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About F.E.A.R. 1, 2 & 3


Sure some of you may heard about NOLF series of course, and someone even about the Blood series that Monolith developed in the past. Those games were masterpieces of funny, goofy and gory FPS adventures. In 2005 Monolith developed a new game called F.E.A.R.. This game used a dead psychic Japanese little girl to scare you, and told you a great story that involves government experiments on human brains and creation of a telepathically controlled army of cloned soldiers. F.E.A.R. is a very adrenaline driven FPS with bullet-time, at the same time managing to be a very scary horror game exploiting the popular horror cliche in a correct way. The term survival may be used here to describe the clever AI that manages to fill you with bullet holes before you could say POW. Sometimes the game even manages to be funny, introducing the characters that can be present in any NOLF game. Game mechanics in F.E.A.R. are cleverly designed, you not only can shoot, but also fight, performing combo's with your fists and legs. In slo-mo it all feels like you are role-playing in first person the Neo character from the Matrix movies. After the success of this game Timegate Studios developed two addons, which were fine from gameplay perspective, not breaking the Monolith's established rules, but were lacking the quality and logic of the plot making these two addons obsolete and useless for the game's universe. Monolith then developed the second game "F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin" continuing the story from the same spot where the first game ended. Monolith once again proved it's capability raising the quality of F.E.A.R. franchise on a new level. The game even introduced drivable fighting mechs on the streets of a dead city. The little "japanese girl" continued to haunt the player, appearing in contrast with action paced moments. This game very cleverly jugles with your disposition, now you are furiously shooting rockets sitting in a mech, but the next minute you paranoically seek escape because it's too quiet and you already mentally imagine that something bad is about to happen. Monolith is masterfully creating tension in every game moment. And of course the ending. One of the best actually. There is no ending like this in the whole game industry, but i will not speak about it. Just play the game and find out. The third game (F.3.A.R.) was given to some other game developer and many were skepticall about it's success (myself included), but it turned out that the guys who did this game were the fans of the first two. They invented an interesting story and a co-op gameplay mechanic, that exists alongside the plot, making it an important part of the game. The co-op game is literally role-played by Point Man and his ghost brother Paxton Fettel. The two characters are very different in both gameplay mechanic and play style, making you guess about how would your character proceed in a given situation. So here is another horror game universe worth checking out, but as i suggested, the two addons are better ignored if you want to discover a great universe, because they are ignored even by Monolith. It's best to play them after the trilogy is beaten if you want it so badly.

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