Conclusion

How much irony can one sign contain?

In a season of several very competitive, high-quality titles, F.E.A.R. Perseus Mandate is a strange blast from the past. It's hopelessly last generation, even two generations behind compared to Crysis, and its production values are dismal compared to the competition like the excellent Call of Duty 4. It's also a prime example of the kind of brand-name fluff that publishers have pushed down gamers' throats for years.

If you want to play a good horror shooter, pick up the original F.E.A.R. Even if you've finished it many times before. Seriously, you won't find the experience any more repetitive or familiar than playing Perseus Mandate. Hopefully Project Origin, the original F.E.A.R. team's next title, will be a better showing.

Summary of YouGamers Hardware Testing

The publisher of this game state the following specifications for their minimum and recommended requirements:

Component	Publisher's Minimum	Publisher's Recommended
Processor	Intel Pentium 4 1.7 GHz or equivalent	Intel Pentium 4 3.0 GHz or equivalent
Memory	512 MB	1 GB
Graphics Card	ATI Radeon 9000 64MB / NVIDIA GeForce 4 Ti 64MB	ATI Radeon 9800 Pro (Radeon X800 Pro 256MB for Vista) / NVIDIA GeForce 5900 FX 256MB
Graphics Card Example	Not specified	Not specified
Free Disk Space	7.5 GB free space	7.5 GB free space
Net Link	Broadband	Broadband

To learn more about how YouGamers performs its hardware testing, click here. Through our extensive gameplay and hardware testing across the full spectrum of PC configurations, YouGamers suggests that one should use the following guidelines for an appropriate minimum and recommended setup:

Component	YouGamers Minimum	YouGamers Recommended
Processor	AMD Athlon 64 3000+ / Intel Pentium 4 530	AMD Athlon 64 3800+ / Intel Pentium 4 550
Memory	1 GB	1 GB
Graphics Card	ATI Radeon X1800 256MB / NVIDIA GeForce 7800 256MB	ATI Radeon HD 2900 512MB / NVIDIA GeForce 8800 640MB
Free Disk Space	7.5 GB	7.5 GB
Net Link	Broadband	Broadband

Scores

To learn more about our scoring methodology, please click here.

Gameplay	48	Boring, repetitive, unoriginal, uneventful. If you loved F.E.A.R. and like to redo old crossword puzzles for fun, Perseus Mandate is the game for you.
Graphics	59	In this case, dull graphics make for a dull game. Indoor and outdoor areas are dim and lack highlights, and the excessive blood and gore loses all effect within five minutes.
Audio	68	Perseus Mandate's sound effects are strangely unbalanced, and the voice acting fails to convince. Music switches between moody ambience and pumping techno.
Technology	62	The Lithtech Jupiter Ex engine is starting to show its age. There's some evidence of Perseus Mandate's designers and graphics artists wanting to go further, but the engine is holding them back. Despite the age, scaling to the low end isn't quite as good as the publisher claims.

OVERALL

F.E.A.R. Perseus Mandate is a half-assed second sequel that fails to live up to the original's good name. It doesn't try to introduce anything new to the plot or design of the game, and contents itself to copying the classic in an uninspired manner.

If you wish to comment on this review or talk about the game further, then click right here (registration not required).