F.E.A.R.

I'll admit it - I really enjoyed playing Doom 3.

This might be a weird thing to say at the start of a FEAR review, but bear with me. Doom 3's single player experience was dismissed with a disdainful sniff by many gamers. "Too dark!" they'd exclaim. "What's with the monsters just appearing behind me all the time?", they'd ask.

My response would invariably be the same - the game was supposed to be dark. Things were meant to jump out at you. That said, I can easily see how people would completely fail to have any fun whatsoever playing Doom 3 - it was a relatively simple shooter that probably seemed fairly bland unless you were making a sincere effort to play it in the manner in which it was intended - in the dark, all the lights out, at night, surround sound cranking. Without the right mood, you probably aren't going to enjoy it - just like you'd be less inclined to have a good time at your own wedding if your mates ripped off your eyebrows in a prank at the buck's party the night before.

FEAR, described as a "cinematic epic of action, tension and terror", is another game which has a strong focus on trying to draw you deeply into the experience. Pure, concentrated atmosphere is exuded through every pixel that is rendered on the screen by developer Monolith's top-shelf new engine.

If you're worried that it will just be another Doom 3 though - you don't need to be. FEAR is so jam-packed with gameplay goodies that you can happily enjoy this game without needing to pull out the light bulbs in your room first. If you're into the scary games though, you'll appreciate it even more - awesome visuals and sound effects combined with excellent use of lighting and cinematic story telling create an atmosphere that'll keep you on the edge of your seat.

Oh yeah - and you can use the flashlight at the same time as you've got your guns blazing. Happy now?

FEAR stands for First Encounter Assault Recon. This fortuitous combination of words is the name of the team that you take part in - an elite military force that is called in to deal with "extraordinary circumstances" - battling alien invasions, performing exorcisms (the 9mm style), that sort of thing. Your team has been asked to go and check out a big aerospace combination that has been taken over - in spooky circumstances, no less - by an unknown military force. Hostages are involved, video footage reveals blood plastered over the wall, perhaps some mild cases of zombie-itis - in short, it isn't looking pretty.

But in the immortal words of Viper in Top Gun, "this is what you've been trained for". You play the FNG in a small team of FEAR soldiers. The story-setting cut scenes at the start of the game quickly let you know that you're quite the warrior - you have reflexes that are "off the charts", according to your CO. This doesn't really mean much to you at this point, but you'll soon realise that this is basically your ticket to the Slo-Mo abilities in the game, and then everything starts making sense.

The game kicks off with you wandering around in a dark alleyway armed with nothing more than a pistol and, of course, a flashlight. The flashlight quickly becomes your best friend, unless you're a dirty gamma cheater and crank up the brightness - but even then, I suspect you'll have to bust it out to provide some illumination to help you figure out where to go.

The atmosphere is immediately dark and spooky. The lighting is awesome - your character casts a shadow which means every time you go around a corner you're almost popping off caps at your own shade. At key points throughout the game you'll get a sudden flash of a horrible image - usually featuring a lot of slick red blood. You'll also have temporary hallucinations, you'll see ghostlike apparitions, and all sorts of scary things will happen at you.

The visuals throughout all this are fantastic - everything looks incredibly good, particularly the massive amounts of blood that is sprayed liberally all around the place. The mood is heightened extremely well with a great combination of sound effects and music - one of my favourite parts of the game was when I was creeping around (in the dark, of course) and my character suddenly started breathing. Then a few minutes later, his heartbeat came in - really simple elements that were just introduced in a way that affected the entire game in a very positive way.

There is a possible complaint here that perhaps too much effort has gone into trying to develop and maintain the atmosphere. There are several occasions where you'll walk around for several minutes before running into anything to actually DO (i.e., shoot bad guys). Hardcore action junkies might struggle in these moments, but remember - this is a game you should be playing on the hardest difficulty with the lights out. It is about the mood, and if you can play it 'properly' you're probably going to enjoy it a lot more.

However, even if you don't feel like doing that, you're going to have a lot of fun playing this game. The combat scenes are quite literally some of the finest I've seen in an FPS. Since skeletal animation and physics have now become standard, you might not think that this is such an impressive feature any more - but FEAR has found a couple of ways to help you appreciate it all over again - Slo-Mo being the most significant.

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