What a week! first Duke Nukem Forever, now this. Fear 3; a letdown in so many ways.

User Rating: 5 | F.E.A.R. 3 PC
I wasn't really surprised when Duke NukenForever turned out to be a pre-order dud. What the heck, I paid just to verify that the game had in fact been finished. So how about Fear 3? Fear and Fear 2 were pioneering in their introduction of advanced smoke and atmosphere effects. That really added to the suspense and game play. The level of interaction they provided with the environment was awesome. Surely, the next chapter would up the ante.

Unfortunately, similarity to the earlier titles is almost non-existent. When Fear 3 (also pre-order) proved to be a low quality, short flashback it hurt. Starting with the tired console port feel, the lack of support for multiple monitors or especially even high resolution configurations such as 2560 x 1600. (note to enthusiasts, the configuration file format thus far defies making any sense - at least to me- of the values encoded to represent the display resolution; byte offset 0x4A through 0x4f in SharedData.settings). Just like so many recent titles, the quality of graphics is a surprising step backwards; likely because of the console commonality. Textures are low res even when hiked (game does a poor job of detecting - if it even tries- your hardware capabilities so know that you had better go in there an raise the quality of items yourself). The aiming and combat feels slightly sluggish despite very good frame rates. It also doesn't seem like it really matters where you hit any of the opponents; its all good. The level of environmental interaction seems limited to the occasional door kick and lever pool; gone are any of the advanced interaction and physics that we should be able to expect. At a time when good games provide nice hardware physics capability, this one doesn't even seem to provide decent software physics. Certainly no obvious use of one of the premier physics libraries. The original Half-life's implementation feels advanced compared to this. The original FEAR had better graphics and interaction back in 2007. What a disappointing time-warp in capability.

Definitely worth the wait for cheaper prices if you insist on buying; buy it when it is on sale or in the bargain bin. Maybe worthwhile for those craving multi-player - I cannot say since I only really play left-4-dead 2 in multi-player - but if you are seeking a solid single player experience, look elsewhere. For those sad about this news, I picked up Buleltstorm last week on steam for a great deal and it turned out to be a blast of fun.

Alas, a sad week. I am only glad to didn't go 0 for 3 and also buy Dungeon Siege 3. Perhaps one of the worst elapsed seven days in gaming history.