Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid...

By Will Barker

It was cold and dark outside. The rain was persistent but so light that it was like a mist, shrouding the path ahead.

But then, out of the gloom, I saw something glowing. There it was - the Krispy Kreme doughnut shop. 

Besides the abhorrent alliteration that almost sends me into a violent rage everytime I read it, I needed the sweet treats.

It was clear after only 30 minutes game time that, for where I was to tread, I would need the sustenance of a such a vile sweet treat: I was heading straight into hell.

After I showered.

Not just an entertaining, ultra-violent first-person shooter, but Fear 2 lays down an intriguing, excruciatingly creepy story that unfolds in front of gamers through a range of different narratives.

It's the kind of game that once you start playing, you won't want to stop until you've uncovered the mysteries of this excellent story - hence my needs for carcinogenic sustenance in the form of chemically enhanced doughnuts.

In short, this is one of the scariest, most engrossing FPS games I've ever played.

The story of Fear 2 overlaps slightly with the story from the first game and resolves some unanswered questions of the previous title. But don't worry if you haven't played the first game - it's not essential.

Allow me to set the scene: it's a few years into the future and there's a sinister conglomerate called the Armacham Technology Corporation (ATC). In essence, it's like Microsoft but not quite as militant.

This corporation has been working on a number of clandestine research projects aimed at developing  "psycho-warfare". The idea was that one psychically enhanced leader could control battalions of troops.

While the experiments yielded some success, the end result was a resurrected dead chick who could strip the skin off a human - and who had a propensity to do so - through pure thought.

You play a soldier called Michael Becket who, as it turns out, has been extensively experimented on by the ATC, cut open, drilled, poked, prodded, probed, and manipulated to enable powerful telepathic abilities.

Indeed, the protagonist seems to have a curious (and often gruesome) connection to Alma, the incredibly powerful dead chick who thinks people to death.

The game begins as you and your small squad of troopers are cruising along in the back of an APC, on your way to collect Genevieve Aristide, the President of the ATC, from her penthouse apartment.

First you have to find a way into her apartment building and this level serves as a good tutorial to get to grips with the controls.

You can fire your weapon, lob grenades, jump, crouch, and turn on a torch, but sadly there's no "cover" system that let's you take advantage of your surroundings.

This is a bit of a shame as you can move certain objects and open car doors and the like to provide cover, but I rarely found this to be of any use as there's no 'hug' ability. Half the time when you're crouching behind a recently upturned table your head is still exposed. So it's kind of pointless.

Instead I used my innate awesomeness and unparalleled hand-eye coordination to conquer foe after pugnacious foe. Rattatatatatatata! Die heathen!!

The controls are fairly tight and it's an easy game to get going with and the firefights that you will encounter are rather gratifying for the most part.

I played through the game on the medium difficulty level and found Fear 2 to be a fairly hardcore affair. Rarely will you breeze through sections unscathed, though armour protection on top of your health does help.

Your enemies are not always easy to kill and they display fairly good AI patterns: they will find cover, regularly moving from spot to spot, and will try and flank you if there's enough of them. And if you sit still long enough.

Not once in the game did I manage to bamboozle a foe or see one just standing around. They look and act like trained killers.

This extra challenge - not to mention the fact that most enemies will eat a lot of bullets before dropping - makes dispatching baddies very satisfying. 

Also, the guns feel heavy and meaty and realistic and make very authentic sounds when you fire them. This makes you feel a little bit safer when exploring dark corridors covered in blood streaks...

You can only hold four weapons at a time, so choose wisely. Here's some of the weapons, along with my own personal percentage score of their usefulness:

Pistol (35%): Crappy 9mm pea-shooter that you should ditch post-haste.

Combat Shotgun (55%): Good old-fashioned boom-stick that can pulp enemies up close, but is generally pretty shite.

Automatic Shotgun (65%): Faster rate of fire than the standard shotty, this one's also got better range and sometimes cuts enemies in half.

Sub Machine Gun (70%): This will be your mainstay for the first two levels and has a large 50 round clip. It's got a decent zoom function but accuracy is average.

Assault Rifle (85%): One of my favourite weapons. This gas-operated selective fire assault rifle has good stopping power, excellent zoom, and is highly accurate. Rattatatatata! Need I say more?

Heavy Assault Rifle (95%): An upgraded version of the assault rifle. It's got a larger clip, a higher rate of fire and features armour-piercing tungsten carbide core ammo. One of the game's best weapons.

Urban Assault Rifle (90%): Like all the assault rifles in Fear 2, this is one very useful with high levels of stopping power. And it looks tehcy to boot!

Sniper Rifle (70%): Low rate of fire and bugger-all ammo are countered by excellent range, accuracy, and 1-shot kills. Always worth holding on to.

Hammerhead (60%): Developed by ATC, this gun is powerful and very accurate but just isn't as useful as the Assault Rifles. The large prototype rifle fires 14mm deplete uranium spikes.

Flamethrower (30%): Next... This gun is a piece of junk and shoots separate blobs of fire rather than a stream of incendiary justice. It is funny watching enemies run around on fire though.

Rocket Launcher (75%): Like the Sniper Rifle this bad boy is good to have as backup in case enemy vehicles such as armoured cars or mechs try to rattle you. It does massive splash damage, looks cool and can carry more than a dozen rockets too.

Shark Laser Cannon (70%): This 1.7kW laser cannon uses neodymium-doped glass amplified by solid state heat capacity technology. In other words it turns everything to slag. Super powerful, it's like the rocket launcher in that it takes apart highly armoured targets, but is quicker to fire.

Energy Rifle (80%): This is one of the most fun weapons in the game as it fires superheated coherent energy that turns soft tissue into pulp. Gravy! Only downside is that it has eff-all ammo.

There are also four different grenades which, with practice, are often more useful than many of the hand cannons. Frag, stun and flame grenades can be primed to explode early if need be, while proximity mines will bring a smile to the face of all N64 Goldeneye fans.

The X button is your 'action' move and when pressing a wall button to call a lift or moving tables and other objects or turning a valve, the motions are really cool and are generally very accurate as you see Becket's arms extend and move to work and operate things.

It's the attention to detail that helps immerse you into the world of Fear 2 and make it feel more believable, and it looks very impressive as you get footholds on the mechs and climb up into them, twisting around as you go. But more on mechs later.

It doesn't take long to figure out the controls, how to change grenade and weapon types -- and during the overly long second mission, set in a hospital with lots of smashed windows and pools of blood, you acquire a new power activated with the 'Y' button. 

Using your latent psychopathic powers, you can slow down time. 

It's essentially bullet time but as always it makes the game infinitely more fun. And more gory. There's nothing like entering the slow-mo state and unleashing a couple of quick shotgun bursts into an unarmoured foe, completely gibbing them. Also, make sure you watch a grenade explode in slow motion. It's looks wicked.

Needless to say, the blood and gore from the firefights in Fear 2 is very intense, and wait until you see some of the horror scenes that Alma creates... Most slasher movies don't even come close!

Good gameplay? Check. Cool guns? Check. Clever enemies? Checkity check.

The foundations for a quality first-person shooter are in place, and there's even online multiplayer modes to increase longevity. 

But what makes this game truly memorable is the creepy atmosphere. And the destructive robot armour suits.

The music is one of the key elements to the game's chilling atmosphere which, as I mentioned earlier, is without par.

Honestly, I have never been so profoundly scared as when playing this videogame.

Fear 2: Project Origin has so much atmosphere you could cut it with a rusty spoon and one of the most powerful motivators of said terror is not what you see, but what you hear. 

The sound is exceptional and adds to the tension and increases the potency of the scares ten-fold. 

Often you see a shadow or something scurry across a hallway, but it's the sound it makes that really sends chills up your spine.

Adding to the eerie sound effects is an excellent soundtrack.

When the music seamlessly changes from some soft ambient stuff you didn't really register to something more sinister, you instantly shit bricks knowing full-well that some ghoulish horror is going to spring from the shadows and try to defile you.

The second level in the hospital is the first place that you encounter demon-like enemies and sometimes they jump at you, bloodied teeth gnashing up close, and you have to tap the 'B' button super fast to ward them off.

I tells ya, it pumps the adrenaline when you're attacked from seemingly nowhere, and sometimes even when you catch a glimpse of something twisted and deformed. Leading up to really scary points - and you know when they're coming - my legs kept twitching, such was the terror (and the chemically-enhanced doughnuts may have contributed somewhat).

Another factor that contributes to the game's impressive ability to curdle your blood is the story. It's sort of like a really good Japanese horror story, like The Ring, but with far more blood and guts.

Though the game is linear, the story is so compelling that you'll not want to stop until you've uncovered the truth behind the hideous demon-bitch Alma. Is she really your wife, should she be shot - can she be shot? - or is she just a misunderstood hell-maiden?

The story unfolds via in-game cut-scenes that showcase the game's excellent graphics engine, and the dialogue is pretty good for the most part.

Along with all the freaky horror, there's quite a bit of language too. The f-bomb is dropped a fair bit, but unlike some games it never seems overdone and only plays to enhance the story, which is also told via remote communications with your squad mates and data cards you accumulate along the way.

The autosave feature works quite well, saving fairly regularly. I would have preferred to do it myself, but in retrospect it probably would have affected the game's pacing, which is spot and keeps you engrossed in your objectives.

The final ingredient in the Fear 2's recipe for scaring the bejesus out of gamers is the graphics.

The game looks sensational from start to finish with high resolution visuals, detailed 3D models and excellent texture and bump mapping to give everything a smooth look.

From the very first level when you get in the lift with a fellow soldier to reach the penthouse suite to find the ATC's president and glimpse the sprawling city below, you know the eye candy is going to be good.

The weapons look very cool, your enemies move (and die) realistically and later on in the game you'll also come across Elite Power Armour (EPA), basically a mech with unlimited chain guns and quad rockets - and they look ace.

Able to mow down hundreds of ground troops in seconds, the EPA's are the icing on the cake in Fear 2 and help mix up the gameplay nicely so things never get stale.

The EPA's also have an awesome thermal vision mode, which is very cool and help identify targets in low light conditions. 

It's twin chain guns grind up infantry instantly and the quad rockets are good against other mechs, vehicles and enemies in cover, able to sometimes blast through concrete walls.

But getting back to the graphics, the use of special effects to enhance the fear factor is awesome. 

Picture this: you've busted into an elementary school. Why? I don't want to ruin the story. Well I kind of do, but I won't.

The lights are out, the desks are smashed, and of course you come across litres of blood dripping from the ceiling.

You're walking down a corridor and all of a sudden the end of the hall starts to warp and twist like some interdimensional rift and then all the lockers start slamming open and shut as the lights flicker and then a desk slides eerily across the laminex floor. 

Then the lights completely go out. And your torch begins to falter...

These paranormal events are very eerie but the scariest thing of all, though, is the build-up. 

You've been exploring the school for a good five minutes and have just been separated from your squad-mate. So far you've encountered nothing - not a soul. Then the music subsides and is replaced by your heart-beat that serves to make you feel like you're there, so you freak out as you turn every corner.

It's terrific stuff; few games have ever managed to deliver such a convincingly scary atmosphere and I found myself firing random bursts of bullets simply because the lack of noise - save for my heartbeat - was so unnerving.

Doom 3 did some really good things with darkness and ambiance, but Fear 2 delivers the scares with more style, more thought, and more panache. It's more believable too, and the experience is unlike anything else before it.

I kind of thought that a co-op mode would have been nice, but in hindsight it's may not have been so scary. Playing alone, in a dark room, with only the howling wind and Andrew O'Keefe to keep you company... Now that's scary.

Unlike the original game there's a lot more variety in this one and the level design, while fairly linear, is very polished. Again, the game looks superb.

Also, the gore is done rather well, with excellent blood splatter effects and plenty of gibbing to be done with the high powered weapons and of course the areas that have been visited by Alma and other hellish characters will chill you to your bones.

When a skinned body drops from a balcony and look up to see what's there, and you see Alma flicker in and out of vision for a second, you almost have to rub your eyes to see if your mind is playing tricks on you.

It's gory, it's bloody, it's scary but it's so damned captivating that you won't be able to look away.

Vegetarians and scaredy cats will not like this game one bit and it's probably not a good game for those who suffer from night tremors.

For everyone else, I seriously recommend you play this game. It's highly involving stuff that combines a good, solid shoot-em-up with one of the most thrilling stories ever written for a videogame with a host of intriguing characters and bone-chilling scenarios.

Simply put, Fear 2: Project Origin takes gaming to a new and intensely surreal level.

Turn the surround sound up, turn the lights off, eat a few sketchy doughnuts and Fear 2 will scare you witless. Brilliant stuff.

Game: F.E.A.R 2: Project Origin
System: Xbox 360
Players: 1-multi
Online: Yes
Developer: Monolith Games
Distributor: Warner Bros Interactive Entertainment

Rating: 90%

(Ratings Key/Explanation)