Something else to ‘F.E.A.R.’ - Military Video Games, computer games, games, gaming - Navy Times

Something else to ‘F.E.A.R.’

If they give you a choice of assignments after your current tour is over, I recommend against applying to First Encounter Assault Recon — not that those guys aren’t some high-speed operators, but they get the absolute worst monster assignments. The goo gets everywhere.

F.E.A.R. goes up against a new army of bad guys, wall-climbing zombies and psychic children in “F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin,” a new first-person shooter with enough interesting twists and novel details that it still surprised me, even after the positive advance hype.

The events of the game overlap with the story of the original “F.E.A.R.,” and you play as a different team member whose misadventures yield a narrative parallel to the one from the first game. You and your F.E.A.R. squadmates get caught up in the eugenics and experimentation story that players will remember from the first installment, which revolves around the world’s most powerful psychic, Alma. In the first game, she was a little girl. For the sequel, she’s a teenager. Ask any woman about the personal trauma she experienced growing up, multiply that by 12 million, and you’ve got the adolescent Alma in “F.E.A.R. 2,” who, in another time and place, might be hailed as a feminist heroine for all the misery she inflicts on men.

Bad guys are trying to cover her up, so you’ve got to kill them; there are monsters involved, so you’ve got to kill them; and this work involves a lot of poorly lit corridors and haunting child’s music-box melodies. Like any good horror movie, “F.E.A.R. 2” uses long stretches of monotonous space and excellent sound design to lull you into thinking, ah, I just have to get to the end of this board and then I can relax and be satisfied with my progress in the game and then RAUGHHH!

However, unlike a horror movie, you are equipped with a shotgun.

“F.E.A.R. 2” loses points for borrowing many elements from earlier horror-shooters, especially 2001’s “Max Payne,” which included scary freak-out sequences in which you have to navigate a maze or escape from a room with melting walls. In “F.E.A.R.” and “F.E.A.R. 2,” your character sometimes has the same kind of crazy psychic trips, in which it’s not clear where you can move or what you have to do. Some players might enjoy breaks from the shootin’, but I quickly lost patience with the psycho parts.

The multiplayer mode was what surprised me most about “F.E.A.R. 2,” which I’d expected to spend all its energy on its scary-shooter core principles. The designers’ first good choice was to make the online games tactical teams vs. tactical teams, with no monsters invited, and their second good choice was to stock the maps with lots of cool weapons. Although your standard-issue kit includes conventional guns that do the job, each map has points where you can discover powerful sci-fi-style gear, if you know where to look. Plasma flamethrowers, rocket launchers and electronic pulse guns are available if your team unlocks them, which helps players who spend the time to get to know the maps well. You can also build your own personal arsenal as you get more online experience.

The “F.E.A.R. 2” multiplayer breaks away from a few conventions that dominate today’s titles, in ways not necessarily good or bad, but definitely different. I respawned almost instantly in many of the games I played, a respite from a “Call of Duty”-style delay; and many of the “F.E.A.R. 2” matches went for 15 or 20 minutes, rather than to a pre-set kill limit or the standard 10 minutes. But I also had a lot of network hiccups on Xbox Live in the days after the game launched, and some of my battles devolved into lag-dances where I’d shoot at a player who wasn’t really there, or be killed by a round fired from empty space where a player had been standing 10 seconds before.

Although I’m glad they kept out the monsters, the multiplayer could’ve used the richer graphics and sound of the “F.E.A.R. 2” campaign mode, as well as its ability to manipulate doors and objects. In the campaign maps, you can open or close a door as needed to fight or entice bad guys, and you can slide forward couches or tables to use as cover. No such luck in the online games. Nor can you use “F.E.A.R. 2’s” time-slowing-down-so-you-can-kill-people-like-“The-Matrix” feature, also borrowed from “Max Payne.”

Still, when you’re on a smooth patch of Internet, “F.E.A.R. 2’s” multiplayer is a respectable newcomer to the community of violent video games. There’s plenty of blood, but it’s blessedly goo-free.

Game review

F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin. $59.99. For Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 2 and PC. Rated M for “Mature.” www.whatisfear.com

Buy? Rent? Skip? Our verdict: RENT