Written by: Stoo
Date posted: May 31, 2022

By the mid 2000s, Monolith had already achieved an impressive track record of first person shooters. Something that particularly stands out is the range of themes, beyond the usual Manly Man Soldier stuff. They brought us Shogo, a tribute to giant mecha anime, the 60s spy capers of No-one Lives Forever and they took us to the scifi crossover of Alien vs Predator 2. They were also responsible for the Blood series, which mixed supernatural horror with a dark sense of humour.

For this one they returned to Horror, but of a rather different nature. For a start, there’s no gravelly voiced wisecracking protagonist. Also, not a movie reference in sight. Instead of overtly supernatural tales of dark gods and undead revenants, we’re up against a paranormal threat that is perhaps more grounded in reality, but also highly creepy.

The setting is the fictional American city of Fairport in the near future, where the headquarters of Armacham Technology Corporation is located. ATC are involved in numerous areas of milltary R&D, and being a shady and unethical bunch, have for several years been working on a particularly sinister project. They’ve created an entire battalion of cloned soldiers, known as Replicas, that are controlled via telepathy by a psychic commander.

The potential tactical advantages of these Replicas are basically the same reasons they are so disturbing – supersoldiers created and programmed only for battle, instantly and unquestioningly following orders. Who knows what sort of purpose they might be put to; probably not UN Peacekeeping. As it happens though, they’re not going anywhere. That commander, a man known as Paxton Fettle, has gone rogue. He’s killed his handlers and used the Replicas to take control of the facility. Maybe slaving all those drones to one guy’s will wasn’t such a great idea after all.

In response, the authorities have quarantined off a chunk of Fairport and called in First Encounter Assault Recon – a special forces unit formed specifically to deal with the weird and the spooky. You take on the role of the Point Man, a new recruit to F.E.A.R. and part of a small team sent in alongside operatives from Delta Force. The objective is to eliminate Fettel, hopefully bringing the Replicas to a halt.

The game’s opening sequence takes you through F.E.A.R’s first landing in Fairport, and of course also serves as the obligatory ingame tutorial. It’s fairly light on action to begin with, with a lot of military guys securing empty corridors while you roam with a wimpy pistol. However it’s not too long before everything goes to hell and you find yourself facing Replicas alone.

Combat against them (and sometimes ATC security) forms the bulk of the action in this game. Their AI appears highly impressive, acting a manner we might expect from actual professional soldiers. They co-ordinate their efforts against you, so a couple will lay down suppressive fire to protect others moving into cover. They also keep on the move, so you can’t count on one guy who’s ducked behind a pillar to reappear in the same spot. If you don’t keep your wits about you and watch every approach to your location, you may find that you’ve been outflanked. They can react to changing circumstances, so if they battle isn’t going so well, they may retreat.

I was going to read up on the details of the AI – but it all went a bit over my head. From what I gather some of the more clever actions may be emergent behaviour arising from fairly simple rules. For example that outflanking isn’t exactly something Monolith meant to write into their code; rather it results from a tendency to move laterally around the player’s position, from one piece of cover to the next. Still, we get the desired effect – you’re under fire from an unexpected direction and it looks like they’re being smart.

They can also throw grenades – this is one place where the AI actually goes one of two ways, since I don’t think it accounts for obstacles especially well. You might hear a comical sequence of shouting, *boom*, arrrgh. Yet it also leads to those awful little moments when you think you’re safely in cover then that little metal canister comes rolling towards your feet….

Can I just take an aside to mention dust. Clouds of it, when a grenade goes off. I can’t remember seeing it in other shooters, at least not of this vintage. But of course it’s a part of real world battles, and it adds an extra element of chaos. Are the bad guys still behind it? Should you creep through, or wait it out? A highly impressive detail.

Back to the Replicas, there was one moment where I was positioned near a waist-high wall, thinking to myself those were basically impassable barriers to enemies. Or at least at least in older shooters. So imagine my surprise when a Replica ran up, did a little roll and shot me point blank. It’s a great example of how you can’t get complacent in this game.

So then, a typical encounter is you versus maybe five or six soldiers who are smart, mobile and working as a team. It can be a daunting prospect; the intention is to make the player feel vulnerable, at risk of being overwhelmed. However, you have an equalising factor in the form of “reflex time”. Which, yes, is bullet time because the Matrix series was still fresh in our minds, and also Max Payne had codified the idea in gaming. The enemies and world around you slow down, as does your own movement and rate of fire, but you still aim at normal speed.

So you can handily gun down a couple of Replicas before they can even respond to you. The bad news is, you only have a limited amount of Reflex time; then need to return to realtime for a while to recharge. So Frontal assaults are still a bad idea and you’re not actually Neo waltzing through the lobby; you won’t last long enough to defeat an entire squad. It’s better to use cat and mouse tactics – leap out from cover, hit reflex time long enough to line up headshots on a replica before he can even respond, then get out of there.

The Replicas are a vocal bunch – “Anyone See him?” “Flush him out!” and so on. It doesn’t make a huge amount of sense if they’re meant to be mindless drones. I think however it was a deliberate move, to further aid the player. Hearing the chatter is usually your first warning a battle is soon to occur, so you can prepare yourself and look for cover. Also toy idea of how much they know about your location, and how they feel the battle is going.

I suppose the safest tactic may be to just retrace your steps to a defensible choke point where you know the enemy can’t get behind you. This is often possible, due to the linear nature of maps. Then again, it might not be if you dropped down from a ledge and can’t get back up. Also even if you are hiding away, the Replicas aren’t dumb enough to just march into your gunsights. So are you going to hide in a closet all night? Not the best use of your gaming time. At some point you’ll have to be brave, advance and put yourself in danger.

Anyway just to break up the cycles of battles against regular troopers, the game will also break out some heavy support that require different tactics. There are slow moving guys in bulkier armour that can soak up a lot of hits, and make some creepy electronic growling noises. Then there’s a few in powered armour, verging on some sort of small mecha, and they require concentrated fire from your best guns. The game pushes the scifi angle a little harder with this stuff, although it’s all the sort of thing you can picture existing in reality in a few decades.

Meanwhile your weapons range from sub-machineguns and shotguns of today, to more fanciful toys like a particle beam or a massive great portable cannon. You can only carry three at a time, which was an increasing trend at the time after the walking arsenals of the 90s. I found it lead to the repeated dilemma of whether to pick up something devastating but rare, at the cost of a mundane gun for which I knew ammo was plentiful.

Couple of other points to mention on this topic – you can lean around walls to fire or just look out for the enemy. It’s a feature that doesn’t always appear in shooters, but you’d really want it given the more cautious nature of this one. Also, you can use hand-to-hand attacks that are apparently powerful enough to one-shot a Replica. Sounds like a novel idea, but one I sadly never used because I’m old, stuck in my ways, and am used to melee attacks being weedy. When an enemy gets close, my instincts shout SHOTGUN.

So then, we have more or less the most thrilling and convincing depiction of combat I’ve seen in a game of this vintage. There’s that tension when you’re on the verge of being overwhelmed, crouching behind a desk hearing voices and wondering whether to take some shots or retreat. Then maybe the panic of getting flanked, and running like hell while shooting in random directions as bullets ping around you. Or, if you get it right, the satisfaction of keeping track of the Replicas positions, waiting for them to stray out of cover and using Reflex Time at the right moments to devastate them.

So that’s how the shooty side to F.E.A.R works but in between the noise and chaos of battles, you have sections where it all gets a bit quiet. You’re left to yourself to stalk cautiously through offices and industrial works. The funny thing is, these are the sort of environment I’d usually find dreary, yet here they become ominous and eerie. Places that should be bustling with activity are empty. Laboratories are shrouded in darkness, contrasted with the harsh glare of electric lights and computer monitors. Something is very wrong here, and you stalk forward cautiously, waiting for the enemy to reveal itself.

This is where you encounter events ranging from the disturbing to outright spine-chilling It might be glimpsing a struggling security guard dragged into an air shaft, or a body dropping down from above, or an elevator suddenly plummeting to the ground seconds after you step out of it. Signs that something dark and inhuman is in here with you. You get glimpses of Fettel, behind a window or up on a catwalk. Then his voice in your head declares something cheery like “they all had to die”.

On top of that are repeated appearances by a young girl with lank hair and a red dress. I realise that was hardly the most original idea at this point, but on a few occasions she still made me jump in a deeply un-macho manner. Your radio crackles with static, then you see her off to one side, just watching you. Then suddenly gone. It’s worse when you see her scuttling around on all fours in like some sort of demonic creature.

On a few occasions you’re transported away into a vision of something that happened long ago in a hospital. Probably something especially dreadful, given the floor awash with blood and sounds of crying. These have a particular significance to the plot and as the game passes they advanced towards revealing the origins of Fettel, and how that girl fits in. Some of it is fairly predictable, but there’s a real emotional gut punch towards the end that puts the psychic monsters in a more sympathetic light.

Let me be critical for a second. I spend several paragraphs talking about pure combat against human opponents. Out of context, none of that would explicitly say “horror game”. The spooky bits, in turn, don’t really overlap with the battles against the Replicas. A few have you under attack from shadowy phantasms of uncertain nature, but a lot of the time you’re not actually in danger and have nothing to shoot at. In other words, they amount to spooky window dressing. The game tends to alternate back and forth between these two types of content.

That’s not to say the game becomes incoherent. It’ s held together, start to finish, by that permeating sense of dread. Every location that you move through is hostile, every doorway could lead to something terrible. Powers the world was not ready for were twisted into weapons by foolish corporate greed, and now have broken loose. A whole chunk of city has been abandoned and is now the realm of the murderous clones, their mad commander and whatever the girl is. Everyone has sensibly fled and you’re stuck there, all alone.

The soldiers are the most immediate physical threat, living weapons that exist to carry out the will of the mad psychic. Yet at the same time you’re assailed on a mental level, by visions of things that may or may not be real. All you can do is keep your nerve. Shoot the things you can, Endure the things you can’t. Keep going until eventually, you can bring an end to the madness.

When it comes to late 90s shooters we inevitably compare to Half Life. In the 2000s it gets a bit more complex as the genre diversified into military shooters, open world games and so on, but for corridor-based type like this I suppose Half Life 2 would be our reference. F.E.A.R doesn’t quite outmatch Valve’s inventive masterpiece, which constantly dreams up new scenarios for the player to figure out. (including a horror segment) It’s not far behind though; certainly a top-tier shooter.

The action is tuned to an incredibly high standard, the paranormal elements are thoroughly chilling. These aspects combine to create a truly compelling experience, the sort of thing that had me playing till 1am every day for a week. To give another contemporary comparison: I’d put it a step ahead of Doom 3, which was effective in delivering its own kind of horror, but a bit too reliant on monsters leaping out of hidden closets. Oh and we’re a long way ahead of Quake 4, essentially just Doom 3’s less interesting reskin. So F.E.A.R comes with our thorough recommendation; definitely worth adding to your collection.