FEAR: First Encounter Assault Recon

Also known as: F.E.A.R. First Encounter Assault Recon, FEAR First Encounter Assault Recon [UK]

RSS

Overtime is truly hell

Words: Tim Edwards, PC Gamer UK

0 Comments

Email this article

Bookmark

Bookmark this Article

But it doesn’t follow through. The gun-fights are by far F.E.A.R.’s best element. If they continued uninterrupted for the entire game, you’d have PS3’s answer to Black. But they’re short and fractured. You spend much more time exploring drab offices and cubicles, flicking switches, listening to answer phone messages or solving yet another jumping puzzle. So much of F.E.A.R. is just dead time - minute after minute spent walking through the office block, waiting for the gunfights to kick off.

And that’s not the only problem. This is a port from a two-year-old PC game. Back then it looked startling, particularly because the gunfights kick up so much dust and smoke. Occasionally, you’ll just spray fire into a cloud hoping your bullets will connect - such is the amount of fog kicked up. But it’s aged badly. The PS3 version looks like the PC version running on low detail. The textures are grainy, the fogging inept. It’s drab, too - the office block setting lending itself to infinite shades of grey but little other color. And the issues with conversion don’t stop there.

Despite F.E.A.R.’s simple premise, it’s actually quite a tough game to control. There are just so many buttons. Buttons to lean left and right. The fire button. A button to switch to the land-mines. A button to swap weapon from a choice of three. A flashlight. A reload. A melee attack. A use button. A throw grenade button. All these functions have been mapped quite awkwardly to the Sixaxis. You can only scroll through your guns, not select them individually. This is not clever: too often you’ll be caught switching to an empty gun in the middle of a pitched fire-fight. For the first couple of hours, expect to constantly hit the ”change weapon” key, instead of fire. The game provides a few alternative configurations, but none are ever comfortable.