FEAR 2: Project Origin

Monolith’s second outing for her of bedraggled hair and psychic entombment is crash-landing in a very different pool of expectation to the original FEAR. In the past few months, shooters have changed.

Monolith tells me that its pint-sized mascot of terror, Alma, is going to “touch me more” in FEAR 2, and that’s a bad thing. I’ve got a general policy of keeping 8-year-old girls who command psychic clone armies at arm’s length, and if you’re like me, you perfected your “backpedal-while-screaming-and-jamming-the-trigger” technique in the first FEAR.

The events of Project Origin promise to bring the player closer – physically and psychologically – to Alma than the flittering twitches its predecessor, FEAR allowed. “You play Michael Beckett,” enthuses John Mulkey, Project Origin’s lead designer. “You’re going in to rescue Aristide, the president of Armacham – the woman who restarted Project Origin and wakened Alma.

Dec 24, 2007 Earlier this month we posted our first impressions of the spiritual successor to FEAR. Weve since had a chance to ruminate a bit more on the shooter that will be making us all scream like, and because of, little girls. The outstanding memory we have of FEAR wasnt the all-pervading atmosphere - although it was creepy - but the intimidation we felt as we pitted ourselves against some genuinely sharp, crafty enemies. For Project Origin, developer Monolith is currently refining that

Dec 3, 2007 Why is it that child stars always suffer? Its the Macaulay Culkin effect: subject to an increasingly mediocre by-the-numbers career while bickering parents divorce and squabble over the cash flow. Spare a thought then for Alma Wade, preteen star of developer Monoliths money-spinner FEAR: a victim of a tug of love between her creators and her publishers Vivendi - but also paraded through an array of ill-fitting console treatments and absurdly bland expansions. So why are we

No cameras. No voice recorders. No interviews. No screenshots released. No questions asked. To say that our invite to the world's first showing of the F.E.A.R. sequel beyond the iron walls of Seattle's Monolith was heavily policed is somewhat of an understatement. With a marriage to Vivendi Games now thoroughly annulled through Monolith's acquisition by Warner Brothers, and the franchise name of F.E.A.R. now lost in frantic lawyer-speak, the decision has clearly been made to let the still