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- Jan 2, 2007
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Hey there! I haven't done a First Impressions article in awhile (I usually saved them for Betas, and I've been out of the loop on betas for awhile) but I felt the need to do a new one.
This time I'm going to be taking a look at the demo for F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin
FEAR (No dots, too lazy) was one of my top games of 2005. I was able to get past the repetitive locales, the fact that most of the enemies were the same, and enjoy the kick a** combat, cool graphics, interesting story (Well, I liked it even though others didn't seem to dig it all that much) and I was hotly awaiting what was in store for Project Origin since it was first announced. (Plus I'm glad to see that Monolith got the FEAR name back so that we wouldn't have a crappy third party FEAR 2 out there as well.) As soon as I saw the Demo was on steam, I quickly began downloading it. As soon as it was done, I launched it and played it through.
In other words: AWESOME.
First things first, the engine. A pet peeve of mine with modern engines (I'm looking at you, CryEngine 2, you poorly coded hunk of crap hiding behind your prettiness.) is that the designers will toss in tons of good graphics but forget to iron out bugs and make the game compatible on older computers. While FEAR 2 may not look as good as oh say, FarCry 2, it still looks really nice and is on par with, if not better than, games like Dead Space or Fallout 3. Not only that, the engine has few bugs and it runs buttery smooth at 1680 x 1050 with all the antialiasing and antistropic filtering maxed out, and this is on a 4 year old computer that barely runs source games over 20 frames a second. With everything maxed out I get a nice 45 fps on average. The texture work is excellent, and once again I'm going to single out a certain texture and praise it: The blood. While obviously there are more important textures and such, I've always loved the blood textures in FEAR because they look more brutal and they look more splattery and nasty than most blood decals, especially the ones in say games like Half-Life 2 (Which I replaced its blood decals with the ones from FEAR
) that look weird, grainy, pixellated, or tiny.
Now onto the game. If you liked FEAR, FEAR 2 is pretty much a copy of it with a few fancy new tricks, so that means FEAR 2 will be up your ally. If you didn't like the original, then I doubt #2 is going to change your mind. The game still has excellent AI and sound direction, and it continues on what made FEAR a seemingly "universal" horror game. What I mean by that is not only does it have gory, slasher/B-Horror movie type scares for the squeamish or morbid, it also has the occasional f*** with your head low key psychological horror, so whether you like your horror over the top or subtle there's a little bit of both. I won't say the game is particularly "scary" but it provides a unique and compelling atmosphere. I happen to like both extremely gory horror for the funniness of it and psychological horror because its a bit more affecting, so while both may be watered down before mixing together they work for me and I like it for that. The gameplay is fast paced, frentic, and still challenging. As I said before, it's not going to change your opinion of the game if you didn't like the original, but if you liked the original, than so far it looks like FEAR 2 is a worthy addition and is easily the first must play of 2009 for shooter fans.
If only I had 50 bucks, then I'd totally be preordering this
Oh well, whenever I get my hands on some money (Harharhar, that's not going to happen until the year 2059) this is definitely going to be a must buy for me and hopefully I'll see you guys in the games online component, assuming the online is as fun as it was with the original game.
This time I'm going to be taking a look at the demo for F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin
FEAR (No dots, too lazy) was one of my top games of 2005. I was able to get past the repetitive locales, the fact that most of the enemies were the same, and enjoy the kick a** combat, cool graphics, interesting story (Well, I liked it even though others didn't seem to dig it all that much) and I was hotly awaiting what was in store for Project Origin since it was first announced. (Plus I'm glad to see that Monolith got the FEAR name back so that we wouldn't have a crappy third party FEAR 2 out there as well.) As soon as I saw the Demo was on steam, I quickly began downloading it. As soon as it was done, I launched it and played it through.
In other words: AWESOME.
First things first, the engine. A pet peeve of mine with modern engines (I'm looking at you, CryEngine 2, you poorly coded hunk of crap hiding behind your prettiness.) is that the designers will toss in tons of good graphics but forget to iron out bugs and make the game compatible on older computers. While FEAR 2 may not look as good as oh say, FarCry 2, it still looks really nice and is on par with, if not better than, games like Dead Space or Fallout 3. Not only that, the engine has few bugs and it runs buttery smooth at 1680 x 1050 with all the antialiasing and antistropic filtering maxed out, and this is on a 4 year old computer that barely runs source games over 20 frames a second. With everything maxed out I get a nice 45 fps on average. The texture work is excellent, and once again I'm going to single out a certain texture and praise it: The blood. While obviously there are more important textures and such, I've always loved the blood textures in FEAR because they look more brutal and they look more splattery and nasty than most blood decals, especially the ones in say games like Half-Life 2 (Which I replaced its blood decals with the ones from FEAR
) that look weird, grainy, pixellated, or tiny. Now onto the game. If you liked FEAR, FEAR 2 is pretty much a copy of it with a few fancy new tricks, so that means FEAR 2 will be up your ally. If you didn't like the original, then I doubt #2 is going to change your mind. The game still has excellent AI and sound direction, and it continues on what made FEAR a seemingly "universal" horror game. What I mean by that is not only does it have gory, slasher/B-Horror movie type scares for the squeamish or morbid, it also has the occasional f*** with your head low key psychological horror, so whether you like your horror over the top or subtle there's a little bit of both. I won't say the game is particularly "scary" but it provides a unique and compelling atmosphere. I happen to like both extremely gory horror for the funniness of it and psychological horror because its a bit more affecting, so while both may be watered down before mixing together they work for me and I like it for that. The gameplay is fast paced, frentic, and still challenging. As I said before, it's not going to change your opinion of the game if you didn't like the original, but if you liked the original, than so far it looks like FEAR 2 is a worthy addition and is easily the first must play of 2009 for shooter fans.
If only I had 50 bucks, then I'd totally be preordering this
Oh well, whenever I get my hands on some money (Harharhar, that's not going to happen until the year 2059) this is definitely going to be a must buy for me and hopefully I'll see you guys in the games online component, assuming the online is as fun as it was with the original game.
