It just seemed bland to me when compared to Monolith's prior games No One Lives Forever 1 and 2, now those are awesome games, easily some of the most underrated games ever made, I wish Monolith was still Monolith and not another "in name only" dev.

play it on PC. It is way better there then on Console.
I love the first FEAR so much.
FEAR 2 is meh at best, but the ending is so out there, so it sticks in my mind.

 

[Dude Snakes]

I have played all 3 of series but the original on PC is the best. The enemy AI is pretty good and the gun-fu gameplay is exciting. Only issue is there was not enough variation of enemies, the assassins/heavies were criminally under used. You get tons of health packs and you can increase your hp to 199 as well as increase the duration of bullet-time. FEAR 2 was pretty good but I miss quick-saving and leaning around corners. F3AR feels more generic co-op fps with a horror coat of paint on it, its fine but the weakest of the series.

 

[Snekposter]

Gonna throw my hat in with the "Great gunplay, crappy horror" stuff. The guns are some of the best I've shot (aside from the absolute monstrous recoil on some), and for me the environmental havoc is the closest a game has ever come to Black. Unfortunately given the ending of EP they had to do a sequel instead of just something different. God I want a proper sequel or spiritual successor to Black.

 

[c-no]

FEAR 1 is one of the best FPS games I played. And it's my second favorite Monolith game behind Blood and front of SHOGO: Mobile Armor Division. FEAR 2 was ok but I didn't get the same fun from it as I did with FEAR or any of its expansions. FEAR 3 was honestly crap in how it not only got a different developer but also in how they changed things. I did like piloting the mechs though and I'll admit, there's some guilty pleasure with FEAR 3. Wished that FEAR 2 was based more on the expansions rather than discarding them while making it all be "you're some other soldier with high psychic energy or some shit and Alma wants to fuck you." The fact that FEAR 1 outright states that the group was made in response to paranormal threats makes me feel like the group outside of just Armacham, Alma, Fettel, and Harlan Wade would of been more interesting in just seeing what sort of shit they'd go up against.