I am always looking for a new First Person Shooter game to play. Walking around the CPL a few games grabbed my attention, but the F.E.A.R. kept drawing me back. Despite popular belief, it was not because Amanda Mackay was the MC for the tournament. They had a booth with PCs set up to play the single player demo, and eight PCs set up for deathmatch.

The game looked pretty fun, and I wanted to try it out. There was one problem. A team deathmatch competition was going on and they were in the middle of a 32 team bracket. I did what must be done, and used my media badge in a vulgar display of power. I talked Greg Agius of Vivendi Universal into letting me play-test the game for a review. The competition was due to go on break, and if I came back, he told me he would give me a chance to play it. I, of course showed back up early. I can not let those guys sneak away and get food or anything. To hold me over, they let me play a longer single player demo than the one they had set up at the booth. While it is not the focus of the review, I will detail what I thought of it.

Single Player

The name F.E.A.R. stands for First Encounter Assault Recon, which means I get to kill stuff, so good enough for me. As far as I could tell, some evil child sprit takes over some top secret military project. I had to go in and shut it down. It was nice to play a game where I did not lose my gun on the way to the front door and had to use a mop bucket for 20 minutes until I found a cheese grater on the floor. I started off fully loaded with an assault rifle and a flashlight that was on my suit so I could hold my weapon and still have light. What a concept.

The game is built off a new engine from Monolith, the same people that brought us Blood, Aliens versus Predator 2, and No One Lives Forever. The engine does not look bad, but it is not to the level of Doom3 or Half Life 2. It is better looking than most games, but they do not break any ground here. That may be for the better, since those games multiplayer modes do not really live up to their earlier releases. Physics, real time shadows, and partial systems are included, so it does not look like some game from 2002, but rather it has all the features that one would expect from a new game. Things fall over, walls explode, and sparks and smoke fly everywhere during a gun battle. The demo either had the greatest scripted scenes ever, or the AI is everything Valve promised HL2 would have. Soldiers kicked over shelves and climbed over and under things to get to me. They ran from grenades, and threw them at me if I hid behind something. I was having a lot of fun, until a door closed behind me and the ceiling rained with blood and some creepy child started appearing. Hey, who would expect a game called FEAR to be scary. I got blind-sided by classic movie fright when I was too caught up in fighting solders. I do not think anyone noticed that I jumped in my seat, as I muttered a word that rhymes with duck.

Multiplayer

Finally, it was my chance to play some multiplayer. The first thing I thought when I started moving around was that it felt a bit like Soldier of Fortune 2, a game that pulled me away from Counter-Strike for a bit of time. This was a good sign. A few marketing guys sat down to play, and I am glad to say I mopped the floor with them. The map, Construction, was themed to be an office building under construction. The site of newly placed drywall gave me flashbacks to my carpenter days, so I was ready to kill. The action was a mix of SoF2 and CS. Only a few shots were needed to take an opponent down with most weapons, and the movement speed was a bit faster than CS, but not as fast as Quake3.

To start the game, I could select from six weapons. I went for the Nailgun, and smiled with joy as I stuck the heads of my prey to the wall. A few real gamers sat down, and things got a bit harder. I found myself enjoying the quick combat and the use of med kits that dead players drop. They could be used at the click of a key, instead of instant healing, so I had saved up quite a bit. My streak ended, thanks to a player holstering his weapons and kicking me in the head. Holstering a weapon incresses a players speed , and gives the option of punching or kicking a foe. Obviously, that player was cheating to have killed me.

The game seems to add bits and pieces from other great FPS games: Melee combat with my primary weapon, or sighting down my sights for more accurate shooting being two of them. Proximity bombs, a rocket launcher, a plasma gun, and a battle cannon are main weapons lying around the map. It was always easy to spot where they would spawn, thanks to the colored outline of where they were.

The LAN net code seemed spot-on for a beta. I was so impressed that I never questioned why I did not get a kill. The weapons seemed balanced for such a close-quartered game. Aim and reaction seemed to rule the day, no matter what gun the other players were using. The recoil on the guns was not crazy a bit like CS`s AK47, and movement did not put the bullets too far off my mark.

Let us take a quick look at the main weapon choices.