F.E.A.R. 2 Demo Impressions
As you most likely know already, the demo for Monolith Productions’ F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin was released recently on PC, PS3, and Xbox 360. Obviously, so long as you own a device capable of running the demo, you can download and try it out for yourself. What I’d like to do, though, is share with you what my thoughts were about the demo. Hard drive space is a concern for many of you I’m sure, so perhaps I can help you decide whether or not to use yours up. Hit the jump for my impressions.
You might have guessed already, but primarily, I’m a PC gamer. As such, I downloaded the Steam demo of F.E.A.R. 2; that’s what I’m basing this on. I’m sure the console versions aren’t much different, but if they are, feel free to let everyone know in the comments.
As the demo starts, the player is presented with an introduction. Nothing new about that, and fittingly there was nothing new about the intro movie — a few fast cuts and a voice explaining to me why I should be scared of the girl (Alma). Could just be my cold, cynical heart, but it really wasn’t anything special. When the player is put in control, however, it does begin to step up, so to speak.
So many first person shooters now have decided on keeping the player in control of cut-scenes, letting the player look and walk around while the story plays out. Pioneered in the Half-Life games, and implemented badly in many games since, I find this technique of storytelling has become stale and irritating. That said, the beginning of the F.E.A.R. 2 demo does manage to pull it off.
The player starts off in a street lit by flames and torn by warfare, greeted by Alma. A flash, she’s gone. You begin to walk towards the end of the street. Another flash. Alma reappears, walking away from you. Your only choice is to follow, but she’s gone before you can reach her. At the end of the street, you realise that this can’t be real; your only option left is to jump into a pit of bright light. When you wake, your squad-mate is calling for you over the radio, unable to get a signal. To your right is a crashed helicopter — yours.
To progress, the player’s next path is through an elementary school. Your first encounter is with an armoured guard and his five friends. Slow-motion combat is introduced, which is fun for a while, but becomes tedious (I ended up not using it for the rest of the demo). The combat is made a little difficult by the way the character controls — you move with a heavy foot, stomping around, and your vision bobbing back and forth the whole time. It’s almost as if you’re carrying four huge weapons or something. Oh, actually, you are. The weapons I encountered were as standard as it gets: sub-machine gun, assault rifle, sniper Rifle, and shotgun.
After some more combat, the best part of the demo happened. If you want to avoid spoilers, skip this paragraph. I stumbled out from a classroom and found myself in a corridor. The walls are littered with smiles and rainbows, all drawn in crayon. Suddenly, a table flies from a room on the left of the corridor in front of me into another on the right. My cross-hair flashes red — was that an enemy I saw? The screen flashes; all of the colour drains out of my vision. Something flies at me — a locker? A filing cabinet? Whatever it was, it was followed by a myriad of other things, giving me no choice but to run. I ran as fast as I could go down the corridor, catching glimpses of ghostly figures, all furious at me. Why? It didn’t matter. All that did was getting out of there as fast as I could. Terrifying, and exhilarating.
Escaping the school, and narrowly avoiding a falling train carriage, I enter the subway. My escape route is the fallen carriage, and I walk up through it towards the surface. The door in front of me slams shut, and a shadow is cast upon it. Needless to say I had to turn around, and I caught but the smallest glimpse of a figure at the back. Turning away to run, I see through the open door — just up the street (past more hordes of enemies) is something I really didn’t expect.
At first I thought it was another enemy, then a tank of some sort. No, I was wrong. It was in fact a mecha suit — think Gundam, just a little smaller. What follows is an awful sequence where I was sent through the streets in the suit, firing rockets and heavy machine guns at enemies and other mech suits, at which point the demo ends. In a game which had previously made me face my mortality and run away, stomping through the streets in a rocket-laden armour suit was incredibly out of place. Not to mention that I couldn’t actually tell what it was I was shooting, thanks to a cluttered interface and a lot of dark colours blurring together.
Were it not for the pointless and silly ending to the demo, F.E.A.R. 2 would have certainly interested me. The movement is irritating in combat, but certainly adds to the tension in the other sections. This is one of those games, I’d say, that you need to try out before buying. For me, I most likely won’t be buying the game — the horrible mech section at the end, and the repetitive and slow combat, just aren’t worth enduring for the spookier sections. If you decide to try out the demo, let us know what you think in the comments.
