After finishing F.E.A.R 3, which presumably ends the entire story of the Point Man’s quest to end the horror that his two other family relatives, his mother Alma and his brother Paxton Fettle, have brought upon the people of the city and district of Auburn, I can’t help but get the impression that this series has had a progression with each installment in the following manner: Good, Bad, and Worse.
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If we go back to 2005, when the first F.E.A.R game came out, you have essentially a game that had some very memorable moments and really focused on making sure that your experience as the main character of the story was as seamless as possible. The point of the designers and developers of the first F.E.A.R game was to have the player be the action star of a movie. So instead of being the passive watcher of the action and dialog when progression in most first person shooters, you’re the active participant. It’s simple as that and it’s for that logos that drove many that developed the first F.E.A.R to make sure that the story, the controls, the music, the sound effects, and graphical environment, to be as top notch to make the experience be, again, as seamless as possible. Today it’s considered to being one of the best first person shooters as many comment that the game really makes very good focus at first person shooter game play that is convincingly challenging and immersive.
But unfortunately, after some business related troubles, Monolith had to delay the development of the second game. The original development team was not around by the time that the second game was ready for development and what resulted was a game that, although feeling familiar with the first game, really did not seem to have that atmospheric quality of the first game. The controls seemed familiar but a little off, the graphics, although great, really were a major design departure from the first one, and with certain game inclusions such as mecha-armor battles, it really made F.E.A.R no longer so much a first person shooter as it was more of a first person action game. So it was a major departure from many aspects of the first game but it still did not manage to completely alienate the fans of the first game…
…Until F.E.A.R 3. When Monolith decided to have the developer that helped port the first F.E.A.R game to the consoles, Day 1 Studios, what resulted was the complete abandonment of many things that made the firs two, especially the first one, a major success. For one, you have no longer the use of Monolith’s Lithitech Jupiter Engine used and instead you have Day 1 Studio’s Despair Engine. This caused many things such as the controls, the graphics (this includes the methods of lighting, texturing, and graphical detailing), the character modeling to change and take very radical departure from the first game’s design. Also the manner that weapons worked in this game also changed: for every weapon you had collected has maximum limit of how much ammunition you can collect. This, along with some very tough and dirty playing enemies with achievement pop-ups for almost every little thing you do in the game, and you have a first person shooter with arcade level difficulty and design. The bottom line is that you get essentially a console game with all the frills of most modern shooters such as in-game achievements, a score tally, individual mission objectives, and finally regenerating health (good bye med-packs and Hello Call of Duty style health regeneration).
The story, with each game installment, escalates from a small and relatively contained situation to a full scale disaster scenario that, although the origins deal with the supernatural and the fantastic, starts to feel more like an action game splashed with cliched horror. Thus arresting the tension and mood that the first F.E.A.R game manage to bring upon the player as they were going through the game (and with almost little to no surprise scares). And because of it, it really leaves many fans preferring either the first game or the first two games produced by Monolith but never the third.
Speaking for myself, the first F.E.A.R game will be the definitive, and really, the only game that is worth playing in the entire F.E.A.R series.
So for anyone that is thinking about buying F.E.A.R 3 and has not yet checked out the first game, I would definitely reconsider and stick with the first F.E.A.R game.
