Platform: Xbox 360
Publisher: Warner Bros. Interactive F.E.A.R. 3 is a horror-themed co-op shooter featuring two main characters: Pointman, the nameless protagonist from the first game, who has the ability to slow down time, and Paxton Fettel, Pointman’s dead brother, a ghost who can blast, levitate, and possess enemies. The game is divided into eight levels designed to be played cooperatively, which mostly consists of big arena fights connected by short corridor sequences. Enemies appear semi-randomly to enhance replay value. If that sounds cool, by all means take a look at it. Maybe you’ll like it. I don’t like it because it abandons all my favorite elements of the previous games. F.E.A.R. was the first game I played on my Xbox 360. F.E.A.R. 2 was my favorite FPS of 2009. The prequels worked for me because they maintained verisimilitude through three central principles: 1) In F.E.A.R., Pointman was technically nameless (only out-of-game documentation called him Pointman) and purposefully silent. None of the other characters talked to him as if he was unable to speak, but rather as if it made sense that he had nothing to say. Beckett, the protagonist of the second game, was a very similar character but with an explicit name. The franchise never winked at the audience or presented anything that felt out of place aside from the deliberately freaky horror elements. 2) The levels in the first two F.E.A.R. games always felt like real locations, including long stretches where there’s stuff to look at but not necessarily stuff to kill. Running around a maze of supply closets in a hospital in F.E.A.R. 2 while soldiers were hunting me was thrilling even though I wasn’t shooting at anyone. When the game threw big battles at me, I felt like I was fighting in a real place. 3) F.E.A.R. and F.E.A.R. 2 had health packs and armor—actually I think F.E.A.R. 2 was one of the last FPS games to include them. You could carry more than two guns but not an infinite amount—three in the first game and four in the second (which always became “two guns, plus a holdout rocket launcher and sniper rifle”). You carried health packs around in your inventory and used them as needed, and sniper and rocket ammo was scarce, so supply problems carried over from fight to fight. To conserve ammo you could switch SMGs and assault rifles from autofire to single shot or three-round bursts. I always felt like survival over time was just as important as survival right this second. F.E.A.R. 3 has none of that. The silent protagonist appears in cutscenes where his refusal to talk to people who are talking to him looks ludicrous—moreover, he is referred to as Pointman in the game text, making it impossible to take him seriously as a real human being. Level design always feels game-y; you’re not occupying a ruined supermarket but a combat arena wrapped in a supermarket’s skin. Health regenerates as in Call of Duty. You can’t carry more than two guns or adjust their firing rate, and every level your weapon inventory is reset. All of this serves to make the game a decent arcade-style co-op multiplayer game—in other words, nothing like what I’ve come to expect from the previous F.E.A.R. games. It’s also almost never scary or suspenseful. Instead, gameplay is fast-paced with enemies everywhere, except for the last level where you creep through an abandoned medical-research facility. There’s almost no exploration or recon element and only a few tired old jump-out-and-say-boo scares as a sop to series tradition. F.E.A.R. 3 feels like a game put together by people who desperately wanted to be making Gears of War instead. I was disappointed every moment I played it. Given the unique qualities of the previous games, the series deserved a better sendoff.