FEAR demo · Tue Aug 9, 09:39 AM

Here were the awesome bits:

• The soundtrack was very well matched to the action, and spooky as hell in the right spots.
• The guns were really a blast (ha, ha) to work with. The shotgun really gives the impression of sending a serious load of buckshot down the hallway, the submachinegun sprays like…well…like really cool submachineguns should spray, the particle beam weapon zooms in and the field of view gets blurry at the distances different from the distance of your focal point (!), hand grenades bounce like they should…and so on. In a nod to realism, they only let you have three weapons at a time. Want to pick up that combat shotty? Better drop the pistol. Want to pick up the particle beam? Got to decide whether to drop the SMG, the shotgun, or the gauss rifle. Aiiii…decisions, decisions.
• The graphics were super-detailed, the lighting is excellent (though I jumped more than once at my own shadow), muzzle flashes are realistic, and firefights fill small rooms and hallways with drifiting clouds of smoke.
• The AI was good—bad guys were taking cover and shooting from behind it, tossing grenades, and flanking. It was still a bit dumber than I’d like (when are games going to have real fire and maneuver techniques, with bad guys low-crawling up to your position?), but well-improved over most other entries in the FPS genre.
• The atmosphere and story were fun, if spooky. I bought Doom 3 when it came out, for the excellent graphics (which were indeed spiffy) and the creepy atmosphere (which was indeed spooky), but unfortunately the plot (...) and implementation (oh look, a demon is hiding under this metal floor panel I just walked over) were so poor they overwhelmed the good parts. There seems to be no danger of that here.
• The slow-motion implementation was insanely fun. You hit the slow-mo key and all sounds downshift, all the bad guys get really slow, you get a bit slower with controls acting appropriately, objects get a chromatic halo, and you can lay a serious hurting down on the enemy before your timer runs out. Bullets fired at you make that cool little trail in the air, and the particle weapon and hand grenade are even more fun in slow-mo. When the timer does run out, you get a second of sound upshifting exactly right, and your motion ramps up the curve to where it is normally in a way that makes it seem real. Not that I’ve spent a lot of time living in Matrix time, I guess, but it seems to work exactly the way you’d expect it to work. And it rules.

Supposedly the game will have multiplayer, and it’s allegedly pretty fun, but I haven’t seen any of it, nor do I really care that much…I like the single-player mode of most games, though Unreal Tournament is fun enough for me to bother playing MP with every now and then.
Here’s a cool screenshot, and a couple of quotes:
IGN F.E.A.R. Preview : “I just got back from a F.E.A.R. hands-on press event, and I think I have to go change my shorts. After playing the single-player game, I can, without a doubt, say that F.E.A.R. has just taken a place as one of my top most wanted games on any system….From what I played today, I’m convinced F.E.A.R. is already going to be one of the best game I’m going to play at this year’s E3, and the show hasn’t even “officially” opened yet. I was super impressed with the demo, and have nothing bad to say about it; I just want to play more.”
Gamespot Preview : “G4’s G-Phoria awards show played host to a great number of game demos this evening, chief among them—in our minds at least—a single-player demo version of F.E.A.R., the supernaturally tinged, hyperkinetic first-person shooter from Matrix Online developer Monolith….Indications after this admittedly brief demo are that the final game should offer a hard-hitting, unique shooting experience that we’re excited to see more of.”

So, to sum up, I recommend trying out the demo, if your system will handle it (system req: P4 1.7GHz+, 512MB RAM, 64MB GeForce 4 Ti or ATI Radeon 9600 or equivalent, with hardware T&L and pixel shader support). Then you can decide for yourself .

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