First Encounter Assault Recon.
One of Monolith Production's most timeless shooters and a underrated gem released during the trend of setting the bar high for graphical fidelity over DirectX 9 in games and Japanese psychological horror becoming popular with Hollywood.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDahUdiBCA4
After the release of Shogo: Mobile Armor Division in 1998, Monolith had plans on an action-hero shooter in the vain of John Woo's Hard Boiled and The Matrix, wanting to develop a game that made shooting enemies as flashy as possible as opposed to simple FPS routines but also got under the player's skin with a subtle, cerebral atmosphere and dark story inspired by Japanese films like The Ring, Dark Water, The Grudge, and Akira.
The center of F.E.A.R.'s story being Alma Wade; a visage of a little girl of which the player (designated in the loading screens as "the Point Man") and namesake government organization must dig up lore across the game to figure out the correlation between her and the game's antagonist, Paxton Fettel, who psychically controls an army of clones known as the Replicas to war against the Armacham Technology Corporation. The more the Point Man digs, the more blood lines the walls, dark visions manifest into reality, and questions rise of who or what they are. While not a cohesive story when compared to others of the time like HL2, it works as a baseline for the more engrossing gameplay.
At the heart of bringing F.E.A.R.'s vision to life is the Lithtech Jupiter EX engine. A major advancement of its predecessor, it brought in a plethora of intensive graphical features like parallax mapping, volumetric lights, and soft stencil shadows to become a benchmarking program of its time two years before Crysis. Paired with an advanced particle system capable of sending sparks, glass, and debris flying all around in a single scene and Havok Physics to deliver the game's stellar animations, full body awareness, and ragdoll physics. All together resulting in an amazingly immersive game predating the Xbox360/DirectX 10 era.
The biggest highlight of game's technology would of course be the AI. Working off of the G.O.A.P. (Goal Oriented Action Planning) architecture, it allowed for enemies and squads to decide on the fly the plan of their approaches and how to act mid-combat. Player stand in one spot? One will draw fire while another seeks a flanking position. Needs cover? An object flagged as a "SmartObject" will be flipped over and used as cover. Need to get through a small space? The enemy will crouch through or crawl to get to where they're going. All while they project convincing voice lines of their actions and chatter amongst one another to support to illusion of coordination. However, because of it's advanced nature, levels had to be simplified in their design in order for the AI to not get hung up on poor navmesh implementations; resulting in rooms that felt rather empty and sparse in their lack of details. Nevertheless, the system really drives the game home the idea of smart enemies that puts a lot of modern implementations to shame in the gaming industry with others like Deus Ex: Human Revolution, S.T.A.L.K.E.R., and Just Cause 2 adapting GOAP into their AI systems as well.
A game cannot be at its best without good sound design and F.E.A.R. knocks it out of the ball park. Packed with punchy guns, atmospheric droning, and unnerving stingers and environment effects, F.E.A.R. is a fantastic game to play with headphones and surround sound. (Highly recommend downloading DSOAL https://github.com/kcat/dsoal/releases to fix the game's EAX 4.0 implementation of reverb, occlusion, etc. as well as HRTF for headphone users) The game's soundtrack, composed by Monolith's own Nathan Grigg, sets the tone for the game's action and tension perfectly when you're not on your toes with moments of piercing silence.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekfHBamHU54
(Trailer for the Xbox 360 port of the expansions, still resembles the original)
While Steam displays the game's expansions', Extraction Point and Perseus Mandate, as standalone games, they already come bundled with the base game and act as merely executables... which is an oddity of how it works. Vivendi Games held the rights to FEAR and published two expansions out of their new best-selling IP. Resulting in two developed by TimeGate Studios who ever recognized for their real-time strategy games. Both games releasing from medium-high to middling reviews with Perseus Mandate being criticized for ugly levels with flat architecture and bland lighting, an aging game engine after the release of more graphically impressive games of 2007, a boring story with no payoff with its ending, and terrible AI combat that felt stiff compared to the base game. The future of F.E.A.R. was not for the dying Vivendi Games and Warner Brothers, who had acquired Monolith back in 2004, took the rights to the IP name back in time for Project Origin's release to be renamed F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin. The expansions themselves going on to be considered non-canon to Monolith's sequel.
Extraction Point would become the "sequel that never was" to fans who wanted more out of F.E.A.R. 2 but were disappointed by Monolith's approach. Offering three memorable new weapons for the player to reek havoc on enemies and a story continuing off the base game's cliffhanger ending; seeing the remaining F.E.A.R. squad navigate their way through a dark and dead city to escape to their supposed extraction point. Perseus Mandate, on the other hand, takes place parallel to the base game as a secondary team of F.E.A.R. operatives enact an espionage on Armacham's operations all while a mercenary group known as the Nightcrawlers infiltrate Armacham for their own ends. Introducing two new weapons that were hit-and-miss to say the least. Both games were narratively weak, with Perseus Mandate having the benefit of a unique story and imo better action that and plot points that feel pointless to progression. Both maintain serviceable gameplay albeit lacking of coordinated level design and feel artificially difficult; playing Extraction Point on Hard has enemies chew through health and armor like you weren't full to begin with that makes Extreme difficulty just broken.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgoZHvCRK1I
Nowadays, this game will not run 100% out-of-the-box with performance regression over gameplay, a growing list of bugs from modern hardware, and (when not burdened by the low FPS) unstable physics with high framerates. This can all be fixed with EchoPatch; an AIO fix, widescreen/4K, and QoL fix mod. Pair this with the DSOAL mod I mentioned earlier and you'll get the best vanilla experience of F.E.A.R. in all its glory. github.com/Wemino/EchoPatch/releases
The game also lacks multiplayer now with the removal of GameSpy servers rendering the MP executable unusable. There is however a fix for the MP that requires a bit of careful reading to put together. Prerequisites and a launcher can be found here to make the Steam version multiplayer-ready: https://github.com/2cwldys/FEAR-Launcher/releases
There's also F.E.A.R. Combat, which is a standalone version of the multiplayer component and being handled by a community known as SEC that can be downloaded here: https://fear-community.org/
The modding community also provides some fresh experiences once you've completed the game. You can try Sikkmod; which pushes the visuals further with modern shader effects, 2x Textures; which provides higher quality AI-upscaled textures (personally, I don't like the results and stick to the old textures), Complete Edition; which adds a ton of aspects from FEAR 2 and 3 into the base game and expansions for a bigger experience, Resurrection; a small map mod connecting FEAR to Condemned, and MMod; which tweaks and refines gameplay aspects and effects for more detailed and empowering gameplay.
https://www.moddb.com/games/fear
