F.E.A.R

Horror games are mostly based on simple scare tactics to get a reaction out of you, rather than cultivating a deeper kind of fear into your subconscious to keep you on your toes. Thus, except for a few jump scares, nothing is left imprinted on your memory after such an experience, which is not the true purpose of a horror game.

Monolith Productions have developed F.E.A.R in order to shed a new light over the horror genre, by including a few new elements to obtain the desired reactions out of the players. Thus, by utilizing ingenious psychological tricks, the game manages to inspire fear without showing you too much, most of the time, especially not the actual monsters that are at the core of the story.

As such, storyline-wise, F.E.A.R. revolves around a soldier that possesses unnatural reflexes and is part of the First Encounter Assault Recon, which is portrayed by you throughout the game. By using his abilities, you must follow the clues and stop a powerful little ghost girl, called Alma, that is massacring entire commando teams with unnerving ease. Over the course of the story, you find clues about her origins and intentions, but everything is kept as sketchy as possible, to increase your discomfort level.

F.E.A.R utilizes a few old concepts when it comes to shooters, but they are much more refined and polished, offering you a wide array of new ways to put them into practice. Thus, although the bullet-time technique has been overused in video games, it does feel rather appropriate when applied to the game at hand, especially since the graphics allow for almost total environment destruction. Because of this, seeing wall pieces falling off during a slow motion fighting sequence improves the overall experience by quite a lot.

Another chapter that has been carefully designed and refined is the AI, which really poses quite the challenge, especially at higher difficulty levels. You can hear the enemies discussing among each other, as well as organizing themselves in such a manner to make it harder for you to ambush them, or even flank you if you are the one playing defensively. Despite that, their cunning is of little use, since bullet-time makes tactics pointless most of the time.

In the end, F.E.A.R. shines in more than one aspect, thanks to the incredible graphics, physics engine, story and AI. It does, however, get rather repetitive after a while, since the missions are kind of the same from start to finish, but you quickly forget about that once you start shooting.