Behind the Gun: F.E.A.R.

Well, F.E.A.R. is about six and a half years old now.  Maybe I should write about it, before it becomes completely irrelevant.

F.E.A.R. isn’t the first horror-themed first-person-shooter out there.  Doom 3 beat it by about a year, and I’m sure there have been others that I’m unaware of.  But Doom 3 tried to be frightening by way of survival horror, which failed for reasons I’ll explain later.  F.E.A.R., in my inexpert opinion, is largely successful on this count.

What does F.E.A.R. stand for, you ask?  It refers to a fictional top-secret special operations unit that deals with supernatural threats.  It stands for First Encounter Assault Recon.  It also, depending on who you ask, stands for Fuck Everything And Run.  Your tolerance for blood and jump scares will be a good indicator of how true this is for you.

For me personally, F.E.A.R. is rarely ever truly frightening.  In fairness, though, that’s more a consequence of its being an FPS than any failing on the creators’ part.  Generally speaking, most FPS games put you on an even footing with the enemies, in terms of power, maybe even make you more powerful.  It makes sense, since you need some kind of edge, and the enemy pretty much always has raw numbers on their side.  Going the route of survival horror in an FPS, then, is generally a bad idea.  This is where Doom 3 failed.  Survival horror is concerned in large part with managing the character’s resources and relative fragility (hence the word “survival”).  The main notions of the FPS genre run entirely counter to that.  So the game relies on jump scares, unsettling fake-outs, disturbing tableaux and of course a few actual “gotcha!” moments.  Maybe that does it for some people, though.  I’ve seen at least one Let’s Play on Youtube where the player seemed pretty consistently freaked out. 

And to be fair, F.E.A.R. does mess with you a bit.  There are often objects which seem to exist for the sole purpose of being knocked over or bumped into in order to make a startling noise that wrecks the otherwise eerie quiet.  And there are a few moments where some scripted brief weird and eerie event occurs, but is actually harmless, and largely happens just to keep you on your toes.  Particularly on a first pass through the game, you can’t really write these events off, because there’s no real way of knowing (short of familiarity with the game) when these events are happening just to screw with you, and when they preface an actual threat.

So what’s it about, then?

F.E.A.R.’s story is a mix of horror and science fiction.  Long story short, it involves your attempts, as the Point Man of one of at least two First Encounter Assault Recon units, to find a genetically engineered psychic commander named Paxton Fettel, and kill him.

Up until quite recently, Fettel was the property of Armacham Technology Corporation, which is the kind of corporation that employs a small army, complete with fully automatic weapons, as a security force, and has policies in place to murder anyone who might leak incriminating information during the sort of disaster that unfolds as the game begins.

Because it would be far too easy otherwise, in addition to being a psychic commander, Fettel has an army of clone soldiers, referred to as Replicas, who are especially susceptible to his mental commands.  While he was once locked up tight, he has recently been released by persons unknown, and he clearly has a mission of some sort.

He also has an appetite for human flesh, but this is just a means to an end, really.  He indulges mainly because eating part of someone allows him to absorb their memories.

You know precious little of this starting out, and one of the ways in which the game supports its eerie atmosphere is by never spelling any of this out very directly.  What you really know in the beginning is that you, fellow soldier Spencer Jankowski and forensic specialist Jin Sun-Kwon are being called upon to find and eliminate Fettel, which in theory will render the Replica soldiers insensible, thus ending the threat.

Of course, it doesn’t work out quite like that.  It never does.

While he’s supposed to have a tracker chip embedded in his head, Fettel seems to appear and disappear at will.  That he always seems to be a step ahead of the F.E.A.R. team, having slain and dined upon pretty much anyone who might tell you anything useful about what’s really going on, makes things somewhat frustrating.  You uncover clues as you go on, relating to a girl or woman named Alma, who is in some way integral to the experiments Armacham was running prior to the creation of Fettel himself. 

Most of the plot details are revealed through the messages left on various important people’s answering machines, which you encounter as you work your way through the Armacham offices and other nearby locations.  I guess it’s a good thing the game takes place in 2005.  If it was set in the present, the Point Man would have no idea what was going on, unless he could retrieve everybody’s cell phones.  Eventually, the truth emerges, and you realize that Armacham has about a cemetery’s worth of skeletons buried in its closet.  You begin to feel a little sympathy for Fettel.  Clearly, his methods are horrific, absolutely intolerable, and yet his goals are not wholly without justification.  At least a few of the people who die at his hand (or fangs, whatever) had it coming.

So what about the game itself?  That the story is well done is all very well and good, but how does it play?

Pretty well, actually.

F.E.A.R. follows in the newer trend of FPS games in that it limits the player’s arsenal.  There are close to ten different weapons (the number differs depending on whether you count the ability to wield pistols singly or as a pair as two separate weapons), plus a handful of different types of grenades, but you’re limited to carrying only three firearms at a time.  In a game like Halo, this helps to liven up the experience by requiring you to adapt your tactics to whatever weapons and ammunition happen to be on hand.  F.E.A.R. backs away from this restriction somewhat, though, by making a couple of weapons consistently available.

In addition to the FPS-standard melee attack (in this case, hitting enemies with the butt of your chosen weapon), F.E.A.R. also gives you a handful of other melee attacks.  You can holster your current weapon to strike with your fists, and in fact, the smaller the weapon you’re carrying at the moment, the faster you move.  You can also employ a flying bicycle kick and a sliding tackle with a few simple commands.  This amount of attention paid to melee attacks is rare in FPS games, and it’s all the more interesting that melee attacks are so powerful.  Most standard foes will fall in a single hit, especially if you can sneak up on them from behind.

And that’s not even the best of it.  The Point Man has superior reflexes and perception, which manifests in a limited ability to slow the game down.  This allows you to maneuver among the enemies more quickly than they can easily track, and line up precise shots under pressure.

All of these abilities would make the game sound stupidly broken and easy, were it not for the fact that the enemy A.I. is some of the smartest around.

Enemies are intelligent enough to shoot from behind cover, flush you out with grenades, employ suppressing fire, and split their forces in order to flank you.  That last bit is something they will do at every opportunity, and it’s important to remember when playing, because that opportunity presents itself distressingly often.  Pretty much every area has a couple different paths you can take to get through, and whichever one you’re paying attention to in the middle of a firefight, the enemy will probably be sending people through the other route to take you down from your blind side.  They’ll also spot you coming if you have your flashlight on (and the game has enough dark areas to make sure you need it, often at the worst possible moments), and are bright enough to target any exploding barrels or other explosive hazards that happen to be nearby.  As logical as it sounds for the enemies to be this intelligent, it was pretty unusual for its time, and continues to be kind of impressive even today.

In fact, in their way, the regular enemy encounters are some of the more harrowing and taxing parts of the game.  Sure, the intentionally horrific scenes—the hallucinatory nightmare walks through blood-filled hospital corridors, the unsettling encounters with dim phantoms in a fire-lit void—do their job, but the main combat does a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to making you feel strung out. 

To which I can say only: Bravo.

Of course, F.E.A.R. isn't quite perfect.

The environments do wear out their welcome after a while.  There is entirely too much time spent wandering through the Armacham offices, though I do think that’s the worst part.  The industrial section that precedes said offices could probably stand to be trimmed a bit, also.  It’s not that they’re bad, just long to the point that you start wanting to see something new well before anything new actually appears.  The game could stand to be shorter.  If it had to be just as long, then it should have more diverse environments.

The sound effects are a bit of a mixed bag.  Most of the more conventional firearms have oddly low-key sound effects; the submachine gun and the machine gun sound about as threatening as a popcorn popper.  This is in direct contrast to the visceral, meaty sound of bullets ripping into your enemies, which is something I don’t think most other games I’ve played even have a sound effect for.  It’s kind of unsettling.  The more “future-y” weapons, I can’t really complain about.  To my knowledge, nobody actually knows what an energy weapon that vaporizes flesh and leaves a charred and bloody skeleton would actually sound like, so F.E.A.R.’s take on that is as good as anybody else’s.  The voice-acting, though, is done well.  There's something in the mixed anger and frustration in the enemies' voices when you're whittling down their numbers that almost makes you feel for them, and that's rare in any game, let alone in a genre where enemies exist almost solely to be mowed down in a hail of gunfire.

Enemy variety could also stand to be a little more diverse.  You have your normal Replica soldier mooks who (to be fair) come with a  variety of different weapons, armored mooks that are considerably harder to kill, mooks in mech suits, Armacham security mooks, flying gun turrets, ceiling-mounted gun turrets and the odd ghostly phantom enemy.  Still, aside from the phantoms (they go down fast, but move more quickly and erratically than anything else in the game to make up for it), fighting the enemies gets harrowing enough that you may find yourself honestly thankful that they come in strictly limited varieties.

There are also two expansion packs: F.E.A.R.: Extraction Point and F.E.A.R.: Perseus Mandate, which take place after the events of the main game.  Both of them add new enemies and weapons, and if my own experience has been any judge, are somewhat more difficult than the original F.E.A.R.  But I’m honestly kind of bad at FPSs in general, so that may just be me.  I can't speak on these much, as I haven't finished either one of them yet.  But it's kind of a moot point by now; buying the game on Steam, which is pretty much the only way to get it, nets you both expansions automatically.

All in all, F.E.A.R. is definitely worth playing.  The graphics have aged surprisingly well—character models are a bit simple, but expressive and well-animated enough to compensate—and the flaw of overlong areas is far outweighed by the skillfully handled atmosphere.  The story, while simple, is handled well and internally consistent, and there are some nice bits of foreshadowing in the beginning which will probably make you go “Ohhhhhh,” on later playthroughs.  And F.E.A.R. is, frankly, still mechanically better than some later games I’ve played.  That it set a new high-water mark for enemy A.I. in FPS games doesn’t hurt its reputation, either.  After Half-Life 2 and the original Quake, F.E.A.R. is the FPS I’ve probably spent the most time on, and not because it’s difficult.

Not just, anyway.

Behind the Gun: Half-Life 2

I’ve had it in my head for a while now to write a series of “reviews” of first-person shooters.  I somehow doubt I’ll be doing so exclusively for the next little while, but we’ll see.  In any event, here is the first.

*    *    *

I have a fascination with these bleak, dystopian settings, these harsh wastelands barren of hope and promising decay, and death for the unwary.  I think I’ve felt this way ever since I was a child, reading through the mini-comics that came with the Starriors figures I got for Christmas for a couple consecutive years.  The idea that the Earth might be damaged to such an extent as to be inhospitable to human life—that it might conceivably be destroyed, even—is so repellent to instinct that it becomes in some way perversely compelling.

Half-Life 2 pretty much opens up with that kind of scenario and gets progressively more grim from there.  I think it’s safe to say I was going to be a fan right out of the gate.

You start off on a train, a nod to the tram car where your player character, Gordon Freeman, ended the original Half-Life after doing the smart thing and accepting the G-man’s offer of “employment”.  He took you into some kind of stasis, and now here you are, some twenty-odd years later (give or take).  You haven’t aged a day, but things sure have become different while you were gone.

“Wake up and… smell the ashes,” the G-man tells you, in his oddly haunting and strangely emphasized tones.  Who he is—what he is, precisely—remains unknown.  What we know for sure is that he is some sort of interdimensional bureaucrat who has retained you for your unique skills.  Your first glimpses of this future world are not uplifting.  Wake up and smell the ashes, indeed.

You have only the vaguest notion of where you are and what you’re supposed to be doing. The question of “where” is easier.  You are in City 17, located somewhere in eastern Europe, which serves as a sort of capital for the much-diminished human civilization.  The Earth has been overrun twice over.  First it was the creatures that slipped into this dimension due largely to the events of the original Half-Life.  Then came the Combine, a collective of alien races bent on utter domination.  Between creatures making the countryside and wilderness highly unsafe, and the Combine’s efforts to corral and control humanity, the numbered Cities seem to hold the majority of humankind.  A suppression field prevents reproduction.  Volunteers are modified to become troops for the Combine; troublemakers are also modified, but in a much different, less pleasant fashion (not that the volunteers’ modifications look to be all fun and games, mind you).  The message is clear: those who can be used, will be used.  Those who cannot will be driven to extinction.  The bottom line is that humankind as we understand it will be destroyed, and the Earth will be gutted for its resources.  Half-Life 2 shows us subtle signs of this gutting already happening.  Docks and boathouses on dry land, well away from the shore, give a good indicator of how much water has been drained from the oceans already. 

None of this is shoved in your face.  The Seven-Hour War, in which humanity rose up against the Combine and was decisively trounced—which served, really, as little more than a prologue for the complete surrender and “treaty” brokered by one Dr. Wallace Breen—is hardly mentioned.  It’s in a few newspaper clippings you’ll find here and there, pinned up by the sorts of characters who would want a reminder of all that has been lost, perhaps to goad them ever onward toward some action.  Maybe some conversations mention it.  It’s difficult to recall, exactly.

One of the many strengths of Half-Life 2 is in its narrative subtlety.  There are very few scenes where characters exposit at you for long stretches.  People talk about background events and history in much the same way you or I might talk about history.  They talk about the Seven-Hour War like we, today, might talk about 9/11.  We don’t expound on the tragedy.  We mention it; we share a grim, knowing glance; and everybody understands the full meaning of what’s been said.  In much the same way, characters in Half-Life 2 don’t feel the need to speak in brief history lessons specifically for your benefit.  They talk how people talk.  You want to be in the know, great; go figure it out on your own. 

So there’s Half-Life 2’s setting in a nutshell, if we want to be flip: part War of the Worlds, part 1984, part Children of Men.

That answers the question of “where” nicely enough.  What about that question of “what”?

What, indeed?

The G-Man himself provides a subtle answer to this in his brief opening monologue.  “The right man, in the wrong place, can make all the dif-ference in the world,” he tells you with his off-kilter enunciation.

The original Half-Life saw you pretty much being exactly that.  Surviving a catastrophic accident that opened a portal to another dimension was practically a fluke.  The game from that point forward amounted to little more than the player character’s attempts to escape from Black Mesa (the research facility where the disaster occurs) for much of its length.  That there are alien creatures running around, and later, U.S. military personnel whose job was to shush the whole affair up, is practically incidental.  Freeman just happened to be fit enough and determined enough to beat the odds and escape.

The right man in the wrong place.

So, rather than give you any real direction (or even a stated goal), the G-Man just drops you into a train car bound for City 17, apparently having faith that you’ll do exactly what he (or his employers) want, just by doing what comes naturally.

You’re quickly pulled aside at the train station’s processing center, presumably for understandably lacking important documentation.  Thankfully, the guard who pulls you aside is Barney Calhoun, one of the heretofore nameless security guards from Black Mesa.  He discreetly sends you on your way to Dr. Isaac Kleiner, one of your colleagues from the back-story of Half-Life who is, despite his apparent nervous disposition, part of the resistance in City 17.  Lacking a map or even basic directions, however, you are quickly cornered by the City Overwatch.  You’re saved in the nick of time, however, by Alyx Vance, the daughter of Eli Vance, another scientist from Black Mesa.  Alyx guides you to Dr. Kleiner’s lab, where you’re given your familiar Hazardous Environment (HEV) Suit.  Also, your old crowbar.

This is pretty much the iconic image of the series in a nutshell: the bearded and bespectacled theoretical physicist-turned-action hero Gordon Freeman, with nothing but his HEV Suit and trusty crate-breaker to fend off hordes of aliens and other assailants.

From here, you’re pretty much on your own.  You’re tasked with finding Black Mesa East, which is the resistance headquarters, and reconnecting with Eli Vance, where Freeman will theoretically do some science for once.  Of course, this is not to be.  Upon being discovered at Black Mesa, Freeman is forced to flee through Ravenholm, which has been infested with headcrabs, which effectively make zombies of their victims, and make Ravenholm one of the more unnerving sections of the game.  From there you go through the mines, and shortly thereafter find yourself tooling along a lonely stretch of sea-cliff highway toward Nova Prospekt, which is a political prison.

Half-Life 2 never seems to wear out its welcome.  The various environments you traverse last just long enough to feel substantial (especially on your first, most clueless playthrough), yet are short enough that you never really get tired of a particular area.  Even in the game’s various areas, there is often diversity in the different sorts of places you’ll go.  The aforementioned highway section is broken up frequently by various obstructions.  You find yourself dealing with the occasional ambush, or removing a barricade, or deal with rolling mines or any of a number of other things.  There is always some variety to keep things interesting and novel.

The game occurs largely in big setpieces.  There’s a rhythm to the game; you’re usually alternating between more navigation-heavy sequences which involve solving puzzles on your way from Point A to Point B, and more combat-oriented sequences where puzzle-solving is nonexistent and you’re gunning down bad guys or blasting a way to freedom.  But even in combat, you have to use your head.  Sure, some minor encounters can be solved by charging in with guns blazing and mowing down every mook that comes into sight.  Most battles don’t work that way, though.  Like most FPS games, Half-Life 2 requires you to manage your resources.  There are only so many health and armor recharging stations and items in the game.  Likewise, there is only so much ammunition.  And while there are also only so many enemies, unlike you, they can shoot and throw grenades forever.  Some of them are immune to most your many weapons.  (Half-Life 2 is somewhat old-school in that Freeman carries an arsenal of nearly a dozen weapons, and ammo for each, on his person throughout much of the game).  Fight smarter, not harder, in other words.

A common complaint with Half-Life 2 is that its enemy AI is lacking.  This complaint is probably lent more weight than it should be on account of how intelligent (relative to the standards of the day) the enemies in the original Half-Life were.  When it comes to Half-Life 2, the complaint is both true and false.  Custom-made levels have shown the enemy AI to be quite intelligent.  However, the way environments are set up, it’s difficult for the enemies to really showcase their abilities.

So all of this provides a halfway-decent description of the game, but why do I like it so much?  If it’s my favorite FPS of all time, surely it does something special, right?  Well, yes and no.  I tend to think of Half-Life 2 as the sort of game where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.  The game is getting somewhat long in the tooth by now—it was released in late 2004, after all—but that doesn’t matter much to me.  After all, I’ve played the living hell out of older games.  Quake, for instance.

A lot of it comes down to the atmosphere I mentioned back in the beginning.  And it’s not just that Valve chose a post-apocalyptic atmosphere (or one similar to it) when they made this game.  It does take a little more than that to get my interest.  It’s that they were at some considerable pains to reinforce the sense of despair and slender hope that are manifest every inch of the game’s world.  You periodically run across resistance outposts, all of which have the appearance of having been lightly manned and (in most cases) hastily abandoned.  You’ll walk into a room in some dilapidated shack by the road, or some platform tucked away just out of sight, and there will be a small cache of supplies there, and a mattress and a radio to show that someone, however briefly, occupied that spot.  If you’re observant, there are occasionally clues as to why that person isn’t there any more.  The atmosphere is in the way the people dress, the way they talk, the way they mutter to each other about how terrible things are, or warn you not to drink the water while in the city (there’s something in it that makes you forget, apparently)…  There are probably a hundred things that are beyond description because I’d take them for granted, and only notice them by way of their absence in other games.  “Man, I wish this game did X like Half-Life 2 did,” I’ll think, and then pause.  “Or that it did X at all.”

I tend to come back to atmosphere a lot when I think of what makes a game’s story good.  That’s mostly because I think atmosphere is one of the most important things a game has to get right in order for its story to have the greatest impact.  Atmosphere is in the subtle, delicate details of the game world.  A game may look real and sound real all it wants to, but atmosphere is what makes it feel real, in a compelling way, and that feeling is infinitely more important than any one thing we see or hear.  The environment doesn’t have to be realistic, but atmosphere is what gives a game’s environment a sense of consistency and purpose, which translates into a form of realism.

Of course, the rest of the game is also great.  The graphics, despite showing signs of age, still function perfectly well.  The sound effects and music are done admirably.  But I tend to look at the overall experience, and what stands out to me is the attention to detail everywhere you look, the atmosphere balanced so well that it helps to sell the setting while not being cloyingly thick, the aggressive adherence to realism in the environment's details.

Long story short: go play Half-Life 2.  Then go play the two episodes.  Then go play Black Mesa (the fan remake of the original Half-Life).