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
Oh, the horror No, the coffee maker isn't on fire. What you see is a hallucinogenic vision from the outside F.E.A.R.'s biggest selling point was the horror theme. Weird hallucination sequences and sudden scares made you jump out of your seat; Alma, the scary ghost girl appeared out of nowhere and wiped out entire Delta Force squads; and, of course, there was blood and corpses everywhere. Expect more of the same in Perseus Mandate, especially the last bit. On the very first levels, you get so used to the splish-splash sound of running through pools of blood that no amount of gore really stands out for the rest of the game. Lieutenant Chen does some quick-and-dirty forensics before your first run-in with the Nightcrawlers, noting how brutally and thoroughly their victims were killed. Why he pays no mind to dozens of other corpses before that point goes unexplained. Perseus Mandate's horror sequences seem randomly sprinkled around the levels, and there's less of them than in the original. They provide a little relief from the monotony of the game's regular "enter a room, kill bad guys, go to the next room" gameplay, but they don't ever really terrify or sustain the atmosphere for very long.
Multiplayer: the horror continuesI was bored to tears after a few hours of single player Perseus Mandate, so I turned to multiplayer hoping that some fast paced fragging would help relieve the ennui. The primitive server browser was able to locate a couple of dozen servers online, and all of two people playing. Thankfully they were on the same server, and I could get my game on. Multiplayer Deathmatch games in FEAR: Perseus Mandate follow the golden rules established by DOOM way back yonder in the days of old: run around, pick up as many power-ups as you can, kill, get killed, respawn. You can drop proximity mines to annoy the heck out of everybody, see when someone is typing for an easy kill, and jump as if you're on the moon. You get to select the weapon you spawn with, but there's nothing you haven't seen a dozen times: dual-wielded pistols, submachine guns, assault rifles, shotguns and F.E.A.R.'s version of the AWP sniper rifle, the one-shot kill "particle weapon". Yawn.
You'll run into special weapons scattered around some of the maps, like the multi-rocket launcher and the point defense autoturret. However, you can't pick up your fallen enemies' weapons; the only rewards from a kill is the scalp and a health boost. Just as in the single player campaign, the multiplayer maps are pretty uninspired in design, with narrow corridors and lobbies as the most common scenes of carnage. F.E.A.R.'s multiplayer challenges Unreal Tournament for the title of goriest online shooter, as the walls, floors and ceilings get very messy very quickly. Although there were CTF games listed as well, the lack of populated servers meant that I was only able to try Deathmatch. Whether it's contractual problems or sheer stupidity that prevents Perseus Mandate owners from playing on original F.E.A.R. servers, the multiplayer mode is pretty useless at the moment for anything other than LAN games. I wasn't going to subject any of my friends or colleagues to the horror that is Perseus Mandate, so unfortunately other game modes than Deathmatch went untested.
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