The Haunted Hoard: F.E.A.R.: First Encounter Assault Recon (PS3)
F.E.A.R. isn’t so much a horror shooter at is a first person shooter with a sprinkling of horror elements over top. During most of the experience you won’t be worrying about the little girl in the red dress, the strange visions of the psychic cannibal, or the skeletons of unfortunate people found in excessive pools of their own blood. Instead, most of the game’s time is actually spent shooting at gunmen like you might in a more realistic shooter, but that doesn’t mean the brief moments of horror are kept from adding intrigue to the plot.
F.E.A.R.: First Encounter Assault Recon, sometimes simply called F.E.A.R., refers both to the game and the special forces unit your playable character is a part of. When a test subject named Paxton Fettel escapes experimentation, he is able to use his telepathic powers to control a large group of clone soldiers known as Replicas who were altered to essentially serve as willing puppets for Paxton had he stayed under the thumb of the people experimenting on him. Your work exploring areas like warehouses, inner city apartments, an office skyscraper, and laboratories will almost always be in pursuit of Paxton or someone associated with trying to uncover his whereabouts like a scientist with ties to the project or a slimy fellow who works on a building’s security systems. However, the game starts introducing strange flickers of a little girl in red fairly early on before it even begins to start hinting at why she keeps appearing, the player sometimes pulled into memories briefly while other times witnessing the world around them twist in some way meant to be horrific. Flashing a few gory faces on screen quickly is one of the game’s weaker means of doing so, but coming across the grisly remains of someone by first noticing the odd dripping in a corner with a flickering light did have potential for more atmospheric horror if the game didn’t space out such things quite a bit. As said earlier it feels more like this shooter simply has horror elements in its narrative rather than the game aiming to really inspire much fear in the player, especially since you’ll have long stretches of clearing rooms of soldiers before you get those flickers of something more sinister reentering the story for a short spell.
What makes the story a bit hard to follow though is the way a lot of information is provided to the player. Mainly, a good deal of phones with voice messages left on them occupy the buildings you explore, and while they start off a bit too believable with barely any information given by people who have no reason to discuss things, you do start to get key plot details… provided you can even hear the message. There are no subtitles in F.E.A.R. for spoken dialogue and while you can often understand a character directly speaking to you, these abundant plot crucial messages can be hard to make out even if you fiddle with the audio settings. While one slider for volume is meant to impact character speech, these phone messages seem unaffected by it while the soldiers who patrol most dangerous areas of the game are always surprisingly loud in contrast, meaning if you turn up your television’s volume you’ll probably have the inverse problem with their chatter being obnoxiously loud. The crucial details will still be easy enough to pick up in the moments that are harder to miss, but those interjections of horror imagery do lose some of their punch when the mystery of someone like the girl in red can arise more from struggling to hear the explanation of her than a true lack of details.
Luckily, the shooting in the game is handled about as well as you’d hope along with a nice concept in the form of Reflex. The Replica soldiers that serve as most of the game’s enemies are fairly smart enemies at times, leading with grenades if you have the drop on them to make you retreat or spacing out their movement times so you can’t just mow down a squad with ease. In fact, heavy damage will likely be sustained if you stay out in the open when more than a Replica or two is active, and the game isn’t afraid to fill a room with Replicas at multiple vantage points. This is where the Reflex ability kicks in, this power allowing you to slow time so you can better avoid fire and land plenty of shots on your own as you are less impeded by the slow motion. Reflex does take time to recover to prevent it from being abused in every firefight but its recovery time is also not too absurd, meaning proper management in a fight will allow you to escape a bind or quickly gain an advantage so you can better handle the situation when things return to real time. While the Replicas are an overly present part of the game whose main differentiation is often just using different weapons from the same set you use, there are a few additional foes who appear perhaps too rarely considering how refreshing they are to see. Some sneaky assassins can turn invisible and move in for swift strikes, but Reflex is a proper counter to ensure they don’t catch you off-guard too often. Mechanical foes like drones and turrets tend to be even quicker to lay on heavy damage if you don’t deal with them quickly and safely, but admittedly the Replicas and mechs that have greater armor than the standard soldier don’t often require more strategy to overcome, just consistent use of your better weapons that justifies all that time you spent carrying around a rocket launcher as one of the three guns you can carry at a time.
F.E.A.R.’s weapon variety is fairly good even if sometimes that comes at the detriment to certain weapons. The submachine gun for example is often easy to get ammo for and fast to fire but its recoil is so stark you’ll spend a lot of that ammo trying to hit your targets. A standard assault rifle mixes usability with strength though so it’s hard to say no to such an effective standard, but having two open slots for additional weapons to swap to gives you some chance to engage with the game’s other options without being too committal. The HV Penetrator is a precision gun useful for landing the instant kill headshots that will immediately end a Replica, but you’ll usually need to catch them unaware or use Reflex to line up such a shot since they are fairly responsive and mobile in a firefight. The game’s only true sniper rifle is odd in its firing of three quick shots after you line up your scope, but this does end up helping it some because of the flightiness of your foes. You have other options like a shotgun good for foes you’re close to and a pretty standard pistol, but the Type-7 Particle Weapon at least brings a new concept to your arsenal with its energy shot that can almost disintegrate most foes with a well placed shot. Explosives that don’t take up weapon slots come in three types with a frag, mine, and remote bomb you activate yourself for a few options outside of pointing and shooting, but this solid set doesn’t quite assuage the repetitive nature of many firefights.
While there are appreciable layout differences in your many gunfights with the Replicas and they do occasionally have a more inspired moment like snipers in windows harassing you while you cross rooftops, most of the battles will still blend together. This is at least in part because Reflex, the same ability that lets the enemies pose an appreciable threat even in small numbers without being overwhelming, also thins their ability to be clever as you can slow time down and put down a few soldiers. Up to ten health kits can be carried at a time and used at your discretion again as a way to let the game be a little rougher with how much damage bullets deal but health kits are also perhaps too abundant outside of a rare few scenarios. You can pick up armor and even upgrades to your health and Reflex time that won’t kill the difficulty level, but it still feels like the game struggles to put together pulse-pounding or strategic battles beyond needing to sometimes weigh which weapon to use to avoid running low on ammo. The battles never become outright boring thankfully, but F.E.A.R. does start to blur together as most conflict fails to do much to stand out.
Two other modes do exist to try and get a bit more out of the mechanics, weapons, and locations of F.E.A.R., although multiplayer on the PS3 is dead. Both team and solo versions of deathmatches and elimination existed where you try to get the most kills or avoid losing all your lives respectively while capture the flag focuses on infiltrating enemy territory to steal their flag and score a point by taking it back to your side. These fairly standard first-person shooter modes can be made more interesting in their Slow-Mo modes where players can acquire a limited use ability similar to Reflex, allowing them to gain situational edges by slowing the other team down at key moments. Since only one teammate can use it at a time and they must manage this resource it won’t be omnipresent and strategy in using it makes it a bit more interesting than single player where enemy groups are often in quick separate clusters where you have time to recover Reflex between encounters. F.E.A.R. also lets you dive straight into gunfights on your own though, Instant Action a survival challenge where enemies keep appearing and you need to do the best you can with the limited weapons on offer. This contextless action is more a side amusement than a compelling way of extending your time with this shooter though, the concept straightforward and the limit on fighting them in one constantly refilling location making the Replicas feel rather repetitive still.
Of some note as well are what seem be a myriad of issues that might be unique to this port to PlayStation 3. Load times can be all over the map in length, to the point the very final sections of the game would take so long to load it had seemingly frozen right down to the game not letting me access the PS3 menu, but after letting it sit for so long I had given up and gone on to do computer work it suddenly loaded the final bit of the game. This final bit had visual glitches that weren’t part of the horror like strange colored static as textures on objects that disappeared once you get a bit closer, but perhaps the most distracting problems occurred earlier when some light sources would glitch out in an almost fractal patterns. Diamonds and triangles of light would emit from a location and slow down the game quite a bit if you looked directly at the oddity, some gunfights ending up even slower than Reflex mode because of the impact of these lighting errors. Autosaves can save you the woes of losing much progress to these rare but bothersome glitches, but there was also a strange issue that seemed to arise from ambient noise instead playing as obnoxiously loud static sounds. Considering this was my second attempt to rent F.E.A.R. from Gamefly after the first copy straight up wouldn’t load normal play it could be the discs had some damage that exacerbated some delicate code. I can’t find mention of the exact issues I encountered elsewhere despite general acknowledgements of the PS3 version generally being glitchy so seemingly the PC or Xbox 360 versions would be the preferable way to play.
THE VERDICT: The intelligence of the Replica soldiers you fight in F.E.A.R.: First Encounter Assault Recon definitely gives the firefights in this first person shooter some spice, but it’s not exactly given the full room it needs to realize its potential. The PS3 version of F.E.A.R. in particular is riddled with distracting glitches, but elements like the Reflex system that is meant to counterbalance how dangerous enemies are also cuts away some of the need to be tactical in approaching them. A small range of enemy types that aren’t pulled out often enough means even different battlefields can’t quite diversify the action to the level needed to keep the game consistently fresh and the problems with voice audio make it hard to follow the light horror elements. The shooting definitely has its moments where it is superb thanks to the weapon balance and level of challenge, but just as often it will feel like yet another similar gunfight despite the Replicas best efforts to be more than your standard cannon fodder.
And so, I give F.E.A.R.: First Encounter Assault Recon for PlayStation 3…
An OKAY rating. While the lighting, loading, and sound problems are definitely distracting or keep you from taking in the plot, it’s hard to say how much better the game is if you disregard those elements. Reflex is a great concept for a first-person shooting power, the slow down letting you overcome difficult situations without having to compromise the power of what you’re facing. On the other hand it feels like a much too powerful multipurpose tool that can undermine those moments the enemy soldiers try to bring more to the firefight with their behavior and tactics. Besides grenades your only tool for doing more than shooting enemies and finding cover is slowing things down for some quick guaranteed kills, and when an enemy type like the assassins or mech try to bring something new to the action, you aren’t pushed out of your comfort zone enough to keep things exciting. If the game mixed in enemies who fight with different strategies then you might be more compelled to pick when to utilize Reflex or finding your openings with certain weapon types, but the game can feel quite forgiving so long as you use the resources given to you. Refusing them would perhaps skew things too much in the enemy’s favor because of their high damage and placement though, so a sweet spot is hard to find even though few battles really ever feel outright rote because enough variety is found in the spaces you fight in. Perhaps if the horror concepts were better integrated and conveyed in a better manner then you’d have a better hook to keep pushing forward, but F.E.A.R.’s supernatural story is only so-so and the shooting is left carrying more of the weight.
This probably is more of a recommendation against this specific version, the PC version at least going to provide a decent campaign filled with foes who are a step above the mindless drones of weaker first person shooters despite canonically being mindless drones. The place these smart soldiers occupy though isn’t quite up to the same bar of quality, although possibly part of the low degree of enemy variation is because of the level of intelligence they tried to squeeze out of the basic gunman. Blasting your way through a bunch of Replicas who do more than stand around as targets is still an entertaining enough experience despite a plot that is forgettable on top of being hard to hear, so while it certainly would be a good way to spend an evening, you should at least never find yourself playing the PlayStation 3 version if you truly want to enjoy its one major well-executed element.