It was a beautiful sunny day in NYC when I journeyed into midtown for one of the few things that could get me to make such a brutal trip: a game demo. I walked into the hotel, took the elevator up and walked into the demo for FEAR3. After some chit chat, we got down to business. The lights were lowered, the surround sound was cranked up, and the team from Warner Bros. and Day 1 proceeded so show me how FEAR 3 itself has been cranked up.
The key element of FEAR 3 is the frantic combat involving paranormal activity. In other words, you can shoot someone or possess him and kill his fellow zombies in a fight to his death. I’m not going to recount the whole story. I’ll just say that this is set after FEAR 2 and you are about to have a very unhappy and pregnant little girl to deal with.
One thing I found not only super fun but also really interesting from a review standpoint is the co-op mode. You can make choices during game play that affect the outcome of the game and as 2 players both of your choices will affect the outcome. This is interesting because it means that a friend can come over, jump into level 2 with me, do something, and then jump out of the game while I keep playing. The scoring is kind of cool because when you pick up points for certain actions you can decide whether to hog all the points or share them with your teammate. You know, instead of the usual hogging them that everyone is guilty of.
Another cool aspect of FEAR 3 is that each time a map is generated, the location of some pick-ups and enemies varies. So it isn’t like some other FPS where you run through a sequence of events over and over until you get it right. There was enough variation to keep me interested so I believe this increases playability.
We played a developer build and I still thought it looked very good and it certainly played great. Essentially, Alma is now pregnant (probably with something mind-bogglingly evil) and her contractions cause rifts, or events in the game world which propel the story. You’ll be infiltrating a facility and all of a sudden Alma appears before you and the world shakes. You know something bad is going to happen, the real question is what.
We killed probably about 100 zombies or so, I’m not really sure because there were body parts everywhere. Cover is sticky and destructible so using the cover system properly becomes important. Also important is learning the strengths and weaknesses of different characters and how they can best work together. I could, for example, levitate an enemy and tell my partner to shoot him, or I could hide behind cover and then use my powers to shield my partner. This whole different ways to play and move through the game, plus myriad murder methods, made it really fun to play. I could tap my inner creative side. I possessed a suicide bomber and then run him into his own comrades. The best, I think, was when the elite enemy forces came after us and I possessed the first one and turned around and shotgunned the rest of his squad into messy piles of goo.
FEAR 3 will be available in late May for PS3, Xbox 360, and PC. And I’m psyched.
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