Xbox Series X Review: F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin (2009)

In a natural progression, I've returned to review the second F.E.A.R. (this is very irritating to type) game after reviewing the third game last month. Maybe I'll review the first one as well. Stay tuned to Code Redd Net for more reviews of pretty old games.

I hear people don't like this game. It's not so bad! It's pretty good. While it's not nearly as good as the original F.E.A.R. (2005), and I can understand why people might decry the direction of 2, there's still plenty in this one to recommend.  

The story, as you might expect, is a bunch of spooky, haunted nonsense strung between gun fights. Running somewhat concurrently (at least initially) with the first game, 2 is about a Delta Force goon squad captured and augmented by the evil Armacham corporation. That's how you get your slow-motion powers. Alma has grown up and wants to have sex with you, kind of. I don't know. It's very stupid. At least the first game had the dignity to make the story sparse and often limited to items you pick up and read. It was an atmosphere, just a veneer of horror wrapped around a Hong Kong bullet ballet. It was just generally spooky, whereas 2 makes you watch and engage with the Horror Stuff much more, and it's weaker for it.

Luckily, the action in F.E.A.R. 2 is generally excellent, even if it's a fair bit different from the first game. Much of it is modernized: aim down sights, sprinting, you name it. It feels better to play, with quicker, more responsive controls and movement, although the level design is much more condensed. I can't tell if the AI is better or worse because they have so few options in how they engage with you. As a result, the combat is fairly predictable, but it is no less explosive. All the guns feel great and the Soldier Mans you shoot explode and break apart in some wonderful ways.

Unfortunately, it's over a bit quicker than you'd want at about five or six hours. And because it's a single-player FPS from the late 2000s, there's nothing else to do. You can chase some achievements if you want, but you don't unlock anything, there's no extra modes, nothing. There was a multiplayer mode but obviously that's gone now. Hope you like additional difficulty modes!

Xbox Series X Review: Trepang2 (2023)

It's a new F.E.A.R. game! kind of.

If you're wondering what the heck Trepang2 means, don't worry, because it simply doesn't. The meaningless name is indicative of an equally meaningless wrapper of alleged "story" or "plot", cloaked around a series of otherwise disparate missions and locations in which hella shooting and explosions happen. This is what happens when your game starts development as mid-2000s FPS cover band, principally playing the hits from the original F.E.A.R. (2005). You play an enhanced super soldier guy, waking up in a prison and rescued by a group of mercenary people who then recruit you for some missions to do things involving a lot of death and finding keycards. As you might expect, the storytelling in Trepang2 is delivered by a lot of men speaking in thumbnail images. Thrilling!

That paragraph makes it sound like I really soured on Trepang2. I didn't. You won't either. Ignore the plot and just start moving the character around and you'll know. Trepang2 is beautiful in motion. It feels good simply to move in this world. T2 has some of the best FPS movement and shooting I've ever experienced. While your powers (bullet time, cloak, general kung fu) can be a bit much at first, as the enemy counts grow and the blood and sparks fly around everywhere and drench the screen with way too much stuff, pretty soon you'll get used to it and you'll just flow, man, with the brutal mutilation and blood splatter. There's really nothing quite like the ferocity and speed of action in Trepang2. No other game can quite match it, except maybe Doom (2016).

Still, though, it's hard to ignore how shallow Trepang2 ultimately reveals itself to be. It makes a hell of a first impression, but soon enough you'll see the empty storytelling for what it is and you'll see how the side-missions are all just wave-based survival nightmares, and the final boss is beyond irritating and cheap. I had to turn the default difficulty down in order to push throw it. Growing up is allowing yourself to turn the difficulty down because you have other things you want to do in life. Don't be too proud.

Trepang 2 is a good game. Maybe wait for a sale and pick it up then.

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.

XBOX Review: The Thing (2002)

Unfortunately, The Thing is more like a subpar Freedom Fighters than a truly engaging "sequel" to the 1982 film. It has the requisite squad tactics and some neat ideas governing emotional responses from your teammates, but those ideas are poorly realized and unfulfilled, and in some cases downright misleading.

The Thing is somewhere between a sequel and a loose remake of its parent film, set sometime after those events but essentially telling a remarkably similar story, at least at first. An alien race has surfaced in an Antarctic military research base, with the alien infection often taking the form of your human allies. As you investigate what happened to your colleagues, you must maintain their trust, in addition to watching your own back for lurking thing-creatures, which emerge out of your pals in a particularly gruesome fashion.

This is a fairly standard third-person action game with the exception of a neat trust/fear mechanic for your squad. It's neat-o in theory, anyway. Your squad (of up to four) get all a-scared by the alien creatures, as well as by gore, darkness, being alone, and so on. They'll hunker down and won't be helpful to you if they get too scared, so you settle them down by forking over firearms or health. You also never know when one of them will morph into A Thing, which you can check by drawing blood from them at any time. A cool idea, for sure, except that it doesn't work at all: a guy who tests positive for Human will turn around a minute later and reveal himself to be Thing the next, seemingly only because you're moving on to the next level and your squad can't carry over across the loading screen.

The Thing has more problems, unfortunately. Not only do the squad tactics barely function, but the enemy AI is generally incompetent and behaves strangely most of the time. The terrifying threat of aliens is rendered not so terrifying when they can barely navigate most doorways. Additionally, this game has some incredibly frustrating missions later on, only because the checkpoint and save systems are so poorly implemented. There's a whole lot of backtracking, repetition, and memorization depending on when you can find a save point, and how well you were doing when you found this save point.

In general, The Thing is not a good game. It's a decent quick fix for anyone desiring of a Freedom Fighters-style squad shooter, but it gets old quickly and does follow through on many of its promises.

Xbox Review: Breakdown (2004)

Breakdown is a neat idea. It's mostly a first-person beat-'em-up, but also a first-person shooter, and even occasionally a first-person burger-eating and puking simulator. Everything unfolds for you through the eyes of Derrick, who wakes up in a lab just in time for war to break out between humans and some strangely buff aliens. There you meet Alex, your emo girl companion for the bulk of the game. The two of you then set off to unravel the mystery of these aliens, and your identity a la Jackie Chan's Who Am I? (1998), through some incredibly elliptical writing and absolutely maddening combat sequences.

Everything in Breakdown takes place in first-person view. At first blush, this is novel; you shoot, fight hand-to-hand, platform, fall out of windows, backflip, eat, puke, read, and more from Derrick's POV. This novelty quickly subsides, however, and the first-person perspective becomes alternatively disorienting, distracting, or downright difficult to handle. It's often impossible to keep track of your enemies, due partially to the game's inadequate lock-on targeting system, as well as larger problems with the first-person perspective itself. Since everything takes place in first-person, including when you get knocked down (and this happens often), recovering a proper perspective to launch a counterattack is frequently impossible when confronted with multiple enemies. Similarly, later stages in the game require a great deal of platforming, always a fun proposition from a first-person perspective. Other stages consist largely of empty hallways punctuated by frustrating enemy encounters.

The fun of recovering health by consuming stray sodas and hamburgers in a Streets of Rage fashion, or driving jeeps over caverns in first-person view, is largely overwhelmed by later levels in the game. In particular, there are two combat sequences near the conclusion of the game that are among the most aggravating I've ever played. You simply can't see the attacks coming your way, so instead you're treated to a kaleidoscope of images as your character is knocked around by mutants. Sure, perhaps this is a realistic representation of being beaten up by a crew of obscenely swoll alienmans, but it is emphatically not an enjoyable experience. I wanted to like Breakdown, and to its credit, there's very few games like it. And as it turns out, there's a pretty good reason why. Breakdown is a failed experiment; fascinating and educational in its own way, but deeply flawed.

XBOX Review: Half Life 2 (2005)

If nothing else, Half Life 2 demonstrates the strength of what an exclusively single player shooter can be. It is pretty much universally acclaimed, as it should be. It is an engrossing first person sci-fi experience with a (still) advanced physics engine. It may begin a bit slowly; the long sections of dialogue are probably the worst part about this game. Luckily, they don't happen that often, but they can't be skipped. I don't find myself paying much attention to them anyway, as I couldn't make sense of it when I tried (that's what Wikipedia is for). I felt like I knew all I needed to know: there is an oppressive police state and I have a crowbar. The player is taken on quite a journey, first escaping the city through the canal system, then commandeering a hovercraft to provide transportation to a rebel base, to another secret lab where the indubitably fun gravity gun is obtained, to a zombie-infested ghost town, and so forth. Each level seems unique; no where does the game feel repetitive. I found this wide array of challenges to be ever amusing (except for perhaps a specific battle with two gun ships) and all done well (indeed, there are no annoying half-hearted attempts at adding stealth scenarios). Added to the mix are a variety of puzzles that rely on the realistic physics of the engine. I was pleasantly surprised to find that they nearly always find the right balance of not being overly obvious as well as not requiring a visit to the web to figure them out. Puzzles such as these aren't often seen in first-person shooters, but they work well here. In addition, each level seems to build on the last (both in terms of the story and the tension); you obtain distinctly new and different weapons, operate new vehicles with unique characteristics, and encounter new enemies that require special tactics to combat on your way to your final goal. This is definitely not like other FPS games where it is an exercise in entering an environment, shooting everyone, and moving to the next room. Rather, it is a steady progression towards the climax, which was really quite satisfying. If there is a major cost to having it be exclusively single player, it is the unfortunate fact that there is no co-op option. Games this good should be enjoyed together with someone else. As well, there is no multiplayer, not even offline. While some may see this as outdated, I see it as the best FPS experience I've had since the release of Timesplitters: Future Perfect. For the prices it can be had today, I won't hesitate to say that you can't afford to not give this game at least one play through.