FEAR 360 - single-player impressions

Soon enough, it's not enough just to kill; you'll want to turn every engagement into a piece of art, in which the minimum of ammo is expended for maximum effect, and the moment you slip back into real time, a pile of corpses falls to earth on cue.

The only flies in the ointment are that the PC version, while graphically breathtaking, needed high system specs to run at a decent speed. Given the demands on the hardware brought about by some extremely rich texture and bump-mapping work, which then gets an overlay of sheer eye-twisting insanity in slo-mo situations, you can probably expect some drop in performance during particularly hairy scenes.

In addition, the combat sequences were the heart of the game, as the scenery and enemies didn't undergo any dramatic advances as the story played out. Fingers crossed that the Xbox 360 version will readdress these issues to our benefit using its as-good-as-a-top-of-the-range-graphics-card tech... but, as always, we'll wait and see for sure.

Generally though, we expect FEAR to knock our socks off. The 360 is capable of pretty much anything a modern PC can do, and outputting at 720p on a hi-def TV, there'll be no better qualification of your expenditure.

Just be aware that - if the PC version is anything to go by - you're in for a long-haul of corridors and laboratories, with endless combat sequences, not storyline, as the centerpiece. More soon...