Yay, finally a review! I’m a reasonable fan of the FEAR series and was excited with the prospect of this new DLC when I found out about it. Read on for my thoughts and a score. I do those.
Orbitally dropped into a battlezone encased in an invincible battlesuit is certainly one way to begin a game. It sets the pace of the first single-player DLC to appear for F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin – very quick and very violent.
Addressing that: it will almost certainly take you longer to download this than it will take you to play it, particularly if you have recently played the base game. This is easily completable in a lunch hour, which is all well and good until you realise the price to play ratio is roughly £12 per hour. Not exactly the deal of the moment.
The action itself is of a high quality. It’s nothing new from what was present in Project Origin already, but the sheer destructive power of the weapons available is a thing of beauty. On that note there is an odd valley of a power curve to the strength of your character throughout – eventually you must abandon your battlesuit and procede on foot. Later still you lose all your weapons and must build back up again. It was actually reasonably refreshing compared to the standard “here is a new gun, it is better than your old ones” repetition over an 8 hour period.
Despite the shortness, there are attempts to provide additional replayability in the form of some resonably challenging and interesting achievements, including a “Minature Replica Soldier” easter egg. I just didn’t have the passion to go back and complete them afterwards – the experience just wasn’t that exciting. The gameplay was standard run and gun, although very unforgiving to my control-forgetting brain. Some of the set pieces were nicely put together; particularly the finale (although it suffered from a rather ridiculous difficulty spike).
The plot was there but rather thin and requiring a reasonable knowledge of the FEAR universe to even decipher. Cinematic moments involving Alma were as awesome as ever, though woefully thin on the ground. A lot of the metagame pieces were very well put together; mission objectives being worded in such a way to heighten your sense of being in the world.
There really isn’t much more to say, other than: if you enjoyed Project Origin, you’ll enjoy this, but you won’t enjoy the price no matter your preferences. Oh, and I do wish we could control the same character two games in a row, just one time in F.E.A.R.
70%
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Wow, that was short. So’s the game. Inspired me to write a piece on DLC.