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.
Check out Trepang2. It’s a spiritual successor to FEAR.
I did. There's something about the game that turned me off. The graphics look too 'soft' for a lack of a better word and something about the gameplay was a bit boring. Although I might've turned it off too quickly. I returned it within the 2 hour window.
EDIT: Thinking about it I might've also made the mistake of not playing it on the highest difficulty.
The difficulty scaling in the game is a bit wonky admittedly. Since Trepang2 has a few boss enemies, which isn't as much of a thing in the FEAR games.
Like I said I don't know what exactly turned me off anymore. I don't have a problem with high difficulties. But Trepang 2 looks and feels boring and if I remember correctly the levels I played were mostly if not exclusively horde/wave levels. I distinctly remember being in some sort of office lobby and having to hack servers and every time you start to hack a server a new wave starts. For a horde shooter I need appealing visuals otherwise I'll just get turned off.
That's totally fair. I mean I honestly think Trepang2 while decent for what it was (very small dev team), it did not have the same kind of polish that FEAR had. Lots of things like you mentioned that just felt a little off somehow.