 Review By: Jared Black |
Developer: | TimeGate Studios |
| Publisher: | Sierra Entertainment | |
| Genre: | FPS | |
| ESRB: | Mature | |
| # Of Players: | 1 (2-16 online) | |
| Online Play: | Yes | |
| Accessories: | Windows XP/2000/Vista DirectX 9.0c Pentium 4 1.7 GHz or equivalent 512MB of RAM 64 MB GeForce 4 Ti or Radeon 9000 video card or higher 7.5 GB hard drive space DVD-ROM drive |
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| Buy Now: |   |
I was a little late to the F.E.A.R. party, with my first real taste of the series coming earlier this year with the PS3 port of the original game. Nevertheless, it quickly won me over with its incredibly creepy atmosphere and solid FPS gameplay. The first expansion pack, Extraction Point, was a reasonably solid continuation of the original game, picking the story up right where it left off with an open-ended conclusion.
I knew I was in for a less than ideal experience when I first installed Perseus Mandate, as the installation program required me to install the 7.5GB of data (versus 1.8GB for Extraction Point) needed for this expansion to my C: drive. If I tried to choose my huge hard drive devoted solely to installs of games and other space-hogging applications instead, it always read it as having no free space…even though it had over 300GB of free space at the time of the install! Even after searching online I could not find a way around this limitation, which meant that I had to uninstall some programs on my C: drive before I could free up the necessary space required to install this game. A buggy installation program is not a great way to make a good first impression.
Instead of continuing where Extraction Point left off, developer TimeGate took a different route with Perseus Mandate. This expansion tells the story of a second F.E.A.R. team on the scene, with the events in this game running parallel to those in the original game and Extraction Point. This team’s objective is to learn more behind the activities at Armacham and the Perseus project, and indeed this game does add a bit to the overall story. Unfortunately, the revelations are sparse, which shouldn’t surprise anyone that is an existing fan of the series, so don’t expect much in the way of narrative.
Another problem with the story in Perseus Mandate is the fact that it does run parallel to the events in the previous two games, which means that a lot of the major events in this story won’t surprise series veterans. When that big explosion occurs (you know the one), you’ll see it from a different angle, but it’s not like this game takes any time to focus on weaving it into the overall storyline. Yes, it’s kind of cool to see some of these things from another angle, but it doesn’t exactly lead to originality.
Gameplay-wise, anyone that has played the first two games knows exactly what to expect here. The F.E.A.R. series is a pretty standard FPS experience, with its own variation of bullet time. Players have a new enemy this time in the form of the Nightcrawlers, an organized group of mercenaries that have adapted well to fighting in dark places. They seem to follow the same basic AI routines as the Replicas in previous games though, which were advanced for their time (and hold up surprisingly well today) but don’t offer much of a challenge when you’ve defeated hundreds of the same basic enemies before. The Nightcrawlers do bring some new weaponry to the table though, including a new rifle that amplifies light sources and makes it easier to hunt enemies in the dark. Other new weapons in this expansion include the Lightning Arc (shoots lightning that can jump to other nearby enemies) and a relatively ineffective grenade launcher (unless you score a direct hit) to go along with the weapons already introduced in the original game and expansion.
One positive addition to the series is that there seems to be more things in the environment that can be destroyed and used against enemies than before. It’s not a big change to the game, but I found myself using the environment a little more intelligently in key situations.
Posted: 2007-12-30 13:07:57 PST