Reviews// F.E.A.R.

Unfortunately, the gun fights are punctuated by far too much trudging around while trying to work out where the hell you are. A lot of time's spent exploring dingy offices, pressing answer-phone buttons and solving uninteresting jumping puzzles.

The dreariness of the backdrops certainly doesn't help, either. I can see what Monolith, the game's developer, was aiming for: the game certainly has a more real-world feel than most of its peers, and it creates a claustrophobic and at times tense atmosphere. Mostly, however, it just looks drab. Trawling through the endless, samey-looking corridors and offices starts to wear pretty thin unless you're a fan of the colours grey and brown. I often found myself back-tracking and trying to work out where I was thanks to the repetitiveness of the backdrops.

Graphically, the game's a bit disappointing, too. The lighting effects are great, to the point where a shadow will often give away an enemy soldier's location. Otherwise, F.E.A.R.'s graphically lacklustre at best. The textures are dull and everything else is blocky. It looks suspiciously like a port of the 360 version which, let's face it, has a less powerful machine to work with. Sequences that looked great on a PC when F.E.A.R. was first released two years ago don't quite deliver on the world's most powerful gaming console

F.E.A.R. also isn't helped by its awkward control system. As a game originally designed for the PC, F.E.A.R. suffers from having controls which were originally mapped for a mouse and keyboard crammed on to the Sixaxis.

The placing of the 'lean' controls onto the D-pad alongside the on-button for your torch feels unintuitive to say the least; the allowance of only three weapons to be simultaneously mapped onto [R2] is frustrating. Sure, lugging around six or eight weapons isn't the most realistic notion in the world, but neither's slowing down time or picking up ammo just by walking over it. Getting into the thick of a fire-fight only to find your ammo's run out on all three of your weapons feels mildly reminiscent of getting out of the swimming pool only to find your Speedos are still in there: immensely frustrating and like you're about to get hurt.

In addition to the above, the targeting (done with the right-hand analog stick) is overly sensitive. There's no concession made to the fact that targeting with an analog stick is trickier than with a mouse. Some gamers may see this as a plus, but I found I didn't want to enter a shoot-out without my bullet time option powered up and ready to go.

All grumbling aside, however, when the fighting gets going there's much to enjoy in F.E.A.R. - the good news is that if you can't be bothered trudging around gloomy backdrops for minutes at a time you can always jump into an online battle or single player 'instant action.' Here you'll find the glimmerings of greatness that make F.E.A.R. both enjoyable, thanks to the sheer fun of mowing people down in slow motion, and disappointing for failing to consistently deliver.

SPOnG Score: 63%

F.E.A.R. isn't great. The dreary backdrops that you're forced to wander around get tiresome and the controls are awkward. That said, there's fun to be had with it once the action gets going. If you're an FPS fan and you've played Resistance to death, get it. If either of those doesn't apply to you, save your pennies and go paint-balling.