What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them?

I played through the FEAR series recently after @Valarauka reminded me of them. It was one of the wildest trips through a series I've had. The first FEAR really is lightning in a bottle. Monolith Productions has always interested me since they always tried to make some pretty original games. The Blood series was pretty unique in a sea of Doom clones, the No One Lives Forever games also stood out in a post-Half-Life world. Alien vs. Predator 2 was a solid asynchronous 3-way FPS game. Shogo: Armored Division was pretty ambitious even if it didn't turn out well.

FEAR was made alongside Condemned: Criminal Origins in 2005 which boggles the mind. Both were AAA games made by a somewhat smaller, but experienced developer, and despite sharing the same engine both games couldn't be more different. These days they're known for the Shadow of Mordor games but I'd say that FEAR is last notable game of the old Monolith Productions design ethos. There's a lot about FEAR that is incongruous and doesn't really blend together well, as if the game was made from two or three different directions at once. The result is something solid, unique, and a surprising amount of fun.

It's a game that's equal parts inspired by Japanese horror like the Ring and the Matrix's lobby gunfight—just that one scene. It is indeed a bizarre combination and the game doesn't do much to resolve them, which somehow works to its benefit because it keeps the tension and the adrenaline up, but playing at different notes. Whereas much of the mastery of Half-Life is in its control of pacing, giving players quiet breathing room moments between action-packed moments, FEAR's approach is instead to keep the tension high but alternating between intense action and tense, spontaneous horror. The result is a game that maintains attention like a high-tension wire. Some might find it exhausting but depending on your approach to horror, it may work out well in your favour. If gore, jump scares, or the constant dread of something about to spook you around the corner are hard passes for you, FEAR will not do much to change your mind. But if you're open to them as a form of at least kitschy entertainment, then FEAR may go far for you.

Most of the game is high-octane action. Bullets fly everywhere, enemies yell and scream, walls disintegrate in clouds of dust that cloud vision, gunfire lights up rooms, and explosions punctuate the air. This is almost exactly how one can describe the Lobby Scene (though probably with more explosions, this is a video game after all—there are exploding barrels and grenades) and this is exactly what the game goes for in every single one of its fights.

What impresses me is how the game mechanically encourages this to happen organically and through non-scripted gameplay sessions. Firstly, FEAR has some of the most famous AI enemies in gaming. Long heralded as some of the smartest enemies in games, it doesn't hold up quite as well 15 years later but they're still a far sight more convincing and involved than most game AI enemies I've still encountered so far. They're always yelling out what they observe and notice, and also what they're doing. They throw grenades to flush you out, and are always attempting to flank you.

The only thing that hasn't aged well is that when it comes to actually firing upon you, they're effectively stormtroopers. You're not exactly William Tell yourself, the game doesn't go for laser-accurate gunplay and it doesn't quite go for Counter-Strike style spray patterns either. It encourages you to pick your shots and not spam the fire button. More importantly, it adds to the dynamism of bullets flying everywhere in a manner conducive to a Hollywood gunfight, such as that of the Lobby Scene. Contrast it to the more modern Keanu Reeves action vehicle of John Wick. Neo was a stormtrooper compared to John Wick, going far more for body shots and with an accuracy rating closer to that of a phone-line psychic than of an match-fixer.

FEAR is not a difficult game. Enemies don't do that much damage to you, and you pick up far more health and ammo than you will ever need, so perfectly accurate bullets are never needed. Instead you get to enjoy the satisfying bass-rending gunfire and the heavy thunk thunk thunks of bullets landing on armour, concrete, and metal. The game also feels as heavy as it sounds, there is momentum to your movement and movement speed across the board is slower than your average FPS. The slower traversal helps make positioning a little bit more important and the act of dodging bullets that much more of a failing proposition.

Compounding this, the game also features bullet-time in an era when FPS games hadn't quite explored it. Hitting the slo-mo button begins the ever-familiar bullet-time mechanic where time slows down around you while you aim and fire at regular speed. On top of that, there are melee mechanics that, beyond punches, also let you throw flying scissor kicks or crouch-slide into enemies to send them flying. Oh, and you can dual-wield pistols for no clear reason in a game that's otherwise supposed to be grimdark-serious tactical. Putting this all together means the action portions of the game are some of the most visceral FPS gunfights even to this day. Even the way they start evokes a Hollywood gunfight: you get bonus damage on the first unalerted enemy so they go down instantly and everyone else instantly goes into gunfight mode, and aren't nearly as easily dispatched. Every gunfight involves bullets flying everywhere, enemies yelling your last known position at each other, constantly looking at your blindspots to make sure you're not being flanked, and loud, pulse-pounding sounds from all sides as grenades, explosions, and gunfire fill up the space.

And they don't last long. Enemies aren't bulletsponges, and good aim can take you very far. Short, highly intense gunfights are the aim of this game and it delivers in spades.

On the flipside are the horror sections, well done in a different way. Let's get the jump scare thing out of the way: this is a game full of them. If this is a hard stop for you, then this is a hard stop on the game. I'm not big on jump scares but more because I find them cheap and ineffective after I've acclimatized to it, so much of FEAR's horror bounced off of me after the first couple of levels. That said, I find that the use of scares and horror in the game is pretty inspired, in ways that outclassed much of the horror game genre of the time and still hold up well today. You know you're in a horror section of FEAR when there aren't any enemies—when it's only you and a dark, creepy hallway. The game will toss all kinds of things at you to unsettle you: creepy whispers, flickering lights, shadows that jump and move, objects that throw themselves off of shelves, and more. You'll turn a corner and there's Alma looking at you through a window. A hallway you're walking through will melt suddenly and blood will pour down the walls, and then flash and you're back in the hallway you're started in. And it's gory: blood and bodies are everywhere. People are frequently exploded and you see them turn into viscera right before your eyes.

The game doesn't let you relax, as a player. You go from worrying about dying in a gunfight to worrying about if you're imagining things or if you're about to be thrown into a gory scare sequence. For me, that wore away quick when you realize that the game is never actually going to harm you during these sequences. As scary as they're meant to be, you're relatively safe during them. They're only tense because they use every trope in the textbook to evoke tension but there aren't really any stakes in these segments.

The horror is driven by the story of these games which, to be frank, is nonsense. The setup of the first game is that you are part of the First Encounter Assault Recon team, a special forces unit dealing with paranormal activity and you're a new member to the team known only as Point Man. A pharmaceutical company called Armacham has created a bunch of psychic soldiers controlled through one man called Paxton Fettel who has gone nuts, causing him and all the soldiers to rebel and for Fettel to turn into a cannibal, eating other people to assumedly gain their knowledge. The FEAR team is sent in with a Delta Force group to address the situation. But as you do so, you start getting horrifying visions starring a creepy little girl in a red dress, and you keep seeing imagery of a violent birth happening somewhere. Anyway, it turns out that you and Fettel are actually brothers and that the little girl is your long-dead-but-not-quite-dead mother named Alma. Of course, this makes a lot of things about the story make little to no sense but it's honestly just crappy background dressing on the game. It provides very little motivation for anything you actually do or experience in the game outside of the horror sections except to justify why in Alma's seemingly infinite psychic powers, you're the only person she doesn't immediately explode into a fine mist.

Eventually there are these simple ghost enemies that ambush you en mass later in the game, seemingly sent by Alma, who bumrush you but are easily dispatched in one shot each. These are finally paranormal events that are harmful to you... and it's not clear why. Alma doesn't seem particularly malevolent to you in any other way, just creepy and weird because she spent her entire short life caged up and has no concept of social norms. It really just feels like the developers thought they should include one paranormal enemy and went with an easy one.

Even your own FEAR team members wind up barely factoring into the game at all. One of them is basically gone immediately, killed-off screen, and the other just kind of appears here and there to give some semblance of this being an actual special forces team instead of just you, traditional FPS superman, doing traditional FPS things. Your group's operational leader is present by voice throughout the entire game as if to keep the notion of a mission still going on even though it's 100% reactionary with no advance intelligence that factors into things at all. Besides this, there are a couple of names that come up throughout the game in terms of two Armacham executives who are battling it out with their corporate politics. One, Genevieve Aristide, is the President of Armacham who is trying to reopen a previously shuttered project facility that was began and ended by (effectively) the Chief Scientist Harlan Wade. The game is filled with audiologs where these two are basically just yelling at each other while not saying anything of use to each other. It boils down to Aristide opening something that Wade didn't properly communicate the danger of ever, and then all the problems that ensue.

I'm going to spoil some of this plot because a) it's required to show that it's nonsense, and b) it's important to know for understanding some major issues with later games.

Effectively, the Project Origin that was housed in that facility was Alma herself, a powerful psychic child who Wade and Armacham tried to harness but failed to control her. That little girl you see everywhere is Alma as she still sees and understands herself, a small girl. At some point, though, she got older and she somehow had two sons, the player character of Point Man and main antagonist of Paxton Fettel, and wound up completely catatonic. Eventually, due to Fettel's psychic prowess (all Point Man got was slow-mo reflexes, and apparently not even a name), Alma and Fettel merged consciousness, causing the project to be halted immediately. The facility was shut down, and Alma was apparently killed when they cut off her life support in some kind of sealed hypobaric chamber they kept her in. Oh, and it turned out that Harlan Wade is actually her father, and therefore your grandfather, at the end of the game.

Now, Aristide had re-woken Alma by accident. It turns out that she's so psychically powerful that she doesn't need a physical body. She was able to reach out to Fettel, who was operating a battalion of psychic soldiers in the interim, causing him to rebel and take all the soldiers with him. Now you and the rest of FEAR are sent in to stop him, and then Alma when it is evident she's still alive.

Of course, you may have a lot of questions now like how Point Man joined a team that was meant to investigate this very thing a week before, or how he even got approved to join a government team like this without anyone known his past, or even how he was separated from Fettel, doesn't remember anything about it, and is only learning it over the course of the game. The premise and story is complete nonsense. There is also one other character who is clearly some kind of take on Nedry from Jurassic Park, down to being an unlikeable asshole of an obese man, complete with a shirt that says "RTFM", and is meant to be the comedic relief of the game. Every moment he's around, there's either some play of him being a complete dick, or you're meant to be laughing at him trying to squirm through a vent. He is styled to look like a clown compared to all the other characters in the game, and it's not exactly better for his inclusion.

But whatever, nobody plays this game for the story. It clearly wasn't a priority and was slapped together to give some kind of justified flow for the levels you go through. And here's where we get into another awkward thing about the first FEAR games: all the levels are warehouses basically warehouses and offices.

It's an ugly game. Technically impressive when it released with high quality models and detailed particles effects, dynamic lighting, and physics, the game has some of the worst art direction I've ever seen in a game. Everything is utilitarian to the point of being ugly. Nothing is particularly out of place or looks like it doesn't belong, it just doesn't look good. Drab colours exist everywhere but not through colour grading, they just made everything in different hues of grey, black, and brown. The only vibrant colours are green on interactive lights and switches, teal on displays, and red in the copious litres of blood throughout the game. Even then, they didn't choose the most vibrant hues for these. All the art assets are otherwise so general that, taken independently, one might think they're stock assets taken from a collection. Even the UI and the font choices are on the unfortunate side. It's all still perfectly usable and doesn't technically impact the game negatively but the end result is a game that doesn't quite look right. It was also one of the last games before ambient occlusion became a regular part of graphics, now lending everything a rather plastic look. When you look at footage of the game, nothing quite looks real so much as they do oddly lit assets near each other. The lighting, textures, and particle effects all look good but the lack of advanced shadowing really harms the aesthetic, more than any other game from that time period or before. It's unfortunate, really, because with proper AO, the game's graphics could hold up much better than they do.

So when you put graphics like these alongside levels that are all drab grey concrete walls and offices, it just doesn't come out looking very appealing. Imagine if Doom 3 was better-lit but also took place in the ugly abandoned warehouse districts of Detroit and you basically have FEAR's levels. It's highly unimaginative game in terms of level variety, even though some of the level and room designs are pretty interesting. FEAR has some of the more realistically laid out warehouses and offices I've seen, including a few interesting multi-floor layouts in the office sections. But it is drab overall.

This lack of variety spills over a bit into the enemy designs and approaches. The vast majority of the game, you contend against these psychic solider goons. For a couple of levels you instead fight Armacham private security who, despite looking less like traditional bad guys, still behave, move, and fight exactly the same. There are some heavily armoured enemies as well but their gimmick is exactly what you'd expect: they move slow, hit hard, and take more than a few shots to go down. Then there are a handful of mechs that show up that are bigger, slower, and stronger.

Other than this, there are only those previously mentioned ghost enemies to contend with. The weapons don't vary much from the usual genre staples of pistols, shotguns, assault rifles, and rocket launchers. There's nothing to complain about with these, and they're all well done. They have a general slow fire rate (SMG aside) but hit hard, and they carry a lot of weight. Shotgun fans will appreciate this game's shotgun, as not only is it damn meaty to use but it also satisfyingly can sometimes literally vaporize enemies into a bloody mist if you're close enough.

The one unique gun FEAR does include is a weaponized nailgun called the Penetrator. There is no in-game lore or explanation for why this exists in the world, or why it's the weapon of choice for the heavily armoured enemies compared to something like, say, a machine gun but it's there. It seems more like a tool to show off the physics of the game as its main use is to pin enemies to walls when they die. A fatal nail send an enemy flying into the wall behind them and pins them in position. It was a delight to watch back in 2005 when we were fresh off of Half-Life 2 but it adds very little now besides a fun alternative to a limp corpse on the ground.

The game works because the best parts come together well and the bad parts don't interfere with the success. Well designed levels and great combat feel, and the Hollywood-esque effects means the action never feels stale. The horror moments are always genuinely creepy, they know how to instill a sense of unease into a player (something they also applied to Condemned: Criminal Origins). Once you get past the ugly art style and rote environments and manage to let the story roll on its own strange path, you get a game with some interesting action with unique level designs, and a horror game that somehow manages to be unique in the medium despite the use of so many played out tropes. There were two expansion packs made for FEAR: Extraction Point and Perseus Mandate. Neither of these were developed by Monolith, made instead by TimeGate Studios while Monolith was in the process of getting purchased by Warner Bros., so that Vivendi could cash in while FEAR was riding high.

The first one, Extraction Point, is a direct sequel to the base game. It takes place where the first game leaves off and acts as a continuation of the story for a little bit longer.

For the most part, it's a fine continuation. The team at TimeGate seemed to have a good idea of what made FEAR work and made sure to keep it going. Interestingly, they also noticed all the drab sameness to everything and took strides to improve it. The very first location you go into now is a church! Not an office, not a warehouse, but a church with a unique new layout for a combat encounter. And it has walls that are yellow, not bare concrete. Of course there are still plenty of hallways and offices and warehouses throughout but they obviously tried to introduce some more variety to the overall colour scheme. And they even introduce sewers! It's blase but it's at least a change in pace.

The most notable change about the expansions, both of them, is that you can tell that TimeGate had a different approach to the horror elements than Monolith, even though they were trying to keep Monolith's going. The two big changes I noticed were that TimeGate applies cliche musical stabs during the horror segments that wound up ranging a comedic note for me, and they play with environmental manipulation a lot more. This second one is neater, it adds a more immersive dimension to the horror because instead of being teleported into different vignettes and tableaux as the base game does, you instead actually see the geometry of the levels change in front of your ideas. A hallway you're in front of will suddenly stretch ten times as much, or a floor you're walking across can melt away and drop you down into a black void. It's neat to experience, really.

Perseus Mandate allowed TimeGate to flex their creative chops a little more after the mild success of Extraction Point. They felt comfortable enough to add a new enemy and weapon to the game in a prominent way. Extraction Point had a couple of new ones as well but they were simply carried by the heavy enemies to provide some more variety. With Perseus Mandate, they put their new enemy and weapon in together: some kind of new hunter-killer soldier with their night-vision augmented slow-but-accurate assault rifle. Neither are very interesting at all. In fact, as much as I tried, I couldn't find any situation where the new assault rifle was a better choice than the base one.

Storywise, both are okay. In fact, they're the most okayest stories in the entire series. While not much happens plotwise, TimeGate at least seems to have a better handle on characterization and motivation than Monolith does. It effectively leaves aside a lot of the focus of the base game to instead focus on the tighter narrative of trying to find your last remaining teammate and getting out in Extraction Point, or being part of another team sent into the Armacham facilities to grab some McGuffin or another in Perseus Mandate. The odd part about Perseus Mandate is that you don't play as the Point Man at all, but instead some random other guy, and for some reason the continued ghost of Fettel haunts you specifically throughout for a never-specified reason, even though literally hundreds of other random soldiers are bloodily misted or torn apart without a second thought throughout the games.

Again, nonsense stories, but at least it's easier to enjoy the rides these expansions provide than any other others. FEAR 2: Project Origin is an odd followup in many ways, and mostly due to behind the scenes issues. After WB finished buying up Monolith, Monolith secured the IP of the FEAR series after poor sales of the original's expansions and immediately trashed what TimeGate had done with Extraction Point and Perseus Mandate. Allegedly, Monolith hated what TimeGate did with their story and they wanted to strike it from the record and deliver a follow-up that only they could make, deserving of the franchise.

It didn't go well. It didn't go terribly, but FEAR 2 isn't a very good followup to the entire first game and its now-abandoned expansions.

FEAR 2 was released in 2009, a couple of years after Call of Duty 4 hit the FPS scene like a baseball bat in a boxing match, and it shows. Gone are the trappings of the first game's Matrix lobby gunfight scene, replaced with an approach more reminiscent of a Call of Duty clone: guns that fire more accurately and faster and hallway after hallway featuring some simplistic combat arenas. FEAR wasn't a hard game but FEAR 2 is an easy game. Tight hallways, more accurate guns, and enemies that have big bodies and hitboxes make for a significantly lower level of difficulty than before.

There is also more variety in the missions, both in looks and in size with some portions now featuring the ability to pilot the mechs you could only fight against before in much bigger, and more expansive levels. There are also a few kinds of gameplay segments you wouldn't find in the first game, including a turret sequence set to some truly terrible metal or buttrock. I honestly couldn't tell the different. There's more visual variety to the levels than before, it seems like the environmental art design and assets received the biggest upgrade. FEAR 2 is by no means a boring game to play through at all but it isn't quite as cohesive to play through as the first one and its expansions.

The enemies don't feel any smarter than they did in the first game. In fact, they might be dumber. It's hard to tell between the change to combat environment design, the more linear structure of tighter hallways and more expansive combat areas instead of the carefully designed areas of the first game, and the easier-than-ever weapons but the combat is over and done with in much shorter order in FEAR 2. Additionally, the removal of all the trappings of the Matrix lobby scene fight has left it all feeling somewhat more limp and derivative than before. There's no concrete dust obscuring vision, no meaty gunfire pounding through encounters, you can't even dual-wield pisols anymore if you were ever so inclined. They did add those hitmarker X's though!

Graphically speaking, it's a better looking game from a technical perspective. Higher polygon counts and better shadowing will do that, along with generally more colour everywhere. But a lot of it is also more derivative than ever. The designs across the board are completely uninspired, there is nothing in this game I can point to and say "that's the FEAR style". One of the most glaring examples is the design of the only female member of your otherwise realism-based Delta Force squad: she has the tight clothes and exposed midriff of a Sonya Blade design. The UI also really annoys me. The first game's UI wasn't much to look at but it was fairly utilitarian and minimal, indulging only in a questionable font. FEAR 2 seems to borrow straight from the Halo school of UI, complete with a simulated helmet view for some inexplicable reason that leaves all other UI with a warp rendered onto it. It's there on your screen the entire game and there is nothing you can do about it.

The horror elements of the game are preserved in terms of execution, though not as impactful, either due to re-use or simply a lack of unpredictability. The previous ghost enemies got a major change in terms of visual design here that works really well, and I actually like quite a bit. The biggest change is that Alma isn't exclusively portrayed as a creepy little girl anymore, but also in her current physical form of a desiccated corpse that never truly died.

Earlier I said that the horror ties into the story directly and that's not changed here. But it's also what makes FEAR 2 so much more questionable overall than the first game to the point that I'd dare call FEAR 2's story one of the worst I've played in any game. It's a story so bad, it actively pulls me out of the game and makes me wonder what on earth Monolith was thinking. It's not like the previous game had a story that was even worth paying attention to, so it would have been hard to make a story that's worse but they managed to pull off one so bizarre, outlandish, and downright wrong that it's impossible to talk about FEAR 2 without talking about its story.

In FEAR 2, you play as a new character named Michael Beckett, a soldier with Delta Force. You and your squad are sent in to arrest Aristide from the first game shortly before the explosion at the end of the first game goes off but you have to fight off Armacham goons sent by the board of directors to assassinate or capture Aristide. You prevail but as you get to Aristide, somehow only the entire squad is knocked out by the explosion, and Aristide and her surprise goons collect your squad. You and your group wake up in an underground medical facility where it quickly becomes apparent that Aristide and her crew have done something with the crew that tries to make them into a newer version of Fettel, a new kind of psychic commander for the psychic soldiers that isn't of Alma directly.

The rest of the game is MacGuffin after MacGuffin to go to new locations but the odd thing is how much Alma specifically goes out of her way to haunt your player character. Even in the lab notes you come across when you wake up in the medical facility, it indicates that your character seems to have developed the best link and the others experienced varying levels of success. Your only female squadmate was summarily dismissed as a candidate from the outset, something about the chances of psychically bonding with Alma skewing to men meant she could never be part of it.

Alma is drawn to you increasingly as the game goes on and, in case the subtleties are lost to you between all the frantic gunfire and horror elements, the ending makes it abundantly clear: she wants to fuck you. And she does. At the end of the game, Alma rapes your character and becomes instantly pregnant with your new baby. Replaying the game, and knowing that this was the ending, a lot of the horror elements and points where Alma show up throughout the game make so much more sense. They are clearly sexualizing her throughout her many appearances despite the fact that she is also a desiccated corpse in some of it. She projects a normal (but also naked!) form most of the time but it drops to the crone-line corpse body here and there. It's hard to keep sex in mind when you're seeing that. It also explains what the developers were working towards when they said part of what they wanted to do with FEAR 2 was increase the amount of "touch" between the player character and Alma.

This is, frankly, batshit inane. This is a girl who was locked up and experimented on for all of her life, and still saw and presented herself as an 8 year old in the first game. Now she's a horny teenager despite being a corpse for more than a decade. But wait, how was she pregnant enough to give birth twice before falling into a catatonic state (which alone is terrible)? Seems she was just impregnated with a cocktail of the scientists' DNA, including her own father's, and made to breed twice before they hedged all their bets on Fettel. I guess the implication now is that all Alma wants to do is have another baby of her own and is using all of her terrifying psychic horror powers as an act of seduction, that eventually culminates in a rape sequence???

This is the story that the FEAR 2 producers at Monolith were willing to throw out the perfectly reasonable storylines of Extraction Point and Perseus Mandate for, claiming that they would do better and do things that FEAR fans deserved. I have no idea what the hell they were thinking.

There is an expansion for FEAR 2 called Reborn. It's very short, I completed it in just over an hour. In it, you play as one of the psychic soldiers who eventually somehow goes rogue when you get visions generated by the already-deceased Fettel. It's a fun combat treadmill, featuring an alternative-but-still-awful UI, and ends with Fettel seemingly taking over your psychic clone's body to bring himself back to life. It's all perfectly bland, and also doesn't seem to be canon at all so I wonder why Monolith even bothered with this.

The series concludes, so far, with FEAR 3. It is stylized F3AR. Let that be the first red flag.

FEAR 3 is not a Monolith game. It's made by Wargaming West Corporation, formerly known as Day 1 Studios (during the period of this game's development), and Mayer/Glass Interactive. They had previously made the Mechassault games for the Xbox, and Fracture, a forgettable sci-fi shooter for the Xbox 360 and PS3. Warner Bros. selected them to make FEAR 3 and, I assume, did not give them a very big budget because FEAR 3 feels like a budget game through and through. I don't have much to say in favour of FEAR 3. It is a basic co-op shooter game set in the FEAR universe.

Through completely unexplained circumstances, the Point Man (now given a completely generic appearance somewhere in between Adam Jensen and Solid Snake) is an Armacham captive after the events of FEAR before he is freed by the ghost of Paxton Fettel through his power to possess people. This is a co-op game where one person plays as a generic FPS shooterman and the other player plays as a ghost who can possess enemy shootermen to shoot at the other men. So anyway, you start blasting.

The thing is that you don't stop blasting until the end of the game. This game is seven or eight giant combat levels, with barely any horror to speak of. What little horror there is doesn't have time to matriculate beyond a "What?" before you're shooting things again. The combat itself is also just... so unsatisfying. This series feels like practical demonstration of how to turn a good shooter turn into bad one through slowly adjusting mechanics by chasing industry trends over time. The glorious shotgun of the first game has transformed into a cooked spaghetti gun here.

In terms of the story, it's at least not as heinous as the last game but it's not particularly interesting. It's mostly just Fettel non-stop complaining that the Point Man killed him, even though that's pretty much all Fettel seemed to want him to do in the original game, and the still unnamed Point Man glowering hatefully back without a word. There's a lot of hooplah made about how Point Man and Fettel were tight as children until the day they closed the project down, how apparently you both only had each other and Alma to trust while you acted as lab rats, and how much the importance of family matters.

Again, the first game drops you in as if all of this is a surprise, and here is the third game in the series telling you what you were supposed to be feeling all along. But now the two of you are teaming up to find Alma because you're both now aware that she's pregnant again. Fettel wants to help birth your little brother so you both can eat him and gain unlimited power. Point Man apparently wants to kill the little brother to stop Alma's full power from being ushered back into the world. The way Point Man's motivation is expressed is through another character entirely, that surviving squadmate from the first game simply telling you that that's what needs to happen while Fettel loudly disagrees and wishes the Point Man would let her die already.

At the end of every mission, all players are assigned a score and the ones with the highest is the Favourite Son. I'm not kidding. At the end of the game, only one of you can get their way and either kill the brother rape-baby, or save it. And the one who got the most points (and therefore is the Favourite Son) wins.

At least, graphically, FEAR 3 is the best looking game in the series, featuring lots of colour and a slightly cartoonish art style that actually works pretty well. I don't have a lot to dock this game for, visually speaking, except for its bizarre use of text going from top right to the bottom left of the screen during the loading screens. It's a minor complaint but one that's so prominent, I can't but help feel like it's a signal of the game to come when you first see it when you load up the game. It's an odd choice in a game full of odd choices.

So that's the FEAR series, gone from lightning in a bottle to a sad mess. I don't have any sentiments of what could have been with this series because the first game always felt like it was a singular thing, something which could never be replicated with how much had to come together just right for it to work. The expansions continued that well but there was no way a sequel beyond the mid-2000s would be capable of doing it again. Too much had changed in gaming at that point and FEAR 2, terrible story aside, showed that it couldn't keep up in a way that stood out as it chased after industry trends in an industry where the safe bet was the only bet you were allowed to make.

If there is any appetite for that classic FEAR experience, it's only really found in the first game and its expansions. Despite all the unspecified issues Monolith had with the expansions, they offer a better FEAR experience than I feel Monolith would ever be capable of. FEAR 2 was a testament to that and even though it's a decent enough game, it doesn't really offer anything for a player to go back to, not like that first game does.