F.E.A.R. Review

And finally, performance-wise, there are both good and bad news about FEAR. The good news is that the release day patch in this particular case was really a case of "much ado about nothing". (Unlike with Age of Empires 3 for example.) The single-player campaign is very polished as it is, and though there are some rather silly bugs here and there, I have nothing major to report here. It is my subjective opinion that the retail (as well as the patched) version perform the same as the demo. I have played FEAR on two different rigs. On my AMD64 3700+/7800GT/2GB RAM high-end rig, I had nearly all of the graphical settings set to maximum (aside from volumetric lighting, soft shadows and maybe a few more features), no FSAA, and the game was quite playable at 1600x1200. The mid-range rig (AMD64 3200+/6800GT/1.5GB RAM) handled itself slightly worse on 1280, even with the CPU settings at "medium" rather than "high" (which is what was set for the high-end rig).

I love the shadow play in this game.

The drone has bought it.

In any case, know that FEAR is a huge hardware hog, and often it seems like this is unnecessary. I didn't mind this fact much, as I played it on powerful PCs, but I'm sure that a whole bunch of people would like to have seen more optimization being done on the code. Valve showed everyone that it is possible to have an absolutely gorgeous FPS running at rock solid frame rates, so Monolith could've tried harder.

Finally, I should add that the musical score, voice acting, and sound effects are all top-notch, but honestly, did you expect anything less from a horror game of this quality? (It sometimes seems the publishers do. Thankfully, Monolith did not -Mo)

When you are done with the modestly lengthy single-player mode (took me about 12 hours to finish the game at a fairly quick pace), there is always the multiplayer facet. Enough content to justify the price tag.

I thoroughly enjoyed FEAR and I wholeheartedly recommend it to every fan of awesome video games. This one is terrific and no self-respecting PC gamer should miss the opportunity to relish in its many qualities. Just remember again that FEAR is definitely not suited for minors.

Yet again, I thank you, Monolith.