Despite it's age, F.E.A.R continues to hold up as one of the most impressive and immersive games I have played to date.
What it lacks in impressive visuals and what everyone expects from a game it makes up with in a deep and exciting story, that can be be hard to uncover and may take as many as two or three playthroughs to glean the full story.
In the game you play as F.E.A.R (First Encounter Assault Recon) operative tasked with taking on what others within the military won't. The game opens with a somewhat disturbing third person cutscene that sets to establish the scene and mood of the story. This opening two to five minutes is essential to seeding the story and it is the only third person cutscene within the game, the rest is first person and on the fly.
The gun play in the game is what you expect of your average shooter with close range weapons such as the shotguns and smg, the medium range weapons like the assualt rifle and a long range three round burst rifle. Aside from this comes a myriad of speciality weapons that are rare and tempt you to make a choice from being mildly balanced to throwing out everything you had setup for certain situations and these specialist weapons like a repeating cannon may not come in handy at first but will be essential down the path a ways. The weapons feel all perfectly balanced for their particular roles and more importantly they feel very powerful like a gun should.
In addition to the gun play fear adds a slow-mo ability that is common within most games, but F.E.A.R does it in such a way that every time you activate this ability it feels like a shoot-out from a Michael Bay film, with explosions going off and dust kicking up from the environment whilst chunks of concrete and wood are removed in an eerily slow fashion. The bullets cut waves through the air to add to this feeling.
In addition to gun combat your character boasts a wide variety of unarmed attacks like a flying kick, a slide tackle or uppercut. These attacks are very powerful and often kill your opponent in one shot. This serves to flesh out the later revealed trait of your character being inhumanly strong and fast.
The enemy faced throughout the inception of the campaign are cloned soldiers, you will face these for the majority of the game but from time to time you will take on security forces and even a rare and fleeting but exciting enemy the invisible assassins. I personally wish these enemies were used more often but the game does a nice job of giving a mix of enemies from soldiers to ghostly apparations produced by the ghost Alma.
F.E.A.R sports an amazing artificial intelligence and particle system. The enemy AI is still to date one of the smartest I have faced in any game, they use the environment to their own advantage and use suppressing fire to pin you down whilst another moves to flank you, this type of AI is pretty much rare in any games nowadays. F.E.A.R's particle system allows for amazing fire fights and macro and micro destruction never before seen in a game, this makes shooting cover a calculated risk as dust kicked up from impacting rounds can obscure your vision.
Despite some faults FEAR does a good job with what they had at the time. To date it has one of the most interesting and deep stories in any game, more so than deep it's intricate with many twists and plot holes filled in with careful investigation of the wide open environments. This is a game of shooting and story, the developers did a good job on both making it a fun, scary and immersing experience all in one, something most games struggle to achieve. To anyone yet to play it, I would recommend playing it immediately as it is classic.