FEAR and its two expansions are now available on Steam for $10. From the standpoint of 2010, is the game worth $10? Have we moved beyond its gameplay? Do the expansions, in hindsight, not suck or still indeed suck?
And why isn’t this game available on Good Old Games where it really belongs?
this is really Office Block Shooter: THE GAME.
I’m playing through it for the first time ever. The AI is kind of neat, the graphics are still acceptable, but the environments are blah, Blah, BLAH hella boring so far.
Don’t bother with the expansions. They manage to be even more blah and repetitive. The level design somehow takes a step backward and approaches near Doom-like levels of boxy, square geometry.
If you ignore that for a horror game it’s not particularly scary, it’s definitely worth $10. I remember at the time being impressed by the AI and some of the visual effects but it’s definitely true that the environments are samey.
Don’t bother with the expansions. They manage to be even more blah and repetitive. The level design somehow takes a step backward and approaches near Doom-like levels of boxy, square geometry.
that’s quite unfortunate.
i love the story explanation for the fact that you’re shooting the same guy again and again and again
oh, of course it’s an army of superclones
I liked the firefights in the game but yeah, the environments were mostly variations on cubicles and conference rooms. I got tired of it after a couple of hours and shelved it.
The office thing didn’t bother me at all. I didn’t even think about it much until people on here complained about it. I love the first FEAR game, so I absolutely think it’s worth it.
The office thing never bothered me either. Some games I play to be a tourist and observe interesting environments. Some games I play so that I can watch an interesting story play out. I played FEAR to get to the next combat encounter. They give you different weapons. They put you in different types of rooms in a variety of combat situations. Sometimes you fight people in power armor, other times it’s ordinary soldiers, other times it’s something else that I won’t spoil. But whatever the circumstances, they keep varying it up and changing the situations in every combat encounter.
I know that I sometimes complain that games are sometimes too long. That the narrative doesn’t support such a long game, but the game is padded with repetitive content just for the sake of making it longer.
FEAR didn’t have that problem for me. It’s a pretty long game. But it never felt repetitive to me, despite it taking place in drab office environments. The combat stays interesting all the way to the end, and the pacing of the game kept me moving right along for several days worth of gameplay for many hours.
The game does have some levity. There are phone messages left in office cubicles on answering machines that are sometimes funny. It’s not No One Lives Forever, but they do have the flavor of a Monolith game, and they tell the bigger story using those answering machine messages. It’s complicated, and you don’t need to follow it, but it is good for a laugh sometimes.
So yeah, I’m with Robert Sharp on this one.
I rated Fear 1 as completely average game, the shootouts are pretty good, destructibility and slow-mo and good AI. But everything else, level design, story…just sucks bigtime. There is one and only one whoa moment in the whole game (and it is at the end) and that’s all.I finished it, but barely.
Strangely, I bought Fear 2 (20 bucks) and hated that one even more, since there even the shootouts sucked.
I would say that with Fear came the fall of Monolith, previously known as maker of NOLF, Blood, TRON and AvFreakingP 2.
If you play it after midnight with the lights dimmed and headphones on, some passages can be quite … startling. I remember liking the combats, it was fun to play.
edit: yes, from artistic/story point of view it’s nothing spectacular, but it’s fun to play, compared to say Bioshock, which is beautiful and interesting and could just as well have been an animated movie.
It’s basically Blood 3. And not in the good way.
Anyone know why the Steam store page decided to tell me FEAR was 5GB? When in actual fact the download I’m looking at is 16GB… Yea that’s never getting played. Oh well, at least I only wasted €9.
Good shootering and bad (repetitive) level design/story. Basically the opposite of bioschock.
I’d play any number of fps games instead. Slowmo was interesting though, as it always is.
I’d say worth five bucks, if you’ve already bought everything else worth twenty.
Hmm, Maybe FEAR itself is only 5GB, but when combined with the expansions it is actually a 16GB download.
The environments are repetitive, though they still manage to have some really nice set piece shootouts in there. And I found the story, confusing and vague as it was, worked in terms of keeping me interested until the end. But ultimately what sells the game or not is whether or not you enjoy the combat. I did. For $10 it’s definately worth giving a try, IMHO.
It’s definitely worth it. My assessment is very similar to Rock8man, but my enthusiasm for the game is milder. The firefights are what keep you going, not to witness interesting environments. It wasn’t even that the fights were particularly challenging, they just felt more fresh than combat in many other games. Sort of the same experience as battling Half-life’s AI for the first time. The middle segment is meandering and they could have easily trimmed 3 or 4 hours and it would have been a tighter game.
Also don’t play it and expect a survival horror game. I found it genuinely scary at times, but it was mostly startling. It’s somewhere between Half-life 2 and Bioshock in terms of how powerful those momentary shocks can be.
EDIT: Oh, and definitely don’t play expansions. It stretches the plausibility of playing such a long, repetitive shooter without poking your eyes out to the breaking point.
I’m with Robert and Rock8 on this one, it was a fun game and it’s well worth the price at $10. My only issue with it is it does run a little long so be prepared for a bit of a slog through the later levels. That being said the answering machines were definitely awesome and I absolutely loved the atmosphere and AI.
The thing is, it’s all bought off the same store page and it’s impossible to install the components individually. Therefore they should list the full size of the download.
I’m tempted to kick up a stink with Steam and get my money back (purely for the principle of the thing) but I’ve had a stressful day and am simply too tired to bother.
FEAR is basically a one trick pony, but its a very good trick.
The gun fights with the clones and other foot soldiers is really fun, or at least when I played it. Probably still is. However, fighting almost anything else is not so fun.