Fear Effect

Fear Effect - The PS1's Swan Song Cult Classic, Now on PC! Fear Effect has a tendency to creep into my mind every now and then. Mostly because of how groundbreaking a game it was back when it released in the year 2000 for the PS1. By this time, we had already assumed that the potential of the PS1 had been completely tapped out, with games like Vagrant Story, Alien Resurrection, and my absolute GOAT, Metal Gear Solid, pushing the boundary of just what exactly that console was capable of. And then one month before the PS2 is set to release, Kronos Digital Entertainment and Eidos come out of nowhere and just flashbang everybody with an absolutely insane concept: A futuristic cyberpunk-ish story-driven game using Tank Controls and feeling like an RE/SH game in terms of controls, where every single background is made out of Full-Motion Videos, to the point that the game had to come on a whole 4 Discs! This was insane: You booted up this game, and from the very start, there are moving parts in the entire background. Air vents have propellers going back and forth while the sound of it is in your ear, along with other ambient sounds and background music that is quite moody. The story is as follows: The daughter of a wealthy Triad Boss goes missing, and you and the 3 Mercenaries, Hana, Glas, and Deke, catch wind of it and try to collect on the bounty on her head. This throws all of them down a rabbit hole while hunting for her, which ends up growing into a lot more than just that. With characters being caught up in their past, supernatural phenomena, and even the end of the world being all viable endgame scenarios on the table here. The game is quite short, which is why I won't say anything more about the story. What I can say, though, is that the gameplay is BRUTAL. The controls are very unintuitive at first and require some finagling here and there to start pulling off moves. For instance, your melee weapon can be used to stealth kill enemies by crouch-walking up behind them. You are more accurate when crouched, and you can dodge enemy fire by rolling in the 4 cardinal directions, giving you invincibility frames for the duration (This is important, do NOT forget this.) Enemies dish out a lot of damage, but once you figure out how their AI works, it can become easy. They won't shoot at you when they aren't on screen, meaning that you can run back to a different camera angle and have them come running at you and get the drop on them. On top of that, you can also dual-wield weapons to target two enemies at the same time, which is CRUCIAL. Your health bar is actually more akin to what modern shooters are: You lose health when shot or running into environmental hazards, and it will ONLY replenish when hitting certain checkpoints. Those could be triggered by picking up a key item, or going through a specific door, or after a cutscene. There are also a fair bit of puzzles in the game. That range from "Hmm, that is quite easy" all the way to "Wow, this was obtuse and required me to look up a guide just to understand it". Sometimes key items will be hidden in the corner of a room and won't be shown to you unless you have meta-knowledge of it being there and walk up to it, seeing the camera angle change, and then picking it up. The game, in this regard, is just as punishing and brutally difficult as the original. With many setpieces and insta-kill moments that require you to load a previous checkpoint. This was a PAIN back on the PS1 because of how dense and full of data the discs were, the load times would always be between 20-30 seconds every time you died. So you REALLY didn't wanna mess things up. Now, with this port, most of these issues are trivialities, and let me tell you why: What we are playing here is actually a modified version of the game. Quite literally, the very PS1 Rom for this game has been modified, and you can tell because when you start up the game, the old PS1 controller prompts have been replaced with Xbox controller prompts. Load Times are pretty much instantaneous between the main menu and starting a new game. They have always been a pain to deal with and adjust on Emulators because there is a chance that a higher load speed in the settings could freeze your game and force a reset.ikewise, it is for when you die and reload a save. Disc-Swapping is also gone, the game seamlessly swaps between all 4 discs for you between each of the 4 main levels, saving you a lot of pain doing it yourself. Loading a save is something you do not HAVE to do, because in addition to these enhancements, you can now use a pretty handy Rewind System and a Savestate System to roll back the game to go back to the moment just before you died, fix your mistakes, and move on without a hassle. All of this can be handily accessed at ANY time by pressing the Select Button In this very same menu, you will also find that you can swap between the Widescreen and OG 4:3 Aspect Ratio (I REALLY recommend you play in 4:3 because Widescreen just stretches the game unnaturally to fit your screen), and also an option to enable, disable, or tweak a CRT filter to your liking. Something that I also immediately saw is that there is a new control method offered to the player. The "Enhanced Movement" is turned on by default. This new mode allows you to control all 3 characters with the left analog stick directly, where when you press up on it, your character will move UP on the screen rather than simply forward where they are facing. And the right stick will allow you to turn your character around in place for aiming at enemies. This new option makes the game a lot more accessible to new players, but comes with the classic issue that such a control scheme has with fixed camera angles: Upon the camera angle changing, the slightest move of the stick will have your character jerking around to move into a different direction than where you are going. Making this a very annoying control method for me. So I just turned that off and stuck with the Tank Controls I am used to from years of playing this game. What disappoints me is the complete lack of touch-ups when it comes to the graphics. The game is offered as-is, meaning it's in 240p. Which, depending on your monitor size, can look ugly. But I can see why they kept it this way: For years, when trying to upscale this game, all that would happen is that the 3D models would upres'd while the FMVs stayed the same because they are video files. This problem sadly has led to a lot of users downvoting the game and chalking it up to laziness, when this has been a problem for years, even on Emulators, for years. I'd prefer the old chonky 240p look over some AI-upscale Slop. I'm glad to say: The game was NOT censored. Everything is still as horny and gore-y as it used to be. This is a serviceable way to play Fear Effect 1, especially for a new player who doesn't want to deal with the hassle of emulating and fixing the quirks this game has. Yeah it isn't a perfect port and it feels like only the bare necessities were done to make it work. But this is a decent way to preserve the game and make it more accessible to a modern audience. I hope this game and the port of Fear Effect 2 (which comes out in 2026 and HOPEFULLY won't be cancelled) do well enough to show Squeenix that there is interest for this franchise. Tips for New Players: - Swap the game to hard in the options. Otherwise you are locked out of the True Ending - Use the Knife. It is an instakill on unaware enemies and it pretty much mandatory to use on Hard because Enemies take more hits to kill. - Crouch when Firing. You will lock on faster and be more accurate when firing - Don't be afraid to look up a guide and/or use the Rewind feature. This game is brutal in difficulty and obtuse at times in how you need to progress. - Use ONE SAVE SLOT per level or you might softlock yourself with no ammo (4 Levels, 4 Slots, easy.)

while i definitely enjoy the ability to rewind on a whim to avoid the time it takes waiting out the occasional gameover, not having any sort of way to clean up the resolution of the game in 2026 is kind of a "what the hell?" i can run the game on duckstation basically on the base hardware setting of the PSX and get INFINITELY better visuals (WITH a rewind feature, too.) so, really, all we are being offered is an lazy official port that doesn't even offer features unofficial means to play DO offer. buy it if you want, but if you want a good visual experience just emulate it. i won't be buying the sequel until we can at least get the ability to clean the image up patched in.

A tolerable experience. Should have had some kind of visual upgrade as it is incredibly blurry. Looks nowhere near as good as store images/videos. Buy on sale, or just emulate it yourself. Don't reward laziness by buying at full price.

DO NOT BUY! The game is borderline unplayable in it's current state and with no way to up the resolution it looks like TRASH! This is not the way to play this! Got look into other ways to play this game! The issue here isn't the game. Fear Effect is a great game over all. It's the presentation. Square / Limited Run Games do not have any optimizations in their Emulator to sharpen the image/up the resolution. If they fix that then I could recommend this. This is a huge Sin on PC. As it stands right now, There are better ways to play this and I would say to go seek those out

Fear Effect is a hidden gem of the PS1 era. A classic survival horror type game that hasn't aged the best, but is worth experiencing. There's built in cheats at least if the aged gameplay is too much for you. This is a basic port, but that's fine for me as it tries to preserve as much as it can the PS1 experience.

Refunded. Nihilistic AI cover art just kept grinding my gears every time I saw it. Deke looks like Omni Man and they said "It'll do". Will consider repurchase at later date.

No tutorial, no virtual manual to see what the controls are, no way to change the controls. Nothing. It's a guessing game to even get the game started. It slaps the controls on screen once when you first start the game and never shows them again. No known way to pull them back up. Basically a band-aid. Incredibly lazy port. Unless the most basic necessities are implemented, it's a waste of your time.

Halfway through the game I didn't receive the weapons I was supposed to so I became soft-locked with no way to kill the enemies. Apparently this can happen in various places during the game so I'm not exactly hyped about restarting just to run into the same problem again. Not recommended until the problem is fixed.

Reviewing the Steam version of Fear Effect is a very tricky situation. Of course having a port of a PS1 classic on PCs biggest platform is a welcome addition and it comes with a couple of nice additions like a rewind feature, achievements and a widescreen presentation. The game runs without issues and even a known glitch that comes from emulating the game is gone here (granted there's a chance that issue only comes when smoothing out the textures but I digress). But and this is a big but... This is as barebone as a port can get. Unless I am mistaken this is outright emulated and not a native port of any kind. Meaning barely any visual upgrades (despite new emulators doing wonders when running PS1 titles) or of any kind really. Not going to sugarcoat it, this looks horrible. The game was designed for small CRT TVs and the developers didn't even attempt to make it look nice for newer displays. Everything is extremely pixelated to the point that at points I had to squint me eyes to make out text on some spots or even notice doors in certain areas. The beatiful comic book art style is lost under pixels that are so big on my monitor that in many cases I am not even sure what am I looking at. Hey, if you kept your old CRT monitor from the late 90s around, just plug that one on your PC instead, it will probably improve the experience by a lot. As for the game, as much as I love it, it's is also a pretty weird experience. What starts as an action-spy thriller where our team of protagonists try to meet with an informant regarding a mission they plan on completing ends up at a river village swarming with zombies and then continues to escalate from there nearing the absurd (don't want to say more but the final disc/chapter is just insane). Gameplay wise, it's plays as a more action packed Resident Evil (the classic PS1 ones). You can use stealth to save ammo or clear rooms without the risk of losing health but it's not really required you can easily mow down your enemies without issues. And of course, you can't have an RE clone without puzzles and this is probably the biggest flaw of the game. There are some decent ones, some stupidly easy ones, but there are a handful that are borderline nonsensical and even after all these years I am not sure what is the logic behind a couple of them. Doesn't help that in some cases the solution is behind the extremely low resolution easily missing clues (or outright not being able to distinguish them). If it was any random game, I would probably just click the thumbs-down icon and move on. But I just love this quirky little game (and I do mean little, even when stuck you can probably finish it in like 3-4 hours tops). So it's hard telling you to avoid it. What I can suggest though is that unless you really want to support the franchise hoping it gets a revival in the future, maybe play this via emulation. The FMV backgrounds are less stretched and a bit less pixelated even in a stretched window, the textures are clearer and actually fit the comic book look of the game and even if you don't have the rewind feature, you can still just use quick save/load so its not a big loss (heck if you really want achievements you can use RetroAchievements to get them in the PS1 version as well). Still, if you don't want to bother with emulation or seeking out the original PS1 discs, this is a cheap solution that will get the job done.

Controls are ♥♥♥♥.