Gaming Trend

Gaming Trend Review

F.E.A.R. Perseus Mandate

1. Official Site
2. Platform: PC
3. Publisher: Sierra
4. Developer: Timegate Studios
5. Release Date: 11/07/07
6. Genre: Action/Adventure

by Mitch Youngblood

When is it time to put a series out to pasture? My vote is when there is nothing left for a story to say, which was exactly three quarters of the way in to the first F.E.A.R. Regrettably the publisher never consulted Yours Truly, therefore we now have a second expansion pack ("Stand Alone!") bearing the pretentious title Perseus Mandate that further explores one of the most monotone digital worlds crafted since the Amiga.

The game lacks personality from the top on down. You play another faceless, nameless guy who can shoot and jump kick spooks and specters yet is choosy about which doors he can open. Also, while it may still seem scary on paper to have a little girl in a red dress slicing and dicing bad guys by staring at them the thrill is gone. The first game had moments of terrifying scale, yet the latest expansion pack feels more like a "greatest hits" album than the stand alone product it bills itself as. So the question becomes, did I like anything about it?

Truthfully, not a lot. I especially failed to find the joy of sacrificing 7 GBs worth of hard drive space for a derivative and ultimately pointless waste of an afternoon. While there may be a few solid jolts scattered throughout, it feels as though you end up searching through a haystack for five needles while 10 shiny new ones beckon you from a near-by shelf.

My computer died a painful death earlier this year, and only recently was it restored. In doing so, I opted to pack in some serious firepower. So what’s the next thing to do? Try to find the game that will make our shiny new computer beg for mercy. The first game I pulled from the library was F.E.A.R. and while that may not have been the first title for others, it was the only one handy for Yours Truly. It looked sharp, which made it all the more surprising when Perseus Mandate appeared washed out. I configured the settings, cranked everything up to maximum, and tried it again. Nope.

The expansion pack for a sharp looking game actually pales in comparison to the original title. Just when you think you’ve seen everything...

It sounds weird, I know, but I have played through both completely and playing Perseus Mandate felt like I was playing DOOM 3 again with less pizzazz. The character models are all the same, the environments may as well be the same, but the expansion looks uglier than the original. I consider myself an intelligent individual but this one stumped me even though nothing about it screamed "DEAL BREAKER!"

You might wonder though whether real life industrial facilities come in different colors other than grey.

The sound effects are where the F.E.A.R. series made its name and the top-notch quality remains front and center. The sound of the fuzzy radio signal continues to be a potent scare tactic, despite simultaneously removing any doubt as to whether or not something creep will happen in the next 30 seconds. The voices and disparate effects scattered throughout each mission keep the tension ratcheted up to an 11, but another key to quality sound design is knowing when and how to use silence. The game may not be quiet for very long, but when it is it becomes genuinely frightening.

A few new monsters appear and the oil pit one is by far the freakiest. You’ll know it because this is the conversation you and your monitor will have when the two of you meet: "Holy motherf&*#ing s!&*! What the h^77 is that thing? BLAM! BLAM! BLAM!" I’m paraphrasing, though don’t be surprised when these exact words fly forth in the heat of the moment. Kudos to whomever thought up that little bugger.

Alma, or course, plays a large role here and she continues to bring the scares. While it might not be that frightening to see a little girl in a red dress standing in front of the fires of Hell (I’m begging the developers to include a usable fire extinguisher in the next game), it is frightening people around her find begin dying in very, very bad ways. The sound design team went out of their way to may her sequences the stand-out moments in the game and they succeeded.

The control scheme is the same as in every first-person shooter available, though being on PC results in the additional benefit of being able to re-map the keys to whatever you want. Want to fire weapons using the P key? Knock yourself out. As it stands, the mouse is your standard fire-and-forget tool, the space bar jumps, and the shift key launches bullet time. One thing to keep in mind is the HUD because when you swap explosive weapons, it isn’t always clear as to which one is selected.

At the start of every mission, your weapons, and the buttons they are keyed to, appear in a faint blue on the left hand side of the screen. Keep those keys in mind because when you hit the 7 key instead of the 4 key, you’re selecting a different weapon than a standard-issue frag grenade. At the resolution I used, the faint blue reappeared in the bottom right hand side of the screen and sometimes it disappeared before I could tell what I was selecting. Again, re-mapping will help but this is something to keep in the back of your mind as you play.

The point of this expansion pack features the exact same setup as the first game only this time you’re part of a second F.E.A.R. team sent in to investigate Armacham. Here’s my problem – the overall story is not deep enough to sustain a single game let alone an expansion pack that works in parallel to the first game. Your nameless character investigates a separate Armacham facility and picks up just prior to the first game’s conclusion. If you have played through the first game then you know how spectacularly it concludes, and yes that plays a huge factor in what happens in Perseus Mandate. During the course of the game, you face a new mercenary army, a resuscitated Paxton Fettel, and a new enemy with an unhealthy interest in Alma.

If none of those names ring any bells, then the short version is the game is a giant pile of average.

While Perseus Mandate may have solid technical merits, those are muted by the lackluster effort put into the gameplay itself. It is not a good sign when a game is supposed to be scary yet the player has to fight off boredom-induced nap attacks in addition to heavily armed mercenaries, evil ghosts and ghouls. The monotous office environment is frightening in the world of Office Space and the original game so in Perseus Mandate that was thrown out and instead... you have to fight through drab industrial facilities. If there is one environment more innately boring than a cubical farm, it would be the local sewer treatment facility. Guess where you spend 90 percent of your time in Perseus Mandate? Oh, but what about the remaining 10 percent...

Cube farms.

Additional heavy weapons are thrown in to add punch to the gunfights, but the energy from the first game is gone despite a fantastic sequence where you are chased by an ED-209 knock-off. It was fun two years ago to charge in to a room, kick on bullet time, and unleash a hail of bullets that shattered glass and bone in equal measure. Now... meh. The Max Payne series did it better, did it before, and the F.E.A.R. series still has yet to bring something new to the table.

I fail to understand how developers lack so much imagination that they set a horror game in a world so utterly lacking in sinister mojo that all pretense of terror are drained from the proceedings before things even begin. Yet here we are again playing through one bland, lifeless level after another. Even when things get spooky, you’re tipped off by a slight flickering of the screen and an "unknown signal" message appearing at the top of the screen. All well and good but if you’re given a message saying "expect the spooky in 3...2...1..." roughly every 15 minutes it completely removes the shock value. I counted on one hand the number of times "GOTCHA!" scares made me jump, and I had fingers left over.

The expansion pack brings about another six hours or so of gameplay to the table, but why bother? If repetitive, bland, lifeless environments are your bag, then here’s six hours more. The first game was entertaining for a while because it was easy to hope things would change. Once the realization set in that things never would, the energy was sucked out of the room so quick you’d think a black hole opened on the floor.

True, the gunfights in the first game were fun and watching glass shatter in slow motion was a thrilling, if brief, joy. But the staging for the fights in this game ring hollow because one can only fight through so many train yards before boredom sets in. Perseus Mandate furthers what little story there is featuring characters no one cares about in a universe packed to the gill with cube farms and industrial machinery.

Why should I play this a second time?

Perseus Mandate needs to be the last installment in this tired franchise because the thrill is gone. They may as well have called this Jaws 5 for all the enthusiasm it musters. Considering how much action there is, that says a lot about how weak this entry is. It seems difficult to believe six hours of gunfights, explosions, and freaky demon kids would be hard to suck the energy out of but Perseus Mandate manages that feat quite nicely. Six hours is a long stretch of time and this reviewer suggests that gamers use it to play anything else.

Gaming Trend Score

79

1. Graphics: 86
2. Audio: 94
3. Controls: 90
4. Gameplay: 70
5. Value/Replay: 65
6. OVERALL:79