F.E.A.R 2: Project Origin Hands-On Preview

Corridor Shooter

Like most games, the original F.E.A.R was a game with both good and bad parts to it. Unlike most games though, these flaws and fineries weren’t just little splits in the gameplay, but hugely obvious divides in the very structure of the experience. To say that F.E.A.R was a game of two halves is a massive understatement.

On the one hand, F.E.A.R was a shooter and it had tonnes of very samey office-based levels that saw you tearing up and down through rows of cubicles like a postal worker with a chip on his shoulder. The levels then progressed into the usual sci-fi bent, with lasers and nailguns becoming more common as you carried on. Just another shooter.

On the other hand though, F.E.A.R was a horror game in the same vein as Monolith’s later (and much scarier) title Condemned. There was the iconic little girl in the red dress who jumped out at you just like they do in those Japanese movies that were so fashionable at the time.


The violence and the horror worked individually, but Monolith’s main problem was finding a way to adhere the two together. Levels were either action orientated or they were scary and never the twain did meet.

Monolith recognised that quickly though, admitting so in a presentation that we got treated too before our hands-on time and promising that the sequel will be different. The focus is now much more on mixing the horror and violence together, creating an on-going series of peaks and lulls not entirely dissimilar to that generated in Left 4 Dead.

Central to this attempt to blend the two themes of gunplay and gore is Alma herself, who has...evolved since the last game. While the original F.E.A.R saw Alma take on either the form of a disarming child or the more aggressively sexual visage of a nude teen, F.E.A.R 2 is upping the game a bit.

Alma has changed and grown more powerful in the interim and can now attack you head on if she wishes. She can conjure new foes and appear in new, deeply unsettling guises. She’ll even attack you in ways you might not expect, making you hallucinate or see things as you work through some levels.


The levels themselves have been changed too and Monolith has exchanged the old office-based levels for lots of more open, outside battlefields. The whole city has been hit by the brunt of Alma’s nuclear hatred and as a result there’s a whole city for you to run through. It’s not free-roaming, but it does give players a lot more to explore and exploit as they try to complete their mission and escape.

The new locations that make up F.E.A.R 2: Project Origin are no longer boring trudges through all too familiar, identikit office blocks. Now there are devastated cafes and metro stations for you to clamber through – residential areas and stretches of open urban landscape that have been wracked and wrecked by Alma’s wrath. In some places you can actually see the sky.

Getting through those streets won’t be easy though – there’s still ATC forces and worse between you and your objectives. A hell of a lot worse.

Luckily, you’ve got a few advantages up your sleeve to help even the odds against your opponents...