First Person Shooters and Horror do not mix. This is perhaps a curious statement considering three of my favourite games are Horror FPS's - or at least FPS's with horror elements. System Shock 2, Half Life 2, and the Thief series. Part of the reason why the latter two work is that they aren't actual horror games. Out of no-where they suddenly spring levels from hell, where you find yourself stuck in an abandoned town infested with zombies or in a haunted catacomb.
But F.E.A.R markets itself as a horror. The title screen has ominous music, the cover images are all of that girl from The Ring - which has become a horror cliché that really needs to die - and the first mission gives you absolutely nothing to shoot whilst gradually building atmosphere. It's a shooter that's legitimately trying to be a horror game...whilst putting you in slow-motion tactical gun-fights with robots.
F.E.A.R was released in 2005 by the mad uncle of the gaming industry; Monolith. You play as some random faceless guy who's been recently shoved to the top of the First Encounter Assault Recon unit - a unit which turns out only has about three people judging by how many times you have to go in by yourself despite having already just barely survived a previous mission where you had to go in by yourself desp-you get the picture.
The plot is very weak. There's a big twist revealed just before the end of the game, but you can guess what it's going to be almost right away. I thought for a moment that the game might play with this revelation and either perform a double-twist, or just blow it early and move the story in a different direction. It could have been like the opposite of Portal: which begins as a funny puzzle game before suddenly getting dark whilst keeping a sense of humour. But no. The plot feels like watching a play produced by children, where you're forced to go through it and act surprised when you predict a jumpscare or guess the dramatic final twist.
That's when there actually is a plot. Actual exposition is kept painfully brief. Whenever you meet another human who you're not supposed to shoot, it's gone before it even arrives. This isn't like BioShock where the idea is to keep you isolated and always feeling deprived of progress. You progress during these segments, but they're gone before you can get any kind of emotional attachment to anyone or anything. There's a guy who communicates with you throughout the game via your headset, and I still don't know his name. Compare this to Deus Ex, where at first Alex Jacobson is just a voice in your head, but then you actually meet him and hold a conversation and explore his office and: oh my god! He's a character who I care about!
This is odd because when the exposition is merely woven into the gameplay, it's very well done. When the player character hallucinates, it tells so much more than a voice in our head - to the point where it outright gives away the plot. You can also hack computers to get further information, and listen to messages left on answer-phones in offices; which ultimately provide more insight than the other characters. It feels as though Monolith were trying to go for the typical survival-horror route where you experience the narrative via discovery. You explore, find exposition, and learn. It's not even like Gone Home where suddenly a voice chips in to just tell you the plot in case you fell asleep (which is understandable given the lack of gameplay in that 'game'). You can easily skip vital exposition in F.E.A.R by just walking past the laptops and phones.
The pacing of the game is also strange. At times it's downright brilliant, but at other points it feels amateur. The face-to-face dialogue scenes flash by, as do the sections in-between missions, but the missions themselves keep things slow yet diverse. The first mission has no combat and is entirely about buildup. The next mission introduces the combat before suddenly bringing in the paranormal element for a shock. It works brilliantly as a 'pulling the rug from underneath us' device.
But then we go back to the tactical combat. In fact there are no supernatural enemies in this game. Only right at the end do we get accosted by inter-dimensional horrors, and these horrors are surprisingly lame. We next break into a huge science centre filled with offices and this mission goes on forever. And ever. Whilst it starts well, beginning with a series of intense firefights then having a slow, horror section where all the lights flicker, then culminating in an all-out war. Then...it keeps going. And going. And going. This mission lasts at least half the game! Yet whilst this section really drags, the climax and final revelation keeps things mercifully brief and thus very effective.
So why is this game regarded as a classic? What did it do that merited two sequels and a series of expansion packs that were later declared non-canon because reasons?
Well, this game came out in 2005. It was a time when PC gaming was reaching the very peak of innovation. The previous year had bought us Half Life 2 and Doom 3. Whilst Doom 3 was a dull pitch-black slog, Half Life 2 was a breakthrough in terms of it's realistic environments and physics engine. Not only did it's in-game world look like it was full of objects and life, but you could interact with all of this. You could pick stuff up, you could stack things, you could throw thing, and most importantly you could throw things at people who would then fly in the air and crumple like a real person...a real person with a missing skeleton.
This was followed by Far Cry, a game where you were given a whole island full of stuff and life...most of which was trying to kill you. You moved through this island uninterrupted, organically coming across structures and characters...most of whom wanted you dead. We'd progressed from simulating a world in Half Life 2 to actually creating one. Far Cry isn't a very good game, but it's perhaps one of the most important in gaming history. It was the ceiling video games hit where everything was simulated. All we can do now is just add more guns and make the textures shinier.
The early 2000's was also a great time for lighting engines. Previously, 3D lighting was either flat, or beam-based. Shadows were a rare luxury, and when they existed they were only fixed points unless illuminated by an outside source. As with textures, shadows were Dynamic shadows simply did not exist. It was only with games such as Thief 3 where dynamic shadows were introduced and exploited correctly. The Thief games were all about blending into the shadows, and so it made sense to finally have an instalment in the franchise where this was completely possible. A selection of PC games from the early 2000's had glorious lighting, and this is the prime reason why F.E.A.R looks like it was made five years ago instead of ten. As with film, good lighting means so much in videogames.
This game also has slow-motion. This was not a new mechanic, and it's been done to death in recent years. But it works in F.E.A.R because the slow-motion doesn't give you a combat advantage, but it gives you a reflex advantage. You don't really use it to dodge bullets, you use it when an enemy jumps you, or there are so many people firing you need to stop for a moment to work out where everyone is.
But whilst the slow-motion is incredibly fun, that's not the real reason why I like this game so much. I like this game just because the combat is so good.
Every weapon has impact. Even this pistol sends a pulsing shockwave that wrecks the scenery. The game abuses ragdoll physics in the best way possible, as bodies fly when hit. This game has the best shotgun in videogaming history. You hit someone square in the chest with it and they go flying feet in the air whilst the gun itself makes the loudest bang ever. Assault rifles cry out as bullet shells clatter on the floor and bodies do the shimmy-shake dance you see in spaghetti westerns. These weapons are all so powerful, and it only takes a few hits to down enemies.
To balance this, you yourself can't take much damage. Again, this is why you use the slow-motion, but you also have to keep to cover and improve your aim. Hit your shots and enemies go down quickly, but miss and keep yourself exposed and that's half your health gone. Fortunately there's no cover-based mechanics, meaning you have to organically take cover by hitting crouch and so sometimes you find out the cover isn't effective and so you have to strafe or run or use the slow-motion to map out an escape.
The A.I you're faced against is also inspired, and I have yet to see a game with A.I this good. They're not too good. They can't duck rockets or jump out of the way of bullets, but I just love how they use the environment and play off-of it. Whilst occasionally enemies just run at you, for the most part they're tactical. They will flank you, they will split up, but perhaps the most genius part is that they communicate with each-other.
Again, this isn't new. Half-Life had the military troops who yelled "grenade!" "Get down!" and "We're under heavy fire!" But F.E.A.R doesn't just include this for the sake of immersion. This is actually a key mechanic. You use the chatter to work out where enemies are, what state they're in, and what they plan to do. There's no indicator that a grenade's been dropped, you have to listen out for a "Fire in the hole!" Often it's difficult to tell if all the enemies in the area are dead, so you have to keep an ear out for "Squad: check in" and "We've lost three men!" The best part of the game is when you stop firing and so the enemy goes: "Keep quiet!" as they wait to ambush you. So you both wait out, and eventually one person will say something before the other says "Shut up!" And now you know the position of two people. Two people who will now be introduced to your favourite grenade. Compare this to Skyrim or Mass Effect where the enemies just ran at you yelling the same lines whilst bumping into scenery or circle-strafing.
Not only were the graphics top-notch, but another reason why this game has aged so well is because of how the environments are so mundane. You alternate between either offices or industrial complexes. Yet these environments don't stay mundane for long because the combat is so destructive. Bullets shatter scenery. Glass flies. Walls crumble. Clutter flies, Blood splatters. Bodies crumple. The amount of carnage that's going to completely transforms the environment. There's a strange pleasure in seeing such everyday locations being changed in this way as you interact with it. It reminds me appealingly of The Terminator where the everyday world is torn apart by two characters from an alien future.
Is it possible to enjoy a game in such a way and still call it horror? No, not really.
So this isn't a horror game. It has it's occasional jump-scares, and times when it attempts to build an atmosphere, but there's no actual pay-off. There's no supernatural entity you have to fight or even work around. It's an exceptional tactical shooting game that thinks it's a horror game. But that's OK, because it's still a great game. It's like the Bad Lieutenant remake. The film isn't supposed to be a comedy, but because Nicholas Cage is so funny then it means the movie's still great...just not for the reasons the film-makers want it to be.
