The Impression Game: FEAR 2 demo

The ad campaigns for FEAR 2: Project Origin tell you to fear Alma again. Playing the advance demo the other night on my Xbox, I wondered if it was more fitting to fear pre-Half Life 2 shooter design.

But that's not to greatly disparage the solid game on display here. All the familiar trappings of the FEAR were present, along with the beats you've come to expect from a tightly scripted corridor first-person shooter. Your character, a different FEAR operative than the original's protagonist, is dogged by Alma during impromptu hallucination sequences. Meanwhile phantoms haunt your steps and homogeneous hordes of replicant soldiers impede your progress through a story that seems as nebulous as ever.

Typical of a shooter, things like "meet us at the rendezvous point", "find the exit" seem to provide all the narrative force required to string you through some beautifully devastated environments. Monolith has taken FEAR to the beauty salon by applying a fresh coat of foundation and layering on all the blush and highlighting you could ask for. The texture detail in the sequel is several magnitudes more intricate than it was in FEAR. The light has also seen a tremendous overhaul. Gone are the jagged, janky shadows, replaced now with bevy of lighting tricks that take the games atmosphere from being merely believable to utterly gripping. It shares more than a few stylistic hallmarks with last year's Condemned: Bloodshot. Thankfully, where that game revelled in up-close melee while offering a smattering of gun play, FEAR 2 amps up the gun porn but throws in the same amusing butts and scissor kicks from the original FEAR.

The play mechanic are competently realized. The game nails that all-important feel of holding and firing powerful weapons. Where FEAR offered a largely cosmetic option to aim down your weapon's barrel (which in practice looked more like you were lifting the gun from waist to chest height), FEAR 2 goes full out with a iron sights mode that perfectly mimics that found in the Call of Duty series. The standard arsenal of boomshots, rifles and subs all look appropriately sexy but they suffer with their muted reports. Really, a shotgun should not sound like a pop gun.

Yet if there's a problem with FEAR 2, it's surely not for its lack of intensity or good intentions. With it's thin story and pretensions of Hollywood horror scares, the developers are still not sure what they want you to think after the last bullet has been fired and the final replicant dispatched. Despite the cheap scares brought on the occasional blurry visions, you're essentially a one-man wrecking crew: incredibly well-armed and endowed with superhuman reflexes (yes, the slow motion makes a return), so the threats never feel elevated to any point beyond the purely concrete. As in the first game, the core game play is actually quite divorced from the core of the story. A survival horror game like Dead Space links these pieces together by actually making the scares and threats one and the same. Here you see visions of ghosts but blast armies of obstacle-hurdling relicants in the face mask. Ther'es not much horror there, but it's still a damn fine guilty pleasure.

So while the demo for FEAR 2 still makes a solid case for retail purchase, it doesn't quell any suspicions I have about stepping into the shoes of yet another super soldier on a particularly bad acid trip. Perhaps the multiplayer modes will include one for a communal freak out session, no weapons required.

(Note: To be fair, the various preview videos of the final game do show some variety in the enemies beyond soldiers and mechs. We can expect a showing from the deformed freakazoid contigent and even the demo included a posse of angry poltergeist monsters. I'll admit that it can be fun to hate on Alma, even if it will probably be a lot more fun to play the damn game once it comes out on February 10th, 2009.)