As you may have already heard, F.E.A.R. 2 has come out with a huge 1.8GB demo this week on the PS3, 360, and the PC. I pulled the PC version down since that’s the one I want to play after having gone through the first one in sheer terror on the same platform when it was first released. The graphics look nice and gory, just as they did in the first game, and the action is just as brutal as I remembered it to be.
It plays off on the creepy factor just like the first one did with a few twisted bits of reality to mess with your perceptions. If you haven’t heard anything about the story, it doesn’t put you in the same boots as the character that finished the first game. At the end of that, you witnessed the destruction of a large chunk of the city thanks to a nuclear failsafe that was designed to destroy the top secret facility where horror girl Alma was imprisoned. In this one, you’re playing Michael Becket, a soldier tasked to arrest Genevieve Aristide, the head of Armacham…the ultracorp responsible for exploiting Alma’s psychic powers…only to run right into the aftermath of Alma’s vengeance against her captors.
The demo packs in a good amount of action amidst blasted set pieces including the suit of powered armor that you can rampage through the streets in for some Robocop-styled excitement. The suit feels more like a guilty-pleasure feature than anything, but it’ll be interesting to see what they do with it. F.E.A.R. 2 feels like it will deliver more of the action and cold terror that the first game did, so I can’t wait to get it into my hands.