F.E.A.R. Platinum

F.E.A.R. plus its expansion packs Extraction Point, and Perseus Mandate, are some of the most intriguing games I've played. Horror was never a genre of games I could get into, however these games blend horror with great first person action. This game reminds me of a tech demo, but made into a very serviceable game. The story is not ever super clear, but its great piecing it together, and making sense of the world, and the crazy shit happening in it. Voice acting is done very well, and isn't cringy in any way. The atmosphere is just perfect, with the gray, and brown color scheme that just works. Gun fights consists of ricohets, sparks, smoking, intense gun fire that is a beatiful sight to see. However, one thing became pretty apparent, especially during the play throughs of the expansions packs: The padded out campaign The story and action is usually drip feed when walking through the huge levels, and without the ability to run, it makes it slower going through the levels, and backtracking for equipment. Especially in Perseus Mandate where the horror elements are weaker, and the levels are much more stretched out with forgetable characters throughout the way. Other than this complaint, F.E.A.R. Platinum is a great collection, completely DRM free.

Purchased and played again for a second time since its original release way back when. Still one of the best shooters ever released. Perfect slow mo action, great gun play and awesome sound design make this just fun from start to finish. Quite long and locations do get repetitive, but I was having too much fun to care. Shame Fear 2 changed the gameplay to something more fussy, didn't really need to change anything Fear 1 is about as slick a shooters get.

Level Design is a little bit repetitive but despite that the gun fights are highly enjoyable on highest difficulty and graphics are still good for a game that came out more then a decade ago

Beat the game in roughly 5.5 hours but I definitely intend to come back to this. Had a blast from start to finish and the game was pretty easy to get working. Only had to download a single dll file to fix a mouse framerate issue and I was good to go.

I just want to remind people who are really into FPS that the biggest flaw I notice every time I play is the run speed of the character feels somewhat slow, like fast walking pace at best. This was a period in FPS history where many developers made running in FPS games much slower than the earlier FPS games like Quake, Doom, and Half Life. However, in this case they went a bit too far. Although the run speed isn't as bad as Far Cry 1, which is painful... FEAR still feels outdated in this important regard as well. I have much more fun playing FEAR without using slo-mo, so I wish the character just had a basic sprint move or slightly faster running speed in general. I had modded this aspect before but unfortunately the modding tools don't seem available or I can't find them anymore. The modding tools originally came with the disc versions of the game. Also, the gun animations in FEAR are notchy and not smooth like most other FPS games. Especially with the pistol, he muzzle flash is never consistent and appears in different places during the animation which looks pretty bad. I still love the game, but it's nowhere near perfection when these basic elements are lacking that even mediocre FPS games get correct or better. Other reviews will mention the lack of variety in the enemies and locations, which I agree with, but these two issues I mentioned get ignored for some reason.