Posted on: December 16, 2022
googoogjoob
Games: 617 Reviews: 24
Unfortunate
F.E.A.R. 3 is... unfortunate. It began development as "F.E.A.R. 2"- publisher Vivendi owned the rights to the "F.E.A.R." name and wanted to follow up the success of the first game (made by Monolith), while Monolith (now owned by Warner, a competing publisher) owned the rights to the story and characters, and put what we know as "F.E.A.R. 2" in development as "Project Origin." Eventually Warner secured the name rights, and the in-dev "F.E.A.R. 2," and decided to keep the development going, but to rebrand the game as "F.E.A.R. 3." Are you keeping up? This resulted in a fairly convoluted 5-year dev time, during which the game was reworked multiple times, and the devs subjected to over a year of crunch time. The resulting game is not the worst thing ever, but it's a mess. The devs tried, but under the circumstances, it's doubtful they could've achieved anything great. The story is stock-standard "horror sequel" stuff, ploddingly following up on threads from the first two games without doing anything particularly new. (Embarrassingly, the protagonist of F.E.A.R. 1's name is made, canonically, "Point Man.") Famed horror director John Carpenter was fleetingly involved in development, but left little mark on the finished game, and the original devs at Monolith were only involved in a consulting role. The game is heavily "actionified" compared to the first F.E.A.R., with the (sometimes quite solid) scary sequences drowned out by mindless combat. The publisher mandated the inclusion of trendy co-op features, which are probably the game's most appealing feature- and this GOG release of the game doesn't have co-op anyway. The inclusion of co-op and the general "actionification" of the game result in something shallower and less memorable than F.E.A.R. 1. I'd only recommend this game if you have already played F.E.A.R. 1 and 2 (and expansions), and are absolutely desperate for more.
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