So yes, F3.A.R or whatever the stupid name given to it is.
I had never played the original F.E.A.R. Just before it released I had to sacrifice my top end gaming machine in order to fund my car. For many years afterward I had a really poor PC based on a Celeron D with 256mb ram. It wasn't that I had gone off of gaming, just that I couldn't afford it and even if I could have my selfish ex wife would have disowned me for building a gaming PC.
With my gaming PC sold (the specs of which are laughable now but were so uber for the time) I forgot about gaming. Thus, F.E.A.R went by me completely stealthily and I had no idea it even existed.
I was sitting on the toilet one day reading though an old gaming mag (my reading room) and I noticed F.E.A.R 2 as a preview. I hurried back to my PC and sure enough it had released ages ago, so I bought it for like £2.50. I loved it. It was quite easy, but had one of the most gripping storylines ever in a game. I wasn't frightened by Alma, more completely intriuged. I just wanted to get further into it to see more of her, and figure out what was going on. F2 (I'm sick of typing F.E.A.R now so fuck it) was a fantastic game. I really, really enjoyed it. So imagine my pleasure at knowing that a third iteration was on its way !.
But, when F3 finally released my bubble was well and truly burst. It's fucking awful.
Let me explain why. Firstly the story gets rather muddled. At the end of F2 Alma has her wicked way with you, and the final scenes contain her putting your hand on her tummy. She's quite clearly baking a bun in the oven, so you would naturally expect nature to take its course and the popped sprog to be the subject matter of F3. The thing is F3 seemed rather muddled. There was no mention of Alma, and, during my incredibly upsetting eight hour attempt to get into it no sighting of her either.
Now I had made sure to read a good few reviews before investing and from what I could gather it was hailed as being a very good game. This was not to be sadly.
Firstly F3 was incredibly clunky. It just didn't feel good to play at all. At first I thought it could be my mouse as my mouse is rather fussy. I cleaned the mousepad and the lens of the lazer, callibrated it using Razer's software and even tried every DPI setting it had. But alas, the game was still very clunky. I tried speeding up my pointer but then the aiming was just incredibly twitchy and it was close to impossible to hit anything. The machine gun tends to lift as you fire it, and this coupled with the terrible clunky (or twitchy) aiming just made things very frustrating. I was becoming annoyed, and fast.
And then it got worse. I was tossed into a town with streets looking like they were literally lifted from COD MW2 and fucking dropped into the game. There was absolutely nothing new there at all, and if anything MW2 had it nailed quite well. Don't get me wrong I don't like MW2 at all as any fun to be had is very short lived (four hours short to be precise) and I don't do online gaming. However, there are some truly wonderful moments of bliss in MW2 so I would imagine that it's that they were trying to emulate in F3.
And, they fucked it up, royally.
The streets you are on have no way markers and no direction. I found myself running up and down like a fucking linesman on the Sunday football. After a couple of hours and being incredibly frustrated I finally managed to find my way out and started making my way to the rooftops.
Just a quick digression here folks. I don't like hard games. I like a challenge, but I don't like ending up stuck in a quagmire of MDS (multiple death syndrome). And F3 has that shit in fucking abundance. In the end I managed to stay alive for about an hour on this rooftop, taking out never ending enemies. I did try resorting to the "Fuck it and run" technique but then I just got my head ripped off. After about (literally) five hours of trying to pass that point I gave up and I haven't played it since. I simply uninstalled it and chucked the fucking Amaray up in the "Done" cupboard above my desk.
I can understand why game creators are taking a more hard lined approach. Games in recent years have been too easy. The thing is in my opinion I want to see all of the game. Games to me are like movies. If they tell a story (which F3 desperately tries to do but fails on every level) then I want all of it. I want the fucking ending. If I sit down for a wank I don't bring myself to the point of ejaculation and then stop and say "Sod it, will do that again later". So if a game is too easy it simply means I can play through it all very quickly.. HOWEVER, I can play through it all and I can see all of it. £29.99 is what a top end PC game costs now. That's about twice that of a DVD movie and if the game can provide me with four hours of entertainment I have gotten my bang for buck. If it lasts longer? bargain. If it lasts like Fallout 3 or FONV or Borderlands? hand it a fucking medal.
What a game can't do, however, is become so infuriatingly hard that it is beyond completion for some one like me. I don't have the patience to sit around on a rooftop for two fucking hours trying to kill two million fucking enemies just to make it to the next checkpoint. Talking of checkpoints.... Fuck sake where is the manual save? Why the fuck are PC owners all of a sudden being treated like fucking kids with a console? How much money and time would it fucking take to put in the quicksave function? Half Life was a hard game, you pressed F5 when you got cover and you carried on. In F3 you can spend an hour in a gunfight, die, and have to start it all over again.
Needless to say I really don't like this game at all. And before you say it no, this isn't a review as reviews involve scores and likes and dislikes. I fucking hate this game and there is nothing to like. I hate the graphics, I hate the fucking physics and I hate console fucking shit that ends up on a PC.
And that, said the mayor, was that.
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