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.