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F.E.A.R is a first person shooter action game from Vivendi Universal Games and developer Monolith.
The main story to F.E.A.R is that the player plays the game as the newest member of the First Encounter Assault Recon, the military's top-secret task force assigned to deal with paranormal situations. In the opening cinematic, a military commander named Paxton Fettel goes insane and takes command of a secret army of cloned soldiers that are telepathically linked to him. Fettel and the battalion of elite soldiers then go on the rampage in a nondescript American city. They appear to be searching for something, though their objective is a mystery. It's up to the player and the rest of the F.E.A.R. team, along with units of Delta Force, to find out what it is they're looking for and stop them. (Gamezone, 2005)
F.E.A.R has been described as being one of the first first-shooter combat games to elevate the action to cinematic levels (Gamezone, 2005).
The gameplay in F.E.A.R goes against everything that was considered conventional in first-shooter combat games. For instance, the impact of firing a weapon has more realistic results, such as bullets that tear chunks out of concrete and wood, as it would in real life. All of the weapons used in the game, including pistols, are capable of bringing an opponent down quickly. This goes against the genre’s convention, since most shooters usually scale weapons on a curve, with smaller or lighter weapons being almost useless in the game.
This game is heavily influenced by Japanese horror movies, most notably The Ring. The game uses many of the same kinds of visual tricks like a split-second appearance of a ghostly apparition when the player least expects it.
The creators of F.E.A.R have captured the essence of a first-person shooter game and has elevated it to a new level of intensity due to the quality of audio and visual effects. The gunfights in this game are of a cinematic quality and include blinding clouds of dust and debris and realistically loud sounds of real guns being shot. Another effect that helps this game rise above convention is the deathly silence that follows each gun battle.
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Gamezone (2005) F.E.A.R Review, retrieved October 25, 2005 from:
http://pc.gamezone.com/extlink.php?SiteID=gamezone.com&Link=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.gamespot.com%2Fpc%2Faction%2Ffear%2Freview.html%3Fsid%3D6135744
