GameSpot, I'm sorry, but I think you were wrong on this one. It's a great game right out of the box.
I played the first F.E.A.R when I was bored and wanted to try a good FPS, as I never really enjoy these games before, but it made my eyes tear with joy, and suspense. It made me try more and more FPS games just to try and find something to catch up with this masterpiece, but I didn't find it.
When I bought F.E.A.R 2, I had mixed expectations. I thought: "I want more and more of the same, with some extra info on Alma and her actual agenda", while I also yearned for some new huge feature, like character customization, RPG elements or some new combat mechanic like grabs and such.
When I ran it for the first time I also thought: "It'll probably be full of bugs, like every game that is released these days.", but NO! This game just comes out great out of the box, just installed it, went through it once, payed attention to the details of the story (almost none), jumped whenever (almost) that little female dog, Alma, appeared out of nowhere, started spraying when those spectres started rushing me out of room corners, delivered headshots to the intelligent (yes, they are) clones as they tried to flank me, and even died a few times on hard difficulty (I tend to go straight to hard and then I can truly say I mastered the game with one pass),
I used the slo-mo feature, which felt quite satisfying and extremely necessary in most combat situations, I tried to explore the maps to get some extra ammo and injectors (extra slo-mo time), and all this journey lasted no more than 7 hours. That really is the only downside of this game, as I only play one multiplayer game and it doesn't matter to me, but those 7 hours are something that I enjoyed so much that I couldn't stop playing.
I understand that they wanted to keep some secrets for the third game, but wtf?! give me more single player game time! Multiplayer feature is not an excuse! you've got so many great games that offer both, why can't FEAR 2 do that?
Other than that, I think that this game is so solid, so polished, so much fun, that it deserves a good rating like I gave it. But to get a 10, it must have some more single player content, or at least replayability value, as this game doesn't have.
Buy it, spread the playing playing hours generously and you will truly appreciate this great game.