Yes, the graphics are dated but the gameplay is absolute fire and it has the best enemy A.I. of any shooter I've played by a long shot. F.E.A.R. is I dare say a true masterpiece of the shooter genre. I cannot think of a single shooter in the last 10 years that comes even close to how good F.E.A.R. is.
It truly is scandalous how game developers 20 years ago and longer were able to create timeless classics that still hold up today (as long as you can get them to run on modern systems) but game developers of today can't even create decent games with completely overblown budgets.
Comparing the diversity of games of the late 90s and 00s with today is truly soul crushing. The shooter genre alone was incredibly diverse. Call of Duty, Battlefield, Counterstrike, Half Life, F.E.A.R., Unreal Tournament, Quake, Crysis, Max Payne, Painkiller, Dead Space, you name it. And don't get me started on the now almost extinct RTS genre.
It really is painful to look back and see how with the end of the 00s the games industry has turned into one big copying machine trying to recreate one smash hit over and over and shitting out abominations that get worse with every iteration until a new smash hit appears and the cycle repeats.
And if shitty gameplay wasn't bad enough modern games also have abysmal performance and blurry, smudgy, shitty graphics with constant ghosting and other artifacts because every asshole uses Unreal Engine 5.
I just want to play good games. Fuck.
Are the sequels any good? I was thinking of picking up a copy after reading this and saw that they're all pretty heavily discounted on steam right now.
FEAR 2 already leans into the Call of Duty trend of the time. Based on what I've seen in Mandalores review I'm choosing to skip the sequels and only play the addons of the first games.
Based on my hazy recollection from way back the second one is pretty solid, though it was pretty hit and miss if you loved or hated the story. Monolith made both Condemned* games in between the two and you can tell they improved a bit from doing so.
The expansions were not good and the third game was by one of Microsofts random "porting" companies and it shows. Ironically the company who made it would rename themselves and become the devs behind World of Tanks a few years later.
*Condemned 2 still has probably the meatiest and most fun FPS gameplay I've ever played, and its tacked on multiplayer actually manages to use horror as a gameplay element while being incredibly fun. Its a shame that, unlike the first game, its locked to the PS3/360 with zero ports and its emulation is unplayable.
There's 2 addons to the original which are better then FEAR 3, FEAR 2 isn't as good but still good.