A taste of F.E.A.R.

[Bernadotte 0]

F.E.A.R (First Encounter Assault Recon) is an intense combat experience with rich atmosphere and a deeply intense paranormal storyline presented entirely in first person, according to Monolith studio.

It easily won Best Action Game at this year's E3 and should start haunting store shelves in September.  Most reviewers praise the enemy AI who apparently pull shelf units down across your path or dive under tables to elude you.  I just hope it's a good creepy tale in the style of System Shock II.

The demo has just been release at 662 MB, and is expected to challenge most hardware configurations.

[monkeygoat 0]

Just finished the dl, off to play now!

[Stealth3 0]

Downloading. Hope its worth the time to download it....

[monkeygoat 0]

Just finished it, and I have to say I'm in two minds about it. The demo itself is very short, will probably take an experienced fps player around 20-30 minutes to complete. The atmosphere throughout is very well done, as is the ai which jumped through windows and crawled under collapsed shelves to get at me.

On the other hand I didn't find the vanilla combat especially exciting, pretty standard fps fare. Bullet time mode was much better and had me cracking up as I ran circles around enemies bludgeoning them to death . Also the ripples that explosions make in bullet time are gorgeous.

Overall though i think it was worth the download, looking forward to it hitting shelves.

[shadow 6]

At first this started out very badly.

I started downloading the demo a couple of minutes after it had been released. Then I decided since this is going to take a about an hour to download I wanted to do it on a different computer. So stopped the download only to have to wait 15 minutes in line to download with a different computer  

Then after installing it and enabling most of the eyecandy I got very very very low fps in-game. After fiddling about with the settings setting everything to medium and minimum I got acceptable framerate and played some. But after a while the fps became worse and worse. Then it hit me, my current video-drivers always revert to 8xAA in the global profile. When I set it to app-controlled and set 2xAA I finally got very smooth fps with all settings maxed out (except soft shadows).

Game looks very nice with everything on max, but the weapon-sounds are not what I'd expect. The sound-engine is either very bad or have a major bug in it.

Toss a grenade down a corridor and you hear a BOOOM. Toss it around a corner so it lands about 2 meters from you and you hear a very distant puff  

The melee attack reminds of Riddick, only Riddick did it better. There is something about it that just feel wrong.

Besides the overkill particle-effects (which are cool to look at) this is your regular run off the mill first person fun-action-shooter. It'l be a fun distraction on a rainy autumn evening or cold winter evening

Now where's my Boiling Point 2.0 patch? It was supposed to be released today

[Colossus 2]

Whats the system requirements?

I don't think my 64 MB Geforce4 Ti 4200 will work at this

I NEED CASH FOR A TEMPORARILY CARD!!  

Oh, by the way "what is fear?"

That girl is creeping me out.

[EiZei 0]

Whats the system requirements?

I don't think my 64 MB Geforce4 Ti 4200 will work at this

I NEED CASH FOR A TEMPORARILY CARD!!

Oh, by the way "what is fear?"

That girl is creeping me out.

Radeon 9800 Pros and Geforce 6600 GTs are surprisingly cheap these days..

EDIT: Bittorrent mirror seems pretty slow, are any of those mirrors located in europe?

[Stealth3 0]

Meh, I had to wait 4 hours to download so I quit downloading. Ill pass out on this on since it looks like doom3 and hl2. Nothing new or special....... Its just like D3: Shoot your way in the game, shoot your way out of the game...

[Guest Ti0n3r]

Doom 3 is one of the best games I've ever played in my entire life and this game seems to have at least some things in common with D3. Im downloading right now, but with a 6.8kb/s...

[Colossus 2]

Whats the system requirements?

I don't think my 64 MB Geforce4 Ti 4200 will work at this

I NEED CASH FOR A TEMPORARILY CARD!!  

Oh, by the way "what is fear?"

That girl is creeping me out.

Radeon 9800 Pros and Geforce 6600 GTs are surprisingly cheap these days..

EDIT: Bittorrent mirror seems pretty slow, are any of those mirrors located in europe?

I got about $48/€39/Å27/300 NOK now

And I know that you can't get a reasonable card for that kind of money, lol.

[Mr_Tea 0]

And again, monster shooting in new clothes.

[shadow 6]

Quote[/b] ]I don't think my 64 MB Geforce4 Ti 4200 will work at this

FEAR supports DX8 shaders. Your GF4Ti card is okay for now.

[Stealth3 0]

D3 is a good game but for me after I get to delta labs, I got bored of it. It was the same thing over and over. Shoot, run, shoot, run shoot, run. The atmosphere was good however, but It doesnt keep me from getting bored of it.

[Colossus 2]

Quote[/b] ]I don't think my 64 MB Geforce4 Ti 4200 will work at this

FEAR supports DX8 shaders. Your GF4Ti card is okay for now.

Ah, great. Thanks!

Then I should try it out

EDIT: The Offical System Requirements

Quote[/b] ]MINIMUM SYSTEM REQUIRED

· Windows® XP or 2000 with latest service pack installed

· DirectX® 9.0c (April Edition) (included)

· Pentium® 4 1.7 GHz or equivalent processor

· 512 MB of RAM

· 64 MB GeForce™ 4 Ti or ATI® Radeon® 9600 or equivalent with hardware T&L and pixel shader support

· 5.0 GB free Hard Drive Space for installation

· 4x CD-ROM drive (for Director’s Edition, this will have to be DVD-ROM)

· 16-bit DirectX® 9.0 compliant sound card with support for EAX™ 2.0

· Internet Connection Required

· Mouse

· Keyboard

RECOMMENDED HARDWARE

· Pentium® 4 3.0 GHz or equivalent processor

· 1 GB RAM

· A 256 MB Radeon® 9800 Pro or equivalent DirectX® 9 compliant video card with hardware T&L and pixel shader 2.0 support

SUPPORTED CHIPSETS

Nvidia GeForceâ„¢ 4Ti, GeForceâ„¢ FX 5900, FX 5900 Ultra, 6800, 6800 GT, 6800 Ultra

ATI® Radeon® 9600, 9600 Pro, 9600 XT, 9700, 9700 Pro, 9800 Pro, x700 XT, x800 XT, x850 XT

[ebns72 0]

Instead of rewriting all my comments, just pasting what I said on another forum:

EDIT: I posted this on the half life forum, thats why I mentioned ravenholm and some physics things.

Not done playing yet, but so far it seems pretty cool Here is my review...I got to the part a little after the ladder to share my thoughts.

I have different thoughts on the game thus far.

My only major gripe right now is the weapons. I don't like the way they "Feel" when you shoot them and generally I think they lack personality. I didn't like the handling..the tracers seemed kinda annoying and fake-looking. There are some cool guns in there (like that gun turns people to smoldering skeletons was cool, and the nailgun-thing inspired by the half life crossbow) but generally at the end of the day it didn't seem like it really mattered which ones you used in combat. They all felt....too balanced....like there was no real super duper advantage or different playstyle required for individual weapons. The only thing that really changed between the weapons is the way your bad guy died.

BUT...the game totally makes up for it in its brilliant action sequences. The firefights in the game feel very hollywood (in a good way). Everytime you fight it feels like you are put right in a matrix movie, between the parallax-mapped bulletholes, the special effects, the blood, the physics, the exploding things, etc the combat is truly a rush.

Speaking of, the physics are ok but nothing incredibly special. Its cool how you can see your feet move things, and I did like the way ragdolls didn't slow you down but still had physics if you stepped on them. There weren't a ton of interactive objects in game, it seemed like the developers placed the physics-affected objects in or near action sequences for the most part. For the affect the physics in the game are trying to achieve of cool things exploding during a firefight, this is fine.

The atmosphere in the game is great. It has a good, dark, a spooky atmosphere. Every time I walk into a supply closet I wonder whats going to be in there. While some things made me jump for a second overall it isn't really anything more than the first time I played ravenholm was. I was expecting it to be a lot more scary to be honest. Most of the "Scariness" is just kinda a creepy atmopshere and thats it. Some parts will make you jump though...the little girl is creepy.

The game also had nice contrast...slow, eerie, walks through dark halls turned suddenly into completely-chaotic-fast-awesome firefights.

While the atmosphere was great, the levels themselves seemed to lack a sense of location. They seemed very generic and didn't have a lot of personality to them...this could just be a demo thing. If I buy the full game maybe I will get a greater understanding of where I am exactly. Though they were creepy I must say.

Now if you will excuse me, I have to play some more FEAR.

EDIT again: I had no problems performance wise with the games, but I have a radeon 9800/1 GB RAM and a pentium 4 2.4 ghz.

[Stealth3 0]

Does this game even has a storyline? At least doom3 had a storyline. It was pretty good for the type of game....

[ebns72 0]

As far as I saw in the demo, this cannibal guy leading an army of super soldiers takes over some coporation and all this supernatural stuff starts happening. As part as a super-duper secret government strike team called First Encounter Assault Recon, you have to kill him.

The bad guy is creepy. He eats people...and you see it.

the plot is a little cheesy if you ask me, but I thought the gameplay was pretty decent.

[DracoPaladore 0]

Game is cool. Might pick it up awhile after release or as a present when price drops or something. Slow-motion was cool, scored several shots that impressed me.

I've noticed amputation, but you gotta do something pretty drastic so it isn't OTT. Hit a guy with the penetrator round in the head and it was torn off. Another poor bastach ran into one of my proximity grenades. I watched it jump up and explode, throwing him against the wall. Both his arms were laying several feet away.

Nailing someone against the wall is cool.

But it's kinda easy. Maybe its the way I play. I didn't run out and shoot, but instead kept croutched and picked them off. After killing the first guy and ducking behind a corner, his buddy went on a detailed search for me. Slow-mo, a shot to the face around the corner, and he's down.

Proxies are my favorite weapon. So evil placing them in a spot and watching them try to turn and run once they realise they stepped on one.

[Bernadotte 0]

Does this game even has a storyline?  At least doom3 had a storyline.

Seems a bit like Doom3 meets the X-files.

I haven't gone very far into the demo because of some nasty mouse lag.  Might need to update/reinstall some drivers.

Nice to see my own feet and occasionally be startled by my own shadow.  The bullet time seems to work nicely, but I'll know better when my fire button is more in synch with my gun's trigger.  The AI also seems to be clever without resorting to cheating.

The sound may be the biggest disappointment so far.  Not much dynamic range.  Everything sounds like it's happening in a near vacuum.  However with that said, much of the tense atmosphere does come from the subtle mozaic of ambient noises - the water drips, steam hisses, tin can getting knocked over in the dark, etc.

I hope there will be some outdoor daylight levels where the player's path is not so set on a rail and the creepiness is less a function of the darkness.

I also hope that my "mission control" dude will start talking in my ear a bit more like he seems to do in the teaser video.  That's always worked well for me in games like System Shock II and Deus Ex.

Now where's my Boiling Point 2.0 patch? It was supposed to be released today  

LOL    Exactly what I was thinking.

[The Frenchman 0]

I get a CTD when the helicopter shows up.

Not going to bother buying it.

[berghoff 11]

Does this game even has a storyline? At least doom3 had a storyline. It was pretty good for the type of game....

=) ofcourse.

Quote[/b] ]As part of a classified strike team, you will have to find and eliminate intruders who have taken over a multibillion-dollar aerospace compound.

But weird things are happening.

The game is quite good only bit of performance problems if you compare this to Doom3, Doom3 is way smoother. There are also many error in the shadows so I had to turn them off. But overal it was a nice short demo.

[Colossus 2]

Downloading at 276 kbps (ETA: 34 min)

[shadow 6]

I haven't gone very far into the demo because of some nasty mouse lag.  Might need to update/reinstall some drivers.

....

The bullet time seems to work nicely, but I'll know better when my fire button is more in synch with my gun's trigger.

Have you tried turning mouse smoothing all the way down?

Mouse smoothing = unresponsive mouse-control

....

I got a delay with all buttons but the mouse buttons in particular when I had low fps (when I ran 8xAA).

[Heatseeker 0]

395KB/sec, 24 minuts to go, hope its worth it and my old toaster can handle it, doesnt look like my thing but neither was Doom and i turned out to really like it for what it is .

[Colossus 2]

Aaaw, I seriously need a new card once I get money.

I mean, look at my graphic vs. there screenshot at Gamespot.

GIF (180kb)

It isn't scary at all with my graphic.