#extraction point

Paxton Fettel in F.E.A.R Extraction Point

sound starts ~ 0:12

i beat extraction point! i did the unthinkable and just started a new game to get past the crashing issues. it actually worked, i was kind of surprised.

this expansion is basically just FEAR but condensed into a 3-4 hour experience. i’d highly recommend it if you loved FEAR, but the crashing issues can be frustrating. it happens a little bit past the halfway point of the expansion as well.

normal difficulty was a bit too easy for me, but hard was too difficult. i suppose i could have powered through hard mode, though it might not have been as fun. spas12 still too good though. check out this guy i blasted into a door.

What if John Wick fought the girl from The Ring?

I like FEAR a lot.

I am... so sorry.

While the game, including its expansions, isn’t bad, especially considering the time of its release, it sure as hell overstays its welcome. The base game in particular has too few spooks and too much running through repetitive office environments and generally places that look too much like one another, with enemy encounters that tend to be quite samey, as well. Which makes it feel longer than it needs to be. The expansions do better in the horror department but...

... and that’s the second thing, the expansions are a total mess, and I understand why they aren’t canon.

Besides the fact they’re both poorly optimised and at times they ran like shit even on my current machine, almost ten years after their release, and they’re rather prone to glitching... and there’s a couple of near game-breaking bugs thanks to which I couldn’t progress without a workaround because my game kept crashing when I got to specific points of it... This sentence is getting too long.

But anyway, both expansions focused on consistent visual horror, which I at first liked a fair deal (I played Perseus Mandate first), especially when they tried to be more psychological, but you’d better not try to make much sense of the story or the paranormal activities.

Eventually you get used to some elements they keep throwing at you again and again, like macabre imagery, loud sounds and cheap jumpscares. Squirming or crawling figures in the dark become more humorous than scary.

They try to do horror so hard that they forget that showing the spooks and rivers of blood all the time can get boring and repetitive without proper build-up and variation. You realise most things can’t hurt you and you get comfortable, and that’s the last thing a horror game should want you to do.

Not to even mention they kill important characters left and right and render the whole city pretty much unusable.

Overall, none of the first F.E.A.R. really explains much about the paranormal activities going on, even though the expansions had so much space for it. What are all those shadowy figures and why do they appear even before the destruction of the Vault? Alma is one thing, but her and the boogiemen don’t seem to cooperate. Sometimes she helps you forward, except when she doesn’t. 

BUT MOOOOOM!

But who cares, right? Have more creepy crawlies!

I’ve got to say that while I’m glad that I experienced the game and I had some fun with it, I definitely won’t miss it. It felt too darn long.

Also, fuck the ninjas, who somehow have the same abilities as Point Man.