F.E.A.R. Perseus Mandate
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ESRB:
Blood and Gore,Intense Violence,Strong Language
Publisher: Vivendi Universal Games Genre(s): Shooting Home Page: http://www.whatisfear.com
Cover and shoot - repeat until done Capt. Raynes and Lt. Chen are true professionals: absolutely unflappable, never a change in their expressions The only really new gameplay feature in Perseus Mandate is that you actually fight alongside friendly forces, as part of a three-man team. As Sergeant, you sit at the bottom of F.E.A.R.'s command chain. Captain Raynes and Lieutenant Chen form the rest of your team, and when they're not issuing orders or cracking jokes, they show some pretty good fighting skills. That is, whenever you're not separated from them, which happens all the time. Your enemies are every bit as smart as your teammates, although they don't have quite the same sense of humor. The bad guys fall back when wounded, lob grenades at you if you're out of their direct field of fire, and rush you in groups rather than piecemeal. One cute aspect of the game's gunfighting is the frequent radio communication between your enemies. They coordinate attacks, ask wounded comrades if they're okay, and panic when they're alone or taking a lot of casualties: "We can't stop him!".  Reunited - once again Even though it was groundbreaking in 2005, the F.E.A.R.'s AI doesn't stand out as anything special today: the recent Medal of Honor and Call of Duty games have equally smart or smarter enemies and friendly troops. TimeGate also took the easy way out and saved a lot of scripting effort by having you fight and advance alone most of the time. Perseus Mandate tries very hard to make you care for your teammates, but fails miserably because of their wooden voice acting and propensity to cheer you on from a safe distance, as you take on the baddest baddies by yourself. Plot-wise the game is paper thin: there isn't even a convoluted storyline that you can take masochistic pleasure in unraveling and dissecting all its folds and flaws - it's all just fancy sounding words like Perseus and Synchronicity strung together to make you think there's some grand scheme or mystery behind all the gunplay. There isn't, just one cliché after another. There's an Evil Corporation conducting Bad Experiments and producing Paranormal Phenomena. Don't expect to have any better idea of what's really going on by the end of the game. Of course, ghosts and mecha make appearances in the game, but that's to be expected, right?
More guns and levels, but it's still the samePerseus Mandate adds three new weapons to F.E.A.R.'s arsenal, but they lack the "oompf" of other recent shooters' armory. This extends to both graphic and especially audio design: inexplicably, your squadmates' weapons are every bit as loud as your own gun, and the firing graphic of some weapons is so subtle that sometimes it's hard to tell whether you're firing or not. Some of the weapons don't feel "right", either; for example, the scoped sniper rifle fires three-round bursts, which is counterintuitive (although familiar for F.E.A.R. players).
The game's various environments could not get much more impersonal. Faceless concrete compounds, office blocks, sewers, subways and parking lots are all rendered in the same shade of dull. At least you can decorate the place with great big parallax-mapped bullet holes and laser burns, but these unfortunately disappear after a few seconds. It's pretty distracting to see the oversized bullet decals blink out, one by one, as you're advancing through the scene of yet another parking lot shootout.
If anything, the level design of Perseus Mandate is totally conventional. Your progress is pretty straightforward; luckily, there's very little back and forth traipsing between familiar areas, but this isn't much of a comfort as most of the new areas look identical to previous ones. Weapons, ammo and other power ups are unsurprisingly hidden in dead ends, dark corners, nooks and crannies. The only joy I could wring out of the levels was spotting every instance of product placement, and then gratuitously shooting them to pieces or at least knocking them on the floor.
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