F.E.A.R. Expansions

Just beat FEAR, are the expansions worth it or are they just as bad as I hear the sequels are?

They're both fun imo

On the same level as the first game?

they're good but not quite as good, not shit like the sequels

EP is OK, avoid PM. It sucks they went for the cliffhanger route in the game and expansions. Cardinal sin for me is any game/film/TV show/book etc. that is intended to be a series but doesn't end the first entry in a nice complete way. Just in case they never do get to make sequels.

Extraction Point is pretty good, I think spookier than the base. Perseus Mandate is pretty mediocre, but pits you against other things that can move as fast as you in bullet time. Honestly EP and PM > FEAR2/3 anyways.

Extraction point is more of the same, pretty low effort, just a baseline continuation of the base game on every level.
Perseus Mandate shook things up and has more meat to it, but some purists don't like it for those reasons. You don't have to like it, but avoiding it entirely is just unreasonable.

They're terrible, and even FEAR2 is better than them in every way.

The boss things in PM are garbage goddamn bulletsponges, and you can't even slow-mo them to fill them with lead. Though the speed mission things it adds and the rest of the campaign is ok.

EP was just the same game with an extra 2 or 3 weapons. It had very similar map layouts, though was spoopier than the base game. I found the final segment quite a bit spoopy. I might be biased though, as I recall EP having lots of segments with water or in sewers, and water horror truly terrifies me.

I only started playing the FEAR franchise this year, and am currently finishing off PM right now. It's a step down in terms of writing; there's very little horror and the characters are uninteresting. For some reason the 2 guys in your squad are generic action heroes and just shrug all the weird shit off. It does have enemies that attacked you in a very strange manner, and will spook you insanely the first time, but after that you easily recognise their trap and can avoid it save for 2 or 3 mandatory appearances.
One of the best parts of PM is the new weapons added. It adds a grenade launcher, which is quite handy, but lacking in ammo, and an advanced rifle, which is more or less the ASP Rifle with extra damage and more ammo capacity. The Advanced Rifle is amazing, though a bit too easy to use as a crutch to beat the game.

I've played 2 and 3 before EP and PM and can say that the expansions are better than those, however 3 has some fantastic gunplay, and 2 is fun as it's own game (as the story was just slapped on afterwards due to management), so don't skip any of the 5 installments.

FEAR Online can suck my dick in terms of grind, but apparently there are some plot points in the game. I never played enough to find them.

Oh, and despite Monolith stating that the two expansions are non-canon, there isn't truly much contradiction between all of the titles, and the expansions have better stories.

I always saw FEAR 2 as a twist on Perseus' and FEAR 3 as a cheap imitation of Extraction's plot. After all is said and done, I think the expansions do a better follow up on the plot than the sequels.

Fear expansions are non canon if you care about that. They're good though. Basically more FEAR and that's good, no?

Agreed.

I am thoroughly disappointed with Fear 2 and 3. Shame such a cool game deserved better

EP is more of the base game with some little things added in, like melee bashing doors open to get the drop. It also has the best shootout in the series (church offices).
PM tried to add more but most of its new additions aren't very good. The new weapons aren't as cool as the ones from either the base game or EP, the new enemies are lamer than the replicas, and for some reason it has lower res textures and none of the dynamic lighting that made FEAR/EP so good.

Extraction Point is better than the main game

Perseus Mandate starts kinda shit then gets a bit better

Fear 2 is cool because you can fugg Alma.

I'm in the middle of FEAR now, and I was hoping to hear the expansions would somehow salvage it.

It's just so generic. Wander around an office block, run into Generic Special Forces Soldier group #5912, shoot them while spamming medkits that work instantly for some reason, see a predictable, decidedly not-scary hallucination of a little girl, repeat 400 times.

I mean, for comparison, creeping through a dark sector at night in Jagged Alliance 2 trying to find the enemy patrol before they found me was scarier/more tense than anything I've seen in this game.

The shooting itself isn't terrible, and there finally seems to be getting to be a bit of enemy variety, so I'll probably stick with it till the end, but at least it sounds like the expansions/sequels aren't worth the bother.

Are you using the shotgun?
Do you know how the melee works?
Do you know the grenades explode on impact?

I just beat FEAR for the first time the other day and I somewhat agree. The game isn't revolutionary, but the AI being smarter than your average shooter AI is a plus. I played on the hardest difficulty and I can't really say the game was all that hard. Everything was easily cheesed and most of my deaths were from trying to have fun.

Yeah, the shotgun's good fun. Much better than that crappy SMG.

Melee - I know about the special moves, but rarely find it useful. Pistols akimbo seem to handle anything I'd be likely to melee, like random grunts.

Grenades - didn't know that, no. I tend to toss them and then duck back into cover. I'm not really having an issue with the difficulty either way, and I have it on the highest level.

Like said, the AI being a little smarter than average is a plus - though honestly, it seemed overhyped in that regard. FPS isn't my main genre, but are other contemporary ones that much more stupid? It just seemed about what I'd expect, as opposed to the 'laughably stupid' of older shit like Goldeneye.

Anyway, it's just not for me I guess. I was hoping for a genuinely creepy atmosphere with good shooting. The shooting was okay I suppose, but the atmosphere was just too bland.

I enjoyed FEAR 2 and 3, not nearly as much as 1 and 3 is full of XP ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED bullshit but they might be worth a pirate.

F2 is notable as well for being one of the only games in existence with female on male rape.

I understand that cheesing medkits is technically possible and that is a problem in game design, but you are a giant shitmonkey for playing it that way.

Try without slomo and see if you like it more. It gets pretty hectic.

F.E.A.R. is massively overrated and only liked because it's over 10 years old. If it came out today it would be panned by everyone for the turd it is.

It was a low-effort cash-in done by a different team because the original team was tied up with FEAR 2 at that point. If you found it meatier you have absolutely shit taste. What a fucking waste of digits.

nah, thanks for posting tho

Why couldn't Monolith put in the same amount of effort into Fear 1 & 2 as they put into AVP2 ?

But they did put as much effort into FEAR 1 as they did AVP2.

No One Lives Forever and later FEARs are where they aimed lower.

first expansion, everything else is shite

Expansions are worth it if you liked F.E.A.R., the general consensus is that Extraction Point is better than Perseus Mandate but I'd say both are going to be enjoyable. It's really just more of the same with less subtle horror and more Steve Blum, also meleeing open doors and turret-grenades.
It's worth pirating 2 to see for yourself where it went wrong and to experience the only two good parts it has (the School and the ending), it's pretty much F.E.A.R. but consolised. 3 is a terrible F.E.A.R. game but sort of halfway enjoyable if you treat it as a weird coop game with no relation to the original series.

what he meant to point out is you can shoot them in slo-mo to detonate them whenever mid throw, same with enemy thrown grenades.

Well yes, although a lot of improvements in that regard have been made it took fucking years for many bot makers to get to that state. It's kind of a more pitiful scenario of Crysis, it's possible to achieve and do more but most devs opt out of that for using lesser methods that's "good enough" or simple convenience like the tree maker in the latest Unreal engine. The fact the AI is actually gimped through the campaign from scripted sequences doesn't help.

That said some new methods of making AI for games have come out and the results are genuinely impressive, but that still takes work that most devs just don't seem to want to put in.

*The fact the current modern AI is actually gimped through the campaign from scripted sequences doesn't help.

I wish monolith made shooters again. I bet the people who thought up crazy shit like blood and shogo are gone though and now its just warner bros making lord of the rings games.

The storylines are lackluster and they are non canon but the game play is solid and fun. Also seconding EP as spoppiest


cod kiddos go back to reddit

avp2 was wayyyy worse than avp 2000

Didn't mean to be a (1) and done OP, thought this thread would die after a day

Tall order but are there any games that have comparable game-play to FEAR, it's expansions or the 2 Condemned games?

I know its hard for someone under the age of 15 to understand that there were FPS games much better than FEAR, so ill let that slide. FEAR would have been much better before the QA fags said the AI was too hard for them. The AI in fear was toned down. The level design is smart like in the Original half life, but is much more linear due to the massive amount of scripted events in FEAR. Coming from a game like STALKER where the AI is much smarter then in FEAR (when it actually works) makes FEAR seem as if its missing just a little more. The AI in FEAR did impress me while playing a few times though. One of those times was when they learned that i would try to bait them into a proximity mine so future squads would not chase me around corners and instead set up ambushes from three angles. And the other times being when they would put suppressive fire on me as one would go around and attack me from the rear. Now either provide something meaningful to the thread or go back to posting on /r/pcmasterrace until you are old or mature enough to provide any actual discussion.