FEAR Extraction Point (spoilers)

Games
1

I’m kinda time-starved these days so I’ve only just got round to finishing this. There seems to have only been one previous thread, and that was for the demo. So…

OK, pretty, nice fights, one entertaining new weapon (the minigun - the laser is pants), one fun new mob (the heavy heavy armor), but nothing much in the way of new scenery - I could swear those offices are exactly the same as Armacham’s; painfully short; and omg the plot…

I mean, Paxton Fettel (yes, he’s not dead) actually says at one point “It doesn’t make much sense does it? Nothing does, any more…”, which is surely up there with ‘it was all a dream’ in crap plot explanations.

And what actually happens at the end? All this time, Alma has been enticing you on, occasionally clearing your way (by killing the Replicas who are… controlled by her anyway??), taking back to where you were born (I guess), then in the final ‘spooky bit’, we see chid-Alma and adolescent-Alma… what? Walk towards each other and fade to white? After which all the blood (and there was a lot) has mysteriously disappeared and you’re free to go?

Except you’re not of course - another self-aware line from Fettel, “You should know better by now”, and another firefight. And then oh look the whole world is fucked.

I mean… the original, you could at least construct internally self-consistent theories about what was going on. I can’t even make a stab at that with the sequel.

2

My working hypothesis:

Alma wants revenge. Fettel, her kid, is her willing tool. You, her other kid, are her unwilling tool. There’s some kind of dynamic dual-level struggle going on there, as Fettel is always directly hostile to you, while Alma sometimes hinders, sometimes assists your progress.

To all of which I pretty much say bollox, as FEAR remains the best SP shooter out there regardless of plot ineptitude and vagueness. Several times during the original game & the XP I said, “Man, that was a pretty good fight.” Not, “Man, that was a cheesy fight,” or, “Man, am I glad I’m through that fucking sniper town”. Great stuff.

The laser, BTW, is not pants: it carves armor open faster than anything else, and is superb for burning guys at long range. The minigun is great up close but that’s about it.