How F.E.A.R.ful...
This is a placeholder; I'll be playing the F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin demo today and my thoughts on it will be here later. Stay tuned.
Edit: The demo begins with a cutscene showing Alma (the creepy ghost girl from the first game) swinging from a tree. Paxton Fettel, the villain from the first game, narrates, saying that Alma has suffered all her life, that it is the nature of men to make monsters, and that, ultimately, monsters destroy their makers.
The scene gets more hellish as he narrates and culminates with the nuclear explosion from the first game. You take control of the character (whether he's the point man or some new guy is unknown,) standing on a desolated street. The sky is blood red in the aftermath of the nuclear bomb going off. Alma skips on the path ahead of you as you go along, and the screen wavers intermittently.
You jump down into a hole and find that the vision was just that; a vision. You're actually outside a crashed helicopter, still having yet to get the fuck out of dodge. A woman; some government operator, tells you to relink with the rest of your team. I'm betting this isn't the Point man.
You go through the ruins and quickly get thrown into action; a Replica soldier (cloned soldiers and a staple enemy of the first F.E.A.R.) below you executes another survivor and saunters off. (I'll start using "I" after this, cause this is me playing, after all, and not you, so your experience might be different)
I went down the hole, grabbed an SMG, and gave the turned Replica a little love tap with the butt of the weapon; he screamed and fell immediately. His friends in the area immediately laid into me with gun fire, and so the first gunfight begins.
Slo-mo is back, but I decided to forego it; it's a silly gimmick and I like the thrill of fast combat anyway. The Replicas and I duked it out in a small library area until I was the only one left standing.
Some observations: The game uses iron-sight aiming now. The graphics haven't significantly changed from the first F.E.A.R., but they're sleeker and more distinct now. The Replicas seem a little stupider; I'm playing on Hard mode and they still go down fairly easily, even without bullet time. Their trademarks still remain; they find cover immediately, talk a lot, and generally like to shoot you.
Oh, and you can now turn over tables and other such objects and use them as impromptu cover.
I continue on; it becomes more evident that I'm in a school, instead of a library. A newscaster on a nearby radio talks about the explosion, but I couldn't make much out. Traveling through the school halls, I find that a lot of doors have been barricaded.
Someone else gets on the line; one Sergeant Fox, who's searching for a crying woman elsewhere in the school. I get the objective to locate him.
I investigate a few classrooms as I go; projectors are still running, there are books everywhere. This place must have been evacuated in a hurry.
Sgt. Fox says that he's found the woman; they've taken her babies.
I turn the hall corner. *Everything* goes bonkers.
Lockers line the corridor, and their doors go flying off as a gust of wind passes. The lights keep flickering; when the hall is lit for a split second, I see blood and corpses everywhere. Everywhere. On the floor, on the ceiling, on the *walls.*
And some of them are still moving.
As I pass through the corridor, ghostly spectres rush at me, their eyes wide and murderous.
I, uh, kill them. Y'know. With bullets. They don't make ghosts like they used to. Oh well, they're still creepy! The music keeps building up to a constant string of crescendos as I kill ghosts, shrink back from the ceiling people, and it's generally very creepy and upsetting.
I go through another door to find Sgt. Fox, yelling "Get away from her, she's mine!" and he's promptly devoured and disintegrated by a Cthulhuian horror.
Yeah, it happened pretty much that abruptly.
I leave the school. When they let Azathoth on the staff, y'know it's all gone to pot. I end up in an underground subway, where I narrowly avoid getting hit by a falling train. The nuke did a *lot* of damage to the place, but strangely enough I can't find any actual people besides clones or ghosts.
And speaking of clones, I quickly get into another gunfight with them (after seeing a vision of Alma. She does that a lot.)
This fight gels a little better for me than the last one; there's more cover around and the Replicas all act pretty sensibly. It stands out cause I finally got to try my slide-kick on one of the test-tube boys.
I go into a maintenance tunnel, which has tastefully gone with "abandoned structure" decor. Very tres-chic. And the flickering lights just complete the experience!
Anyway, Alma jumps on me when I get down the corridor; she's older and nakeder this time, which I'm not quite sure is an improvement over her earlier red dress little girl spiel. I come into a metro corridor, where Alma is wandering around on a bloody ceiling. We wave at each other. There's a bunch of skeletons littering the floor. She's been so busy, the little trooper.
I go up the stairs, where there's another vision of Alma standing near a tree under a red sky. Okay, time out, girl. You're suffocating me here. We need some space from each other, mmkay?
I continue up and end up on the street level; the city's even more desolate here than it was before. Ash is falling from the sky and there's rubble everywhere. And clones. They mention dropping "power armor," which inevitably makes me think of Fallout. Damn you, Fallout.
We come to fisticuffs, encountering my first grenade. It fails to kill me, probably because it's really big and really green and it glows like a christmas tree. I crouch in the subway entrance like a big, armored, well-armed frog and we fight for a while. The Replicas really are smart; they don't just charge down into my chokepoint; they wait for me to come out to THEM, which I do, and they promptly send me running back down again. I wait a while. They wait a while. Tired of waiting, I walk up again.
I kill another Replica and a radio operator nearby says that the powered armor drops are inbound; this implies to me that the Replicas have much, much more logistical support than I gave them credit for. They're operating like an army here. I also find out around here that the game has, oddly enough, done away with weapon limits; I can use four heavy weapons now, whereas in F.E.A.R. I could only handle two. This could be just a demo thing, though.
I grab a sniper rifle; a red laser sight alerts me to an enemy sniper, much like how it works in Half-Life 2. I really gotta hand it to these evil overlord video game factions in always letting me know when I'm being marked by a sharpshooter. They're so polite. The sniper drops me three times before I'm able to blow up his head.
The city is *really* blown up. A screeching noise echoes throughout the city and a bunch of replicas start attacking. Explosions light up ahead of me and I think I'm about to meet the powered armor.
Another sniper takes a potshot at me, but I've grown wise to their ways and kill him. The Replicas are pretty relentless here; they keep moving and firing, weaving between cars, but I eventually win out. I take a moment to look around, particularly at a theater marque, when I notice another sniper grinning at me from behind the red lettering. This understandably takes me by surprise, but I narrowly avoid being killed and kill him myself. Bonus points for theatrics, though! Better luck next time, mack.
More replicas. I find a missile launcher and am forced to swap a gun, which implies that four is indeed the limit on heavy weapons.
I begin to suspect that instead of fighting clones in narrow laboratory corridors I am now going to fight clones in ruined streets, cause there seems to be no end to these guys.
I try to enter the theater and am immediately seen off by some evil person in massive armor; the powered armor, I'm thinking. He wields a pretty unpleasant gun and kills me in short order.
A note on the score: Very much the same as F.E.A.R., making use of orchestral dramatic tone, interspersed with creepy vocals. It's different from F.E.A.R. only in that it's not the same music.
Anyway, I waste the powered armor with the missile launcher, which sent him packing. I go into the theater. As in all horror flicks, the projector is still running. Unlike in horror flicks, I see a vision of the same tree again through the big hole in the wall. When I try to leave, Alma takes offense and tosses me back into the theater. I think she just wanted to touch me, though and then mask it with her more horrible qualities, cause I know she can't get enough of me.
The government operator (starting to think she's an agent like me) says we need to meet at th- A commercial jet flies overhead, flaming at the engines, and crashes out of sight, making the whole city shake.
Huh. Okay.
I keep going and find some force-fielded contraption squatting in the middle of the street. Oh. THIS is the powered armor. The replicas haven't found it yet, so I nab it. I'm reminded of Chronicles of Riddick in that I'm in a huge badass walking tank and that there are plenty of dudes ahead for me to kill.
I'm not disappointed. The dudes come, the dudes die.
However, unlike in Escape From Butcher Bay the dudes here are much, much smarter and they easily make my walking tank cry "uncle!" until it self-repairs. The battle continues as I make smaller walking tanks explode and much smaller walking people turn into red mist. I start to wonder if the Replicas LIVED in this city before this all happened, because they are everywhere.
Anyway, I start to fight another powered armor-
F.E.A.R.
PROJECT ORIGIN
Oh, balls, the demo's over.
Ah well, I liked it. I wanna buy the actual thing now, so this demo's done it's job. I'm a bit concerned in that it relies too heavily on the standard F.E.A.R. formula, which was what made the two expansion packs so horribly bad, but unlike the expansion packs this has a flavor and atmosphere that truly reminds you of that game.
Oh, and it moves just a *little* too fast, whereas F.E.A.R. paced itself exquisitely.
Metroid approves!
Edit: The demo begins with a cutscene showing Alma (the creepy ghost girl from the first game) swinging from a tree. Paxton Fettel, the villain from the first game, narrates, saying that Alma has suffered all her life, that it is the nature of men to make monsters, and that, ultimately, monsters destroy their makers.
The scene gets more hellish as he narrates and culminates with the nuclear explosion from the first game. You take control of the character (whether he's the point man or some new guy is unknown,) standing on a desolated street. The sky is blood red in the aftermath of the nuclear bomb going off. Alma skips on the path ahead of you as you go along, and the screen wavers intermittently.
You jump down into a hole and find that the vision was just that; a vision. You're actually outside a crashed helicopter, still having yet to get the fuck out of dodge. A woman; some government operator, tells you to relink with the rest of your team. I'm betting this isn't the Point man.
You go through the ruins and quickly get thrown into action; a Replica soldier (cloned soldiers and a staple enemy of the first F.E.A.R.) below you executes another survivor and saunters off. (I'll start using "I" after this, cause this is me playing, after all, and not you, so your experience might be different)
I went down the hole, grabbed an SMG, and gave the turned Replica a little love tap with the butt of the weapon; he screamed and fell immediately. His friends in the area immediately laid into me with gun fire, and so the first gunfight begins.
Slo-mo is back, but I decided to forego it; it's a silly gimmick and I like the thrill of fast combat anyway. The Replicas and I duked it out in a small library area until I was the only one left standing.
Some observations: The game uses iron-sight aiming now. The graphics haven't significantly changed from the first F.E.A.R., but they're sleeker and more distinct now. The Replicas seem a little stupider; I'm playing on Hard mode and they still go down fairly easily, even without bullet time. Their trademarks still remain; they find cover immediately, talk a lot, and generally like to shoot you.
Oh, and you can now turn over tables and other such objects and use them as impromptu cover.
I continue on; it becomes more evident that I'm in a school, instead of a library. A newscaster on a nearby radio talks about the explosion, but I couldn't make much out. Traveling through the school halls, I find that a lot of doors have been barricaded.
Someone else gets on the line; one Sergeant Fox, who's searching for a crying woman elsewhere in the school. I get the objective to locate him.
I investigate a few classrooms as I go; projectors are still running, there are books everywhere. This place must have been evacuated in a hurry.
Sgt. Fox says that he's found the woman; they've taken her babies.
I turn the hall corner. *Everything* goes bonkers.
Lockers line the corridor, and their doors go flying off as a gust of wind passes. The lights keep flickering; when the hall is lit for a split second, I see blood and corpses everywhere. Everywhere. On the floor, on the ceiling, on the *walls.*
And some of them are still moving.
As I pass through the corridor, ghostly spectres rush at me, their eyes wide and murderous.
I, uh, kill them. Y'know. With bullets. They don't make ghosts like they used to. Oh well, they're still creepy! The music keeps building up to a constant string of crescendos as I kill ghosts, shrink back from the ceiling people, and it's generally very creepy and upsetting.
I go through another door to find Sgt. Fox, yelling "Get away from her, she's mine!" and he's promptly devoured and disintegrated by a Cthulhuian horror.
Yeah, it happened pretty much that abruptly.
I leave the school. When they let Azathoth on the staff, y'know it's all gone to pot. I end up in an underground subway, where I narrowly avoid getting hit by a falling train. The nuke did a *lot* of damage to the place, but strangely enough I can't find any actual people besides clones or ghosts.
And speaking of clones, I quickly get into another gunfight with them (after seeing a vision of Alma. She does that a lot.)
This fight gels a little better for me than the last one; there's more cover around and the Replicas all act pretty sensibly. It stands out cause I finally got to try my slide-kick on one of the test-tube boys.
I go into a maintenance tunnel, which has tastefully gone with "abandoned structure" decor. Very tres-chic. And the flickering lights just complete the experience!
Anyway, Alma jumps on me when I get down the corridor; she's older and nakeder this time, which I'm not quite sure is an improvement over her earlier red dress little girl spiel. I come into a metro corridor, where Alma is wandering around on a bloody ceiling. We wave at each other. There's a bunch of skeletons littering the floor. She's been so busy, the little trooper.
I go up the stairs, where there's another vision of Alma standing near a tree under a red sky. Okay, time out, girl. You're suffocating me here. We need some space from each other, mmkay?
I continue up and end up on the street level; the city's even more desolate here than it was before. Ash is falling from the sky and there's rubble everywhere. And clones. They mention dropping "power armor," which inevitably makes me think of Fallout. Damn you, Fallout.
We come to fisticuffs, encountering my first grenade. It fails to kill me, probably because it's really big and really green and it glows like a christmas tree. I crouch in the subway entrance like a big, armored, well-armed frog and we fight for a while. The Replicas really are smart; they don't just charge down into my chokepoint; they wait for me to come out to THEM, which I do, and they promptly send me running back down again. I wait a while. They wait a while. Tired of waiting, I walk up again.
I kill another Replica and a radio operator nearby says that the powered armor drops are inbound; this implies to me that the Replicas have much, much more logistical support than I gave them credit for. They're operating like an army here. I also find out around here that the game has, oddly enough, done away with weapon limits; I can use four heavy weapons now, whereas in F.E.A.R. I could only handle two. This could be just a demo thing, though.
I grab a sniper rifle; a red laser sight alerts me to an enemy sniper, much like how it works in Half-Life 2. I really gotta hand it to these evil overlord video game factions in always letting me know when I'm being marked by a sharpshooter. They're so polite. The sniper drops me three times before I'm able to blow up his head.
The city is *really* blown up. A screeching noise echoes throughout the city and a bunch of replicas start attacking. Explosions light up ahead of me and I think I'm about to meet the powered armor.
Another sniper takes a potshot at me, but I've grown wise to their ways and kill him. The Replicas are pretty relentless here; they keep moving and firing, weaving between cars, but I eventually win out. I take a moment to look around, particularly at a theater marque, when I notice another sniper grinning at me from behind the red lettering. This understandably takes me by surprise, but I narrowly avoid being killed and kill him myself. Bonus points for theatrics, though! Better luck next time, mack.
More replicas. I find a missile launcher and am forced to swap a gun, which implies that four is indeed the limit on heavy weapons.
I begin to suspect that instead of fighting clones in narrow laboratory corridors I am now going to fight clones in ruined streets, cause there seems to be no end to these guys.
I try to enter the theater and am immediately seen off by some evil person in massive armor; the powered armor, I'm thinking. He wields a pretty unpleasant gun and kills me in short order.
A note on the score: Very much the same as F.E.A.R., making use of orchestral dramatic tone, interspersed with creepy vocals. It's different from F.E.A.R. only in that it's not the same music.
Anyway, I waste the powered armor with the missile launcher, which sent him packing. I go into the theater. As in all horror flicks, the projector is still running. Unlike in horror flicks, I see a vision of the same tree again through the big hole in the wall. When I try to leave, Alma takes offense and tosses me back into the theater. I think she just wanted to touch me, though and then mask it with her more horrible qualities, cause I know she can't get enough of me.
The government operator (starting to think she's an agent like me) says we need to meet at th- A commercial jet flies overhead, flaming at the engines, and crashes out of sight, making the whole city shake.
Huh. Okay.
I keep going and find some force-fielded contraption squatting in the middle of the street. Oh. THIS is the powered armor. The replicas haven't found it yet, so I nab it. I'm reminded of Chronicles of Riddick in that I'm in a huge badass walking tank and that there are plenty of dudes ahead for me to kill.
I'm not disappointed. The dudes come, the dudes die.
However, unlike in Escape From Butcher Bay the dudes here are much, much smarter and they easily make my walking tank cry "uncle!" until it self-repairs. The battle continues as I make smaller walking tanks explode and much smaller walking people turn into red mist. I start to wonder if the Replicas LIVED in this city before this all happened, because they are everywhere.
Anyway, I start to fight another powered armor-
F.E.A.R.
PROJECT ORIGIN
Oh, balls, the demo's over.
Ah well, I liked it. I wanna buy the actual thing now, so this demo's done it's job. I'm a bit concerned in that it relies too heavily on the standard F.E.A.R. formula, which was what made the two expansion packs so horribly bad, but unlike the expansion packs this has a flavor and atmosphere that truly reminds you of that game.
Oh, and it moves just a *little* too fast, whereas F.E.A.R. paced itself exquisitely.
Metroid approves!