Maplassie's F.E.A.R 2 Project Origin Review/Rant

Maplassie

AK47 Pew Pew
Well I started off liking this game tremendously. The new visuals look better, the game feels alot smoother, Surround sound is also spot on with my speaker setup, and it's rather immersive.

While the game seemed to be pretty spooky at first, it get's old really really quickly, and rather predictable aswell.
But For some apparant reason the ghosts in the game give me the heeby geebies, dunno why but I get goosebumps whenever they appear, dunno if its the sounds they make, but it happens.

Play it for a little while and the issues start creeping up. The level design is rather bland, and some of the set pieces looks like they were given no thought. For instance one room you enter is supposed to be a laundry room, has some washingmachines and stuff, but go down the hall and you go through this huge generator room, where the only way you can exit it is through a hole in the floor, no doors in either rooms or anything. So who builds a generator and laundry room that can only be accessed by blowing up a wall? This might seem like nitpicking, but as a leveldesigner (COD4,UT3) I take notice of these things rather quickly. SO I got the feeling all to often that they did a path layout for a player to progress through then just filled it with arb items to make it look detailed. Look some of the set pieces are amazing, specially near the end, wont include spoilers here but there are some really well thought out spots, but they are few and far between.

BAD Monolith, very bad Monolith!

Story wise What I found lacking was that the game felt like it had no real "drive", no attachment to anything but to just progress and shoot things. I remember playing the first F.E.A.R and it actually felt like you were part of a TEAM, eventhough you ventured alone 99% of the time, and the story or mission had drive, it felt like you had a purpose, same (for me anyways) can not be said with F.E.A.R 2.

F.E.A.R 1, and even extraction point (persius mandate also rather sucked) had some replay value, it was fun trying it again, Not so with Project Origin.

While I really liked the game when I just started it, it really just started falling appart halfway through. It's more of the same, and feels more like another expansion created as a quick cash in, than an outright new installment. Problem is with a game like this that has so many prequels, if you change it to much, ppl say that it's to different from the others, change it to little and the ppl say its more of the same.

The only reason this game is still spinning on my HDD platters using up a delicious 12GB of space, is cause I am waiting to try the multiplayer a bit.

It's DEFINITELY not worth the price, and DEFINITELY not a worthy successor.
 
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I was thinking of getting it since I won a free game here...... now I'm thinking Warhammer Dawn of War II. :)

Good review Maps. :cool:
 
Yeah thanks for the review, Maplassie. From a linguistic perspective perhaps not very good but in terms of content you covered a lot of interesting points. The stuff about the level design was great to hear, good work on drawing from your own interests/expertise/experience.

The conclusion is exactly what I wanted to know as a South African considering buying this game... Is it worth the five buffalo?

One suggestion/question: Mention the Steam-based install. Was it hard? Did it take long for it to authenticate the files against the Steam servers after the install like Valve's games do?
 
Well I started off liking this game tremendously. The new visuals look better, the game feels alot smoother, Surround sound is also spot on with my speaker setup, and it's rather immersive.

While the game seemed to be pretty spooky at first, it get's old really really quickly, and rather predictable aswell.
But For some apparant reason the ghosts in the game give me the heeby geebies, dunno why but I get goosebumps whenever they appear, dunno if its the sounds they make, but it happens.

Play it for a little while and the issues start creeping up. The level design is rather bland, and some of the set pieces looks like they were given no thought. For instance one room you enter is supposed to be a laundry room, has some washingmachines and stuff, but go down the hall and you go through this huge generator room, where the only way you can exit it is through a hole in the floor, no doors in either rooms or anything. So who builds a generator and laundry room that can only be accessed by blowing up a wall? This might seem like nitpicking, but as a leveldesigner (COD4,UT3) I take notice of these things rather quickly. SO I got the feeling all to often that they did a path layout for a player to progress through then just filled it with arb items to make it look detailed. Look some of the set pieces are amazing, specially near the end, wont include spoilers here but there are some really well thought out spots, but they are few and far between.

BAD Monolith, very bad Monolith!

Story wise What I found lacking was that the game felt like it had no real "drive", no attachment to anything but to just progress and shoot things. I remember playing the first F.E.A.R and it actually felt like you were part of a TEAM, eventhough you ventured alone 99% of the time, and the story or mission had drive, it felt like you had a purpose, same (for me anyways) can not be said with F.E.A.R 2.

F.E.A.R 1, and even extraction point (persius mandate also rather sucked) had some replay value, it was fun trying it again, Not so with Project Origin.

While I really liked the game when I just started it, it really just started falling appart halfway through. It's more of the same, and feels more like another expansion created as a quick cash in, than an outright new installment. Problem is with a game like this that has so many prequels, if you change it to much, ppl say that it's to different from the others, change it to little and the ppl say its more of the same.

The only reason this game is still spinning on my HDD platters using up a delicious 12GB of space, is cause I am waiting to try the multiplayer a bit.

It's DEFINITELY not worth the price, and DEFINITELY not a worthy successor.

so how is this VS dead space ?,


feeling a told you so coming up.....told you so its not worth to spend odd R500 on a play-once-you-might-crap-your-pants...lol :D
 
I can't really compare dead space to F.E.A.R, but if you want scary, Rather stay with Dead Space.

If you want F.E.A.R, then um, go for F.E.A.R. LOL
 
I suppose it all depends what scares you more, I mean I'm alot more scared of ghosts and stuff alot more than alien zombies, don't get me wrong, Dead Space is very scary, but i just get alot more scared with ghosts and stuff cos that crap is real! he he
 
In case anyone's interested, AWX has F.E.A.R. PC for R415. I'll post in the bargain thread as well if it's not in there already.
 
linky?
Also, is that FEAR 1 or FEAR 2? It seems expensive if it is FEAR 1 (which is what it looks like atm).

EDIT: Ok, saw your post in the bargain thread, it is FEAR 2 after all. Thanks guy. :)
 
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