"Fear 2: Project Origin" review

F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin (or, as humans might refer to it, "Fear 2") is not a game of subtleties, as you can probably gather from its title. Fear 2's aim is to scare you, and you play it if you want to be scared - perhaps not the most noble of ambitions, nor a particularly original one, but regardless one it set flat-out to achieve.

Well, actually that's not quite true. The true meat of the gameplay consists of a fairly bland first-person shooter that can't quite decide if it's Call of Duty or Halo. The identikit grunts (quite literally - most enemies are "replicas", a mindless army of clones distinguishable from the earlier human enemies only by their powerful weapons) are fairly satisfying to fight, but the most exciting variations they present are "guy with flamethrower" and "guy with a really big machine gun".

While the logic of featuring such a large quantity of mindless gunplay in a game marketed as a scary experience is questionable, the shooting at least contrasts well with the genuinely scary bits. Monolith pulls out all the stops, with claustrophobic dreamlands and bizarre graphical effects heaped on top of one another. While used sparingly, the infrequent visits from Alma Wade (the "icon-but-only-because-they-ripped-off-the Ring" cover star and very angry poltergeist) become predictable: the screen will turn orange and/or you'll see a swing in a field, and/or Alma will engage the player in a brief thumb war before being shaken off (yet again) with a simple QTE. The secret to great horror, someone once said, is the same as comedy: never repeat yourself. There's a good reason why, in "The Shining", those twins and the disgusting old woman only appear once.

That said, fights with supernatural enemies are tense, horrible affairs that successfully remove the feeling of empowerment the game's ridiculous arsenal provides, with masterful pacing that makes their initial reveals genuinely scary. Yet for all it gets right in these sections, it takes it all back with mounted turret set-pieces and, astonishingly, a handful of opportunities to pilot a giant mech suit.

The bar for horror games' stories was set high by Bioshock, which knew that the sight of a society cannibalising itself is far scarier than freaks jumping out the walls. Fear 2 tells a superficially similar story of science gone too far and how "we make our own monsters", but it's cliched and predictable to the point of self parody. Your team, meanwhile, consist of a bunch of characters so paper-thin it's a surprise they don't just float away in a gentle breeze, and who either provide the player with meaningless objectives ("Get to the nurse's office! Meet up with Snake Fist! Save Corporal Keegan!" - why are these necessary when the player is travelling through glorified corridors, anyway?), or just die occasionally throughout the story. It's a bad sign when the most memorable line in your game is "You're like free pizza in an anime convention!"

This isn't a bad game by any means: if you're looking for a dark, atmospheric and sometimes scary shooter, Fear 2 fills all of the criteria. It is, though, a success only if you switch your brain off beforehand.