F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin

Little girls just don’t scare us anymore. Alma, you can pop up all over the place like a Whack-A-Mole, you can lurch down blood-drenched corridors, or you can get in our face for a quicktime event…but we’re just not spooked. At least F.E.A.R. 2 still delivers competent first-person combat, but this series has lost a bit of its magic.

If you remember the bang that F.E.A.R. ended with, this game starts 30 minutes prior to that and is played from the perspective of a brand-new character, a commando named Michael Becket. As with the first game, there’s story stuff going on, but it’s missable. Have no guilt about wanting this game to hurry up with the exposition (which centers on some trippy psychic-powers research and an evil corporation flattening an entire city) and get back to trying to give you a fright in between some wicked slo-mo combat. After all, when F.E.A.R. first came out on PCs in 2005, it scared the holy hell out of us with a perfectly honed balance of terror and tense combat against really, really smart enemies.

But in F.E.A.R. 2, the fear is supposed to come from the liberal application of blood, various demon-like beasts getting in your face…and not much else. A disappointment for sure, and one that leaves only the combat to drive the game. Fortunately, F.E.A.R. 2 knows how to set up some pretty intense firefights.

As before, psychic powers (or in this case, implants) mean you can briefly slow down time, which is a perfect way to generate some glorious moments. Our favorite: We had to advance across open ground in a ruined building, but were pinned down. We hit Y to activate slo-mo, leapt over a huge gap, and while floating sedately through the air, we hit one enemy in the face with our shotgun. After landing, we had enough juice left to zip up to the flank of the other enemy as he yelped “heee’s sooo faaasst!” at half-speed…until we detonated him into a cloud of gore that hung in the air. Saucy!

F.E.A.R. 2 also takes a break from the never-ending series of office and factory hallways that made the first game drag. This time, you’ll blast through the nuked-out remains of a city and then barrel through the creepiest part of the game, an elementary school. Kids are untouched — as they should be — but it’s downright unnerving to see gore splashed all over the primary colors of a classroom. The fresh scenery is welcome, but the game still leaves you plodding down one too many hallways. At least it takes a break from the FPS-ing now and again to give you a few exhilarating rides. The mission where you clamber into a mech and go on a rampage is a blast, and we’ll give F.E.A.R. 2 this: It has the best get-behind-the-turret-and-fend-off-the-hordes sequence we’ve played in a very long time.

It also brings some pretty decent multiplayer. Along with the customary deathmatch, team deathmatch, and bomb modes, we got hooked on its two off-the-beaten-path modes. Armored Front is slower-paced and more strategic, setting you loose to capture five control points in a certain order, but Blitz is a riot. It’s essentially speed CTF on small, tight maps where flag carriers can score so quickly that a team can rack up 10-plus captures in a few minutes. Still, there’s no game-changing going on here — plenty of well-designed competence, but nothing that’s likely to tear Call of Duty or Halo loyalists away from their stomping grounds.

And that’s really how we feel about F.E.A.R. 2 as a whole. It’s here if you want to play it, and it’s well done in lots of ways. But it feels a lot like the last 007 movie: plenty of fun, but nowhere near as awesome as we hoped it’d be.