This is not a review of: F.E.A.R. 3

It isn’t technically all that important for a small site like mine to worry about such things as journalistic integrity, but I do my best to do right by them anyway. There’s a reason why this isn’t labeled a “review”. My experience with F.E.A.R. 3 includes only the single player and in the grand scheme of the game’s feature set, that’s not a comprehensive look at all it has to offer. Thus my reluctance of doing a traditional “review”.

Precisely this same train of thought strongly compels me to share my thoughts on the game anyway. You see, F.E.A.R. 3 is designed as a multiplayer experience first and foremost.

“Surely you jest!” I hear you mocking sarcastically. “A shooter that places multiplayer on a higher pedestal than single player? Such things have never been heard of!”

The truth intended by your mocking is correct, of course. The single player shooter is a sad and abandoned animal, having been neglected and forgotten in favor of the far more lucrative multiplayer shenanigans that comprise the overwhelming majority of the online gaming scene these days.

F.E.A.R. has always been different to me. I’m not sure it actually is different, as this isn’t the first F.E.A.R. to place a heavy emphasis on multiplayer modes. I still remember being miffed at how many of F.E.A.R. 2’s achievements centered around its multiplayer efforts.

I never had an interest in F.E.A.R. 2’s multiplayer, and I have none for F.E.A.R. 3’s either. They may well be fantastic, and I do, in fact, hear from proper reviews of F.E.A.R. 3 that it is a far better game when shared with a friend. That doesn’t change the fact that I don’t want to play F.E.A.R. with others. I want to lock myself in a room, turn off all the lights, and soak up the wonderful horror atmosphere. Even the shooting itself seems secondary to me, more a way to relieve tension than the primary draw. 

F.E.A.R. 3 moves the focus squarely to action, and specifically action with other people.

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Best of 2009 - Silent Hill: Shattered Memories

Putting this list together has truly made me realize what a good year this has been for gaming, which is surprising considering that my reaction otherwise might have been to suggest that 2009 was a mediocre year.

Nowhere was this proliferation of terrific games more obvious, and more troublesome, than when attempting to choose the candidate for this very entry. I reserved it for those games I played only at the tail end of the year. 

The problem was, I was hit with more last-minute awesomeness than I expected. Some truly deserving games were left behind, relegated, perhaps unfairly, to the Honorable Mentions category. 

The other two candidates, New Super Mario Bros. Wii and Borderlands, are both safer choices. I picked both up expecting them to be fun and they were. There were no surprises with either, but they were both quite fun.

But Silent Hill: Shattered Memories ultimately stuck with me the most because, frankly, it surprised me. In a year of sure things, Shattered Memories was an unexpected pleasure; a nice, refreshing dose of unique. 

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Best of 2009 - F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin

As one year transitions into the next, I find it a healthy and refreshing endeavor to look back upon the past year and reflect upon those experiences which touched me the most; to discover which games stood tall above the rest and, for one reason or another, made a lasting impression.

Over the next few days, I will be sharing my own personal list of the ten best games of 2009, followed by those that didn't quite make the top ten and even a few of my greatest disappointments of the year. These are in no particular order, but they are the games I found most worthy of praise. Reflecting upon them makes one thing clear: it was a great year for gaming.

Sometimes what a game needs to succeed is not oodles of originality. Sometimes all it takes for a game to work its way into my heart is for it to know what it wants to be and to work its little butt off being as good at that as it can.

Little about F.E.A.R. 2, or its predecessor for that matter, is original. The creepy environments you wander through in the game include, off the top of my head, a hospital, an office building, a subway station, and an elementary school. If there was an alphabet of horror environments, I bet these would be A, B, C, and D they’re so common. 

But it doesn’t matter.

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Review - Condemned: Criminal Origins

Bludgeoned with Thrills

There are approximately eleventy bajillion genres out there today, but if I were forced to pick just one out of the steaming pile and award it the title of Most Likely to Age Poorly and Become Forgotten and Sad Within a Frighteningly Short Amount of Time, it would have to be the horror genre.

The effectiveness of the horror genre is tied almost directly to the quality of presentation values to a degree not seen in any other genre. Going back and playing Resident Evil on the original Playstation is more likely to make you scream with laughter than recoil in horror.

A great design and a top-notch art style will take you a long way, but once a horror game’s graphics have lapsed into the territory of the aged, it quickly moves from exciting big budget thriller to the gaming equivalent of a laughable B-movie.

That said, I was amazed that a title as old as Condemned: Criminal Origins held up as well as it did.

Condemned thrusts you behind the eyes of SCU (Serial Crime Unit) agent Ethan Thomas, a man who has just been framed for the murder of two policemen and fired from his job. Seeking justice (and his job back), Ethan must run around the cramped corridors of fictional Metro City (clever name there, guys) and hunt the serial killer that is actually behind the murders, all while trying to figure out why the city’s population is being turned into murdering psychopaths.

It’s hard to find a really original story in the crowded horror genre, and Condemned isn’t one. As with developer Monolith’s other spooky first-person franchise, F.E.A.R., however, a lot of mileage is squeezed from themes you’ve probably seen before, making for an effective plot that serves its purpose of driving you through the game and providing spooky settings to traverse and creepy bad guys to bludgeon.

I will admit that I have played older horror games than Condemned that held up better than I expected them to, Fatal Frame 2 on the original Xbox comes to mind, but Condemned has a little more going against it than just its few year old age. Being a launch game for a console is rarely a good omen in terms of the lasting power of a game’s graphical fidelity (or its gameplay, for that matter), so I was not expecting good things here.

The age of the game certainly shows, mind you, but it also demonstrates how much thrill a game can throw at you while limping along on quickly aging graphics.

This is largely due to the game’s sound design. Audio has an equal, if not greater, importance than visuals in horror titles. Condemned nails this aspect, providing an experience full of convincing atmospheric noises, creepy wails and screams, and audio that really adds to the intensity of the experience. Other games may have done this better, especially since the game’s release (Bioshock or Monolith’s own F.E.A.R. 2, for instance), but Condemned is certainly no slouch and provides the audio quality necessary to really sell the atmosphere of the game.

Condemned uses its premise to provide a couple of key calling cards that it lays on the table to try and differentiate itself from its peers. One of these stems from your role as an SCU forensic investigator. You’ll get to pick up a number of nifty tools and examine crime scenes in order to find evidence and advance the story.

Unfortunately these sequences are usually little more than a virtual equivalent of hide and seek. The game holds your hand through all of them and it often feels as if you’re just going through the motions. That said, I still found them to be a compelling break from the action and a nice change of pace. Even as shallow as they are, I would rather have the information delivered to me this way than in a boring cutscene.

The other, more significant feature that Condemned boasts about is its combat system. This is not your run-of-the-mill first-person shooter. Condemned takes the rather risky maneuver of focusing its fighting on melee weapons rather than the use of firearms. Luckily the implementation is largely solid and the combat works terrifically with the game’s close-quarters, suspenseful nature.

Attacking is done with a press of the right trigger, while defending is done by tapping the left trigger. You can pick up any of a wide variety of items that you’ll find scattered throughout the environments around you, and each one of them has different ratings for attack power, defense, speed, and range. A little more variety might have been nice, but there’s enough to keep things interesting to the end of the game. Whacking somebody with the sharp end of the blade from a paper cutter just never gets old.

I do wish defense weren’t quite so clunky. Tapping the left trigger starts an animation where your character raises his weapon in defense for a certain length of time. Timing this block with an enemy’s attack seems more difficult than it should be. I don’t see any logical reason why I shouldn’t have been able to just hold the block button down to guard as long as I wanted to.

Most of the environments in Condemned are tight hallways and small rooms. Wandering through some of these well-realized, creepy environments with little more than a glorified stick to protect yourself really adds to the mood. It’s nice to see guns treated as a scarce item - a rare treat to break up the action every once in a while - rather than a reason for the game to exist.

The melee focus also plays into the game’s gritty presentation, as the bludgeoning is suitably violent. You even have the option of finishing off some enemies by pressing a button on the D-pad once you’ve knocked an enemy down for a brutal finisher.

With these two tricks, Condemned manages to vary the pace of its campaign and keep proceedings from ever feeling tedious or boring, right up to its impressive (albeit more than a little confusing) combat-filled finale. Still, this is a horror story we’re talking about here. The ending may be thrilling, but don’t expect it to make any sense.

Horror stories aren’t allowed to do that.

As I seem to have acquired a taste for horror games recently, it’s refreshing to come across games like Condemned that can give me that horror atmosphere I crave without the tired trappings of the stale survival horror sub-genre. Its story may not make a whole lot of sense and it may be a little dated and a little clunky, but it still manages to provide a tense, fun experience.

Condemned is honestly one of the scariest, most intense games I’ve yet played and it manages to provide this experience largely without resorting to the cheap tricks that have become so common in this genre. For that I give it high praise, despite some pesky unevenness.