Style: FPS Mood: Paranormal Horror Type: Shooter Developer: Monolith # Notability FEAR and FEAR 2 are landmark games for me. The gunplay, atmosphere, pacing, sound design, enemy AI, and so much more made this hugely impactful and influential. It is one of those games that I measure all others by. I have two great memories about the game involving other people: - Not long after FEAR first came out, I had a friend over who loved horror movies. It was dark out. He was watching me play. I remember him backing into the corner of the room as he watched. - Many many years after FEAR came out I introduced it to someone I was dating. When I first showed it to her she started making fun of its dated graphics but I was able to persuade her to try it out. An hour later she was shaken and had to take a break. She said to me that the atmosphere pulled her in and any failure of the graphics became completely irrelevant. IMHO, the game was top of the line visually when new, and still maintains itself very well despite its age. # Foibles As much as I love the games there are some things that in an ideal world I would like to have been done better. - Point Man and Becket solve all their problems with bullets, even in situations that are so absurd that it nearly breaks the game - The enemy AI seems to have been broken in later updates, it's not clear why but the last time I played it I noticed that they no longer did anything interesting even when I hung back and taunted them - The last chapter of the first game is awful, it spams 2 types of enemies at you that come out of nowhere and are never explained, it isn't difficult, just cheesy to see all these identical phantoms with identical animations swarming out - who the fuck are they and why are they attacking? - The final scene with the helicopter makes me feel embarrassed that it made it into the game - Monolith is very bad at endings - The vaulting and other movement options are never introduced, and rarely useful, even though they are super cool when you figure out where to use them # Inspirations Seems clear that it was inspired by its predecessors in the game medium but also many films. - [[Max Payne]] / [[The Matrix]] - Bullet time # Inspired FEAR has inspired several games since. - [[Trepang2]]'s gunplay - [[3. Reference/Media/Games/Selaco]]'s enemy AI and general mayhem