It’s tough to be a first-person shooter these days. You feel all high and mighty through the whole preview process, smiling in the glow of your adoring fans on the hype train. You can do no wrong—after all, you are an FPS! Surely being a member of the most popular genre in gaming gives you immunity to criticism. There’s an audience for you and you know it. Who doesn’t like shooting things? In the face? With a shotgun? In slow-motion? But when launch time comes around, you face the firing squad, both literally and physically. The critics ask what you do to “advance the genre.” They try to boil you down to your basic gameplay tropes. Soon the truth is revealed: You’re nothing but a shooter with a gimmick, and you’ll never amount to the Halos and the Call of Dutys of the world. It’s rough, but you learn to deal with it by shooting more dudes in the face in your sub-par, tacked-on online mode.

Yes, it’s a bleak time to be a shooter, and that means that even the ones that do a decent job can be lost in the shuffle. F.E.A.R. 2, although not quite as dramatic of an example as the fictional game I decimated above, does suffer from some of the issues I discussed. It does a good job with the basics yet doesn’t offer quite enough unique flavor to really stand out.

F.E.A.R. 2 has one major problem: An identity crisis. No, I’m not referring to the ownership shakeup of the F.E.A.R. IP that happened last year, but to the game itself. As an FPS it works. It delivers a solid, visceral shooting experience that is about as hardcore as they come. Shots tear through enemies just like they should with satisfying sound and streams of blood. The slow motion gimmick goes beyond being just a gimmick and ups the visceral nature of gunfights to an even more enjoyable level. However, it’s when the game turns survival horror that things start getting a little strange, and not in a creepy zombie way. Alma does her best to show up for the cheap scares, but the crawling mutants take the horror cake. Having short, quickly moving mutants at your feet transform a solid FPS into a Dead Space or Gears of War. This sounds good on paper, but the game engine feels like it can’t handle these interactions and the controls thusly fall apart. This reared its head in the game’s unfortunately lacking multiplayer mode, as well.

The horror does work in terms of atmosphere, at least for the most part. F.E.A.R. can give off a creepy aura like the best of survival horror, especially when the game tosses you into dark, maze-like rooms where even your flashlight is freaking out. The dream-like sequences where Alma usually comes into play are hit and miss; sometimes the random change of scenery works and sometimes it comes off as forced. This is where the game’s identity crisis comes back—it rarely knows whether it’s a military-themed FPS or a horror FPS. You can give me a mech suit mission, Mr. Game, but toss out a tension-filled corridor crawl right afterwards? No thanks.

The level design is last-gen linear; I had to check if I was using a Dual Shock 2 more than a few times. Okay, that’s a joke, but Call of Duty 4 proved that linearity can benefit a game if used correctly. Used here, however, it just feels like a tram ride through a tunnel (an event that, spoiler alert, actually happens in the game!). The game’s story also fails to reach the depth of CoD4, offering few interesting hooks. It doesn’t help that most of the story is hidden away in the optional Intel pickups strewn about each level. I understand that this allows people who want to learn more to do so, but integrating it with the gameplay (i.e. Bioshock) would have been much better. Astute readers will notice that I praised the same mechanic in my Gears of War 2 write-up; trust me, this game wants to rely on story more than Gears does, so it has brought this upon itself. A cliffhanger ending does its best to make players anticipate the next twist, but by then you will have already made your decision about how much you wanted to invest in the story. Chances are it won’t be much.

Monolith has proven that you can make a shooter with the best intentions and still fall short of greatness. Even when launched in a time devoid of major FPS releases F.E.A.R. 2 gets lost in the shuffle. I wish I knew exactly what keeps it from that higher echelon of shooter-dom, but until then it will be just another shooter with a gimmick, albeit a good one. If you’re looking for a solid game to play that requires little investment in story I guess this wouldn’t hurt; but if you want something more substantial in this trying economy F.E.A.R. might not offer enough to warrant the sixty bucks. Nice try FPS recruit, but you might as well go back to the face shooting.

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