F.E.A.R. 2 on the PS3

I finished my first game on the new PS3 Slim last night:  F.E.A.R. 2.

I decided to buy a PS3 Slim since they dropped the price to $299.  It was considerably cheaper than the $700+ Core i7 PC upgrade I was spec’ing out, and Best Buy had been spamming me with “18 months no interest” offers lately, so I figured why not?  The only game I bought with it was F.E.A.R. 2.

F.E.A.R. 2 is essentially similar to F.E.A.R. in that you are fighting basically the same enemies with the same weapons in the same spooky Japanese-horror environments.  You have the same slow-motion (“reflexes”) gimmick as before, which for me was considerably more useful on the PS3 since I’m a total newbie with a controller.  And since some of the enemies move so fast in real time that it’s almost impossible to track them, it worked out perfectly.

Happily they addressed a lot of the cons I listed from the first game:  F.E.A.R. 2 was not as easy (possibly because I was using a controller – sometimes I had to try a section 5 or 6 times to get through it), and you can carry 4 weapons instead of 3.  Most of the time I used the assault rifle, auto shotgun and hammerhead, occasionally switching to the sniper rifle.  I rarely used the missile launcher or laser gun (the laser gun was hard to aim).  In fact, whenever I tried to use the missile launcher I tended to blow myself up.  Throwing grenades wasn’t a problem, and I also didn’t have a problem with the ladders this time around.

The bad guys didn’t swear as much, but the good guys made up for it.  Also, I didn’t see any severed heads rolling around like soccer balls. :)

As usual for modern games, it seemed short.  I finished it in two weeks of playing maybe an hour a day.  That’s especially irritating when new games are $60 a pop on the PS3.

I haven’t tried multiplayer yet.  I’ll be interested to see how that goes on the PS3.

Overall I give the single player campaign a 4… out of 5.