Xbox Series X Review: F.E.A.R. 3 (2011)

I miss writing reviews for Code Redd Net, so I'm back! Unofficially... maybe? We'll see how this goes. We started this as a Geocities page in 2001 (holy crap) while Chicken Man and I were both in grade school, letting the world know what we thought of 007 games and Jet Li movies from our world headquarters in the school's keyboarding classroom. We also brought it back in 2012 when I was a grad student, living in the world's worst studio apartment in Montreal. I'm old enough now to really miss it, and even though I have an actual job now, I'm writing this seasonally-appropriate October review of F.E.A.R. 3 because I want to and it's the last thing I (re-)played and I just found out I can still log in to this account. The world needs to hear my thoughts on this game from 12 years ago! Let's go.

I love the first F.E.A.R. game. I even like F.E.A.R. 2 a little bit more than most seem to. I suppose we'll get to this in future reviews of these games (when I go backwards in time and review the first two in the series), but I avoided these games for a long time because I thought they were just horror games and I'm not really into horror stuff. It wasn't until I watched a YouTube video on them and someone described them as J-horror mixed with John Woo that I became interested. I'm glad I did, even if 3 is by far the weakest in the series. It's still a decent FPS by the standards of 2011, but it loses a lot of what made those previous games special.

It's virtually meaningless to map out the plot of F.E.A.R. 3, or the other games, because it's both difficult and simultaneously and definitely not the point of playing something like this. You play (at least the first ime) a super soldier man, rather artfully dubbed The Point Man, on a mission with his psychic brother?-guy, Paxton Fettel, as they run from and sometimes fight a experimental haunted girl named Alma. She's going to give birth? and this future military corporation wants to harness or reclaim her powers. That's good enough. It's mostly just a lot of gunplay; the horror elements are essentially limited to a few jump scares and generically spooooky images of creepy little girls and blood on things.

Sadly, F.E.A.R. 3 is so mainstream now. Unlike the first game, with its wide-open combat and remarkable enemy intelligence, 3 is hella Call of Alma: Black Ops. ADS, vaulting, super linear level design, experience point upgrades, very scripted events, the works. It's smooth and plays well, but your options for movement and shooting are much more limited than they need to be, and once you've played through the campaign you've mostly seen it all. And your series trademark slo-mo powers have never mattered less. As in 2, in 3 you get to jump into a huge mech from time to time. It's fun and mixes things up a little bit, it's a welcome change from the normal business of shooting guys, but it's not enough (and not as good as it was in 2).

When you finish the game, you open up the option to play as Fettel. This 100% should've been the option from the get-go. As Fettel, you can possess the bodies of enemies, throw stuff, and fire little energy balls from your fists. It doesn't sound like much, but his powers make the gameplay much more dynamic, varied, fast-paced, and unique. While F.E.A.R. 3 needs it, it still isn't quite enough. We never gave scores back in the day, but if we did, F.E.A.R. 3 is the definition of a two star game: brimming with promise, but the new ideas don't matter much and the other games in the series render the entire exercise almost pointless. Give it a try if you're bored.