F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin Comments by Kieron Gillen

"One of the alternative control setups will give you COD4 controls for Killzone2."

Those are the controls I used. Alternate 2 I believe it was. The controls are shit, end of story. The deadzone and acceleration are simply awful, combined with those appaling dualshock/sixxaxis stick it's a chore to play. Combined with the completely stupid idea of having to hold a button to stay in cover (???!!!) it's simply not a game I could suffer to play, which is a shame as the weapons feel good and weighty. Terrible missed opportunity.


Guerilla need to go play some more FPS games to see what constitutes non-shit controls. They fucked up KZ1 controls and did exactly the same thing with KZ2. The resident evil school of making the game more difficult with rubbish controls doesnt work.


"Stop being such a dick."

Just as soon as you do.

"Dear god... "

Uh yeah, that wasn't an entirely serious post :p. For all those who love numbers, this got 78% in PC Gamer. As I say, i'll probably be picking this up when it gets cheaper. It does seem to lack that touch of genius t hat the original had, and going by the demo, the atmosphere has been "exaggerated" to its detriment.

lol - looks like someone is sick of shooters. But thats no reason to give this game such a low score.

5/10?

I liked the demo, but now I'm getting second thoughts...

@makariel
Dont you have our own opinion?

how annoying... the adverts in the article overlay the image viewer.

/walks in

/see's someone actually say KZ2 is somehow better than H3

/walks out

so, you slag off a perfectly well executed game for not being innovative....

not that fair, it's not fear's fault the reviewer is fed up with FPS games.

I don't get it.
The review details a game that is decidedly average and is then given an average score.
What's the beef with everyone?

Good review, I couldn't agree more. I even think 5 was just a wee bit generous, as I think it's a slightly below average game.

Not a surprise. FEAR 1 was a painfully average and hugely overrated corridor shooter, this is more of the same.

It wasn't what people usually mean when they say "corridor shooter", even if it took place in corridors.

Weirdly enough, I think it's one of the most consistently underrated FPS games, to the point where I despair about gamers not recognising how a dev finally concentrated on developing Half-Life 1's finest moments into a full game of its own instead of just doing pretty surroundings, and brought the genre forward by marrying stellar AI to brilliantly open (despite the corridors) level design and absolutely perfect shooting mechanics. FEAR 1 stands proudly next to Half-Life 1, Stalker and the original NoLF on my shelf as one of the best shooters ever. ;)

"Elements of the kinetic combat have been removed, oddly. The close-combat flying kicks have been excised, reduced to the standard weapon-bash." Wrong.

The validity of this review is suspect if statements like the above are made. The ability to do the flying kick and sliding kick are still in the game.

@ Widge, I know, but oh well, I just can't get my head around the fact that R2 was such an uninspiring game, although much fun, and scored a 9, and F.E.A.R. 2 scores a 5 ?!

I don't know, I'm going to buy it anyway I think and see if Eurogamer.net was right once more, but hopefully not, the review does not totally read that way anyway. Furthermore I at least hope the games sucks you in and makes you feel exhausted in a strange kind of way after a while, just as the original game!

I know this game could've been better, Monolith has all the capabilities for it, but this just doesn't sound fair. EG should've scored this higher, or all those other good, but rather uninspiring games lower.

I'd love to read some further explanation from EG self for all of this.

There's nothing to fear. except this shit review!

i fully expect Resident Evil 5 to score 5 as well - cause that is a re-skin of 4, except in the daylight.With solid shooting mechanics. it doesn't matter about the online options eurogamer doesn't take those into account.

The problem is that EG made a rod for their own backs by firstly overhyping KZ2, and then overscoring it with a 9.

They cannot then be seen to go back on their own hype by similarly rating another shooter of equal quality (more in my opinion) that did not received the preposterous amount of gushing hype that KZ2 did.

It's an attempt to save face over the mis-scoring of KZ2. It seems to have backfired though.

The review and the score matter not though. On the strength of the excellent demo, it will sell. It will probably sell as well as KZ2 too...

I think taking a stand against the wave after wave after wave of utterly generic first person shooters is a great thing to do. I could tell from the demo that this was just *yawn* another fps, like we don't have enough of those. It does what it does well, but since you could get the exact same thing for £5 instead of £40 why bother?

And VideoGamer just gave the game a 9/10.

VideoGamer give EVERYTHING 9/10. It's become a running joke for me and a few mates.

Fair play to Gillen for going against the grain. I'm still interested enough from the other reviews (the Edge one is positively evangelical in places) to give it a try, but my expectations have now been tempered slightly.

farticusmaximus - KZ appears to be your life at the moment. Move on, watch a film, get a girl, play a game. Get over it son. People love it, it's reflected in the scores. Deal with it :(

"Shooters nowadays need to meet the bar which was raised by Halo 3. The problem is that's an extraordinarily high bar to reach."

Hahahahahahahahaha....hahahahahahahahahahahahahahaaaaaaaaaaa
! That was good.

Halo > Halo 2 & 3. 3 sucked ass unless you are a racist 14 year old homophobe who is also gay.

@Moonprince

"KZ appears to be your life at the moment."

No. It took about 7 minutes of my life. It was too dull and had such awful controls that I could not bring myself to play the full 10 mins of demo.


"People love it, it's reflected in the scores. Deal with it"

Some people love it, also a hell of a lot of people have meh'd very loudly at it, what with it being a slightly dull and stodgy CoD clone.


The mention of KZ2 in theis thread is fully justified as FEAR 2 is accused of being generic, thus scoring low, when KZ2 is the very epitome of a generic game but scores higher.

Good to see an honest review of FEAR2
Face it people we live in a post- KILLZONE2 world now. The FPS genre and its governing criteria have been irrevocably ripped apart. The ante has been upped. All other FPS games now appear old and last gen

Perhaps I've played too many FPSes, but F.E.A.R. was a spectacular, tense corridor shooting section stretched out over a whole game. Never letting up the tension is bad, people. As is being less colourful than Quake.

Although the "psychological" bits were cool to start with, they got a bit old.

Ah, not played Crysis? What a pity for you.

can open...
worms everywhere...

Well I'm sure Dan was on just one big LYING FEST with his Killzone review. For kicks.

I like Doom.

@Katsumoto
Oh,irony! Oh, no, no, we don't get that here. See, uh, people ski topless here while smoking dope, so irony's not really a, a high priority. We haven't had any irony here since about, uh, '83, when I was the only practitioner of it. And I stopped because I was tired of being stared at.

@JayKwon I think the only explanation would be that its down to the reviewer. If they can stand up and justify their feelings for a title then so be it I guess. Of course we don't have to agree, and unless the score matches our own internal benchmark, we don't!

like this:

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/r_star...

is about 3/10 for me!

Not as good as the expansions then?

FEAR Files 7/10

Ouch

Everything I've seen and read puts FEAR 2 ahead of the original in every way. It's as if Monolith took the list of complaints received in 2005 and addressed them all.

I've been playing the original recently and it's aged quite badly, mostly thanks to the tech. FEAR 2, as a visual upgrade, looks incredible.

How can Killzone 2 receive a 9/10 for being a bog standard shooter with pretty graphics and this sequel receive a 5/10 for doing the exact same thing whilst, at the same time, improving on everything that made the original great in the first place?

This is, hands down, the lowest score FEAR 2 will receive. By quite a margin. Even EDGE scored it 8/10!

Edgelol

Farticus: "Terrible missed opportunity"

Yeah, Guerilla had the chance to please you, and only you... it was in their grasp... then, at the last moment they fucked up. That's £40 they've missed out on - I bet they're really gutted. If only they allowed you to bounce around like demented kangaroo like you can in Halo - that would've sorted it all out...

Low scores bother me less than high scores combined with lenient reviews.

What bothers me though is when someone can't do his job right and does the huge mistake of drawing attention to his failure.
How could he even miss the melee part, and why didn't anyone bother to correct that at EG?
Hope that bothers enough people to stop visiting here for a while.

@Dave52

No, Guerilla had 4 years to make a good game, but instead 'pulled a treyarch' and left us with a slightly naff CoD 4 reskin.

My GOD KIERON! You gave this game a mark out of ten which is NOT the one I agree with, based on my 10 minutes with the game in the form of the demo! YOU TWAT!

Furthermore, other magazines have rated this higher! How could you possibly have not checked this before deciding on your own score? You fool! Next time find out the metacritic average before deciding on your own score!

Also, I haven't bothered to read the Eurogamer marking policy to find out what a 5/10 actually denotes! But I don't need to, because i'm so right, and your opinions based on playing the full game don't match up with my own expectations! Damn you!

Funniest, yet most truthful, comment here. Instead of people bitching about the score, just buy the bloody game for yourself and try it. If you like it, then hey you've got a game you enjoy, if you don't like it then...oh tough really ;)

/see's someone actually say KZ2 is somehow better than H3

/walks out

It is though. :)

Okay, well in MY opinion it is. I'm halfway through the game and am enjoying it more than I ever did Halo 3. Sorry if that offends ;)

@Farticus
Are you complaining about scores again. Or is that only a bad thing when they agree with your opinion?

I thought the demo was very solid and a big improvement on the demo of the first. It felt like a decent console shooter where I found the first to be a PC shooter put on a console with very few concessions to the format. I find it interesting that people like UncleLou didn't like the demo - I remember several old threads where he has defended the original as one of the best FPS ever.

Oh boo-bloody-hoo people. FEAR2 got a 5. Waa waa. EG is biased. I dunno if anyone remembers a few years ago when the shit did hit the proverbial fan with the take on the (as then unnamed) Wii, and the article header proudly displaying Nintendo withdrawing from the market. Even I had to say I thought EG had a bias at that point, it was a horrendous moment that I'm sure the big chaps running EG would rather I didn't bring up - but we've been through this whole 'biased' crap before for far worse than this. I think for a long time EG rightly has been very careful. They wouldn't have authorised this to be published if they felt it wasn't representative of the actual game. You might disagree, but reviews are always opinion. If you disagree, write your own. See that thing called a reader review? Have a go a writing a review yourself.

From the demo, I wasn't sure. It seemed like FEAR. That was its main problem. It didn't feel like it had progressed much - and it's been four years now? - and that's usually not something you take lightly. We've had plenty of good, nay, great FPS blending sci-fi and horror into the mix. From initial impressions (and I will be picking the game up) the biggest problem I felt about this game was that it thought more of the same was good enough, but in truth even at the time FEAR was hardly pushing the boat out in the FPS world. It just added some nice freaky moments - although it must be said you could almost hear the game creaking as it switched between the psychological-head-fuckery and the shooty bits. It had a gimmick that was rather fresh at the time, but it's aged now by four years and isn't quite as peachy as it was then.

It might be the full game is better, but I haven't tried it yet. Probably will soon. I may even enjoy it, I mean, reviews hammered Martian Gothic back in the day for being slow and conffusing and clunky but I got a hell of a lot of enjoyment out of the game - partly down to the story, which was acted out so badly that I was compelled to put up with the crappy mechanics and awful visuals just to see the next truly awful bit of acting and plot development. I do like my horror, even when it's substandard. For me, what I take away from the review is when I get around to the game, to expect more of what I got in FEAR and its two near-stillborn spinoffs. It's a message that I have to be careful. It may not be terrible, but there comes a time in a games life when your ideas and gimmicks wear a little thin... FEAR2 is probably a victim not of being a terrible game, but thinking that more of the same would work in a market that's been bastardising the original in parts for years.

But as I said, FEAR got away with it because it had a clever gimmick. Well, two actually. And even one of those - the time-slowing - was already in full milkage mode at the time. It was never the most well-designed game, or the most pretty, but it had good scary bits and a decent bit of plot. It wouldn't have worked now if this were the original, at a time when even Ubisoft have moved Prince of Persia away from the time-mechanics and every third or fourth game has some semblance of horror and/or sci-fi (that is an over-exaggeration. Just.).

So FEAR2 is more of the same. Hey, if you loved FEAR then I'm sure FEAR2 is worth more to you. Go and enjoy it. The reviewer tries to be objective... seriously, when I play or reader review a horror game I have to lay my prejudices aside after all.

I mean, I see Project Zero 2: Crimson Butterfly as potentially the closest evidence on the planet that there may be a god... and that he was thinking of me when he made one of the best horror games ever...

Farticus: "No, Guerilla had 4 years to make a good game, but instead 'pulled a treyarch' and left us with a slightly naff CoD 4 reskin"

LOL, no further questions your honour...

Again I have to ask, why does the sound design not get a nod?

It was really very good from the demo!!!

VideoGamer give EVERYTHING 9/10. It's become a running joke for me and a few mates.

That Videogamer.com scoring scale in full (from bottom to top):

9 - Really shit
9 - Shit
9 - Kinda shit
9 - Alright
9 - Average
9 - Above average but with many flaws
9 - Well worth picking up
9 - Good stuff
9 - A really good game
9 - Best game ever

Fair play to Gillen for going against the grain. I'm still interested enough from the other reviews (the Edge one is positively evangelical in places) to give it a try, but my expectations have now been tempered slightly.

:(

Monolith, they single handedly killed the AvsP franchise, and now they're peddling crap like this. Give it up already.

"Well, at least I haven't done a gun-turret bit yet."

amen for hating the gun-turret

Monolith are great imo....certainly not peddling crap...I'm looking forward to playing this still

I thought the demo was pretty good so this review score suprised the hell out of me until i saw who wrote the review. Way to give the review to the complete wrong person EG.

Kieron 'Too Cool For The Room' Gillen is only fit to review quirky indie stuff because that's the kind of tat he laps up. It's idiotic having him review a blockbuster action game because he's obviously going to hate it.

so, are EG's reviewers specialists in their respective field? or does everyone get a shot at reviewing everything... even though they are not into it? Would be interested to know. is there a list somewhere? like, the name + what they are responsible for... MMOS so on.?!

I know that I would be really bad at judging something like Flower. I would be good at judging an FPS or an RTS. that's it though... damn it. I am shallow ;)

@DrDamn

"Are you complaining about scores again."

A point here and there is fair enough but 5/10 is quite rediculous. The FEAR 2 demo was technically good, had good artwork, had bags of atmosphere and good controls. The one and only complaint about it was it genericness, yet it's a shinig star of originality compared to killzone, which is one long slog of 'shoot the glowing eyes when they pop out from cover that looks exactly like the last bit of cover, and will look exactly like that for the rest of the game'.

A bit of consistency would be nice. This score does not match the review.

I'd prefer they lose scores altogether to be honest, but some kind of rationalisation would be better than the random number generator they are currently using.


"I find it interesting that people like UncleLou didn't like the demo"

I fully expected Lou to hate the demo with a passion regardless of the franchise's history, because as you said it's a console game, not a PC game ported to a console.

@spudsbuckley

Que? GTA IV? Left 4 Dead?

@derFeef:
I do have my own opinion, but I also had my share of bad experiences when buying a full game after playing the demo. And with FEAR2 my biggest fear was (is) that the parts I couldn't stand about the first one - endless corridors after corridors - would be back with a vengeance. The demo was different, but I can't tell if after this level there wouldn't be 20 or more hours of the same corridor ;-)

So I guess I wait for some more reviews to roll in before buying.