Sadly this is a franchise I don't see talked about as much as a lot of others, but I was delighted when there were those of you who were familiar with it when I added it to my Top 20 Games list so I decided to make this thread. I'll start by showing what I can figure is the default stance in the F.E.A.R community.
F.E.A.R: Masterpiece F.E.A.R 2: Not as good as the first F.E.A.R. 3: A HORRIBLE ABOMINATION AGAINST MANKIND!
It's like their version of RE 4/DmC/Final Fantasy XIII. F.E.A.R Online: Will possibly make us forget 3 ever existed.
I was introduced to the series from some friends I role-played with and ordered the first game online. It not only scared the crap out of me it actually inspired me to take up reviewing again so, go game! I later got F.E.A.R 2 last Christmas and played it a bit before dropping it and then coming back to it this past October and beating it in a week. I can agree it's not as scary as the first but I still found it fascinating and had plenty of scary moments, just not the same branch of horror as the first. I also found the FPS part more annoying which probably means they improved upon the FPS from the first game since the FPS genre hates me and wants me to stop buying these on consoles.
Never played the third game and while I'm excited for F.E.A.R Online a few things concern me about it. For starters it's going straight to F2P, and while I'll always exploit that option when it's available to me, F2P is usually where you go when you're either not making money or don't think you can make any money off of it so it doesn't exactly scream good news that it's starting out that way. Aeria Games also has a hand in it and from what I can gather they don't have the best track record. The game is being developed by Korean developers and Koreans (from what I can gather, don't know for sure) seem to have a reputation for doing horror well so there's hope. Not to mention that the Aeria forums are actually asking fans input as well. But there's still the question of how do you do horror for an MMO and why the pull for Online? I sighed up for the closed Beta regardless because I'm hoping the game will do well.
1 is the masterpiece for how it made the player the star of an action film, all that bullet time, leaning, and karate meleing was pretty insane at the time. Bit it suffered from its era of FPS stories going on for way too long in repetitive environments. It was also a legitimately freaky game.
2 was not as scary and just didn't have the epic build-up of the plot that 1 had. It was just an overall great, tactical, atmospheric shooter, probably the best I've played in that niche. I always say I couldn't play the first fear ate dark because of how creepy it was but i couldn't stop paying the second because of how fun the gunplay was.
3 gets hate because it didn't do the story of the franchise justice but gameplay-wise it was one hell of a game. The co-op was probably a little ahead of its time.
2 is probably my favorite but overall a great series.
I can see how one would find 1 repetitive with its environments, and yeah, that seems to be the reason people hate 3. But that what happens when you change developers on a game. At first I thought Monolith Productions had gone out of business, hence why Day 1 Studios (who did go out of business -cough-) worked on the third game, but they're still around making games so I have no idea what happened there.
It is very bizarre why they would hand their signature franchise over to another developer but they did vet them to make sure they were the right studio and collaborated a bit. I think Monolith just has more responsibilities at WB now, they were doing Lord of the Rings games at the time I believe, they probably wanted to keep the brand alive while finishing other projects.
F.E.A.R (Series)
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