For me, Doom 3 was the biggest disappointment of 2004, closely seconded by Half-Life 2. And despite the immense hype surrounding these two long-awaited titles, there were plenty of gamers who didn’t rush to hail them as “the best” of their genre. Come to think of it, the biggest crime that I could commit against these two games would be to compare them with The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay, a confrontation from where they would emerge pretty rumpled. And not because they’re bad games or that they don’t have the looks, but for the simple reason that they don’t manage to keep you glued to the seat until the very end. If Doom 3 can be pardoned by the fact that’s it’s an old-school shooter from the ground up, the same cannot be said about Half-Life 2, where at about 50% down the single-player I was going like Eddie Murphy in Shrek 2: “Are we there yet?”. By contrast, Riddick didn’t offer as much game hours as HL2, nor did it have a multiplayer mode, but it managed to keep your adrenaline up until you finished the game, making you crave for more. The interest surrounding F.E.A.R started with the release of the E3 2004 trailer and it just kept growing with each new piece of information released about Monolith’s new game. Departing from the Doom 3 scare recipe of “monsters that jump in front of you”, the designers opted for a more subtle approach to scaring the player, having the horror movie The Ring as a model.

     At first glance, the storyline may seem as common as any other: Paxton Fettel, a genetically engineered psychic commander which can telepathically control an army of cloned soldiers, goes Looney Toones and starts killing left and right. You’ve just been transferred to F.E.A.R, a special unit of the US Army, created precisely to deal with these kinds of paranormal threats. Your main objective: eliminate Paxton Fettel, since without his control, the Replica soldiers will no longer pose a threat. But after a couple of hours of playtime, you will come to realize that Fettel’s objectives and motives are not as clear as you might have thought at the start of the game and the little twists along the way will keep you interested until the finale. True, some questions do remain unanswered and the ending of the game is a cliché, but all in all, the storyline in F.E.A.R is glued together a lot better than that of HL2 for instance. Nevertheless, I was very disappointed by the limited role of your teammates in the game. I’m not saying that they should have made the game a squad base shooter, but a little more personality for the secondary characters wouldn’t have hurt. Because of this, you will have a hard time attaching yourself to these characters and caring about them, instead of just focusing on your next objective: “Hey dude. One of team members has gone missing / Yeah, so? Tough luck, what can I say?”