F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin

by Warner Bros

Product Features

• Confront enemy forces and Alma's supernatural powers as special forces operator Michael Becket
• Enjoy improved world interaction features as you navigate the detailed environs of a ruined city
• Experience a dramatic slow-motion effect as a result of your character's awesome reflexes
• Combat all-new enemies that use improved AI to employ advanced tactics
• Use multiplayer mode to compete with or against your friends

Product Details

• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B0016N4A7E
• Item Weight: 5.6 ounces
• Media: DVD-ROM
• Release Date: February 10, 2009
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (106 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,591 in Video Games (See Top 100 in Video Games)
  • #8 in Video Games > PC Games > Action > Fighting
• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes

Product Description

Platform: PC

Amazon.com

Confront terrors both known and unknown in a explosive battle for survival with F.E.A.R 2: Project Origin for PC. This action-packed follow-up to Monolith Productions's award-winning supernatural shooter F.E.A.R. begins where the previous game left off. This time, you'll come up against Alma's powers from the perspective of special forces operator Michael Becket. After an enormous explosion has devastated the city of Auburn, you'll quickly discover that what seemed like an ordinary mission to retrieve and interrogate Genevieve Aristide is anything but.

Ghoulish supernatural enemies give F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin a horrific, cinematic feel. View larger.

You'll explore and do battle in the dark corners of the ruined city of Auburn. View larger.

An enhanced graphics engine offers more dramatic effects. View larger.

Improved enemy AI means you'll need better tactics. View larger.

Project Origin Run Amok: Alma's Background
Fans of the first game will be familiar with the suspenseful story surrounding the psychic Alma, a peculiar and disturbing odyssey that adds depth to her devastating quest for revenge and immediacy to gameplay. Origin began as a secret military project run by the Aramacham Technology Corporation (ATC) . In an experiment run by Alma's own father, her DNA was used to create two clones that possessed her impressive psychic powers in an attempt to engineer a telepathic military commander. In the end, the research team became worried about the dangers of Alma's powers, and they tried to kill her.

While her heart stopped beating and her physical body died, her psychic energy continued to exist, and she manifested herself in many forms, including both a child and a deformed adult figure that betrays the gruesomeness of her ordeal. Due to a string of events tied to both her clones, Alma has escaped the disastrous explosion of the last game and the facility where she was held, and the haunting manifestations of her power are at work all around you, adding an unpredictable, nightmarish quality to the world.

Strange Events in a Supernatural Setting
In order to get anywhere in the rubble of the city of Auburn, you'll need to survive firefights, stay calm in the face of surprisingly graphic events, and uncover the terrifying and mysterious nature of your real enemies. Your character's phenomenal reflexes allow the much-talked-about slow motion effect from the original title to persist here, giving you an edge in combat and adding to the unique nature of your perspective.

Improved Details and Enemy AI
An enhanced graphics engine means more detailed environments to explore and better effects. The vast destruction in the city opens up a huge variety of spaces and enhances the other-worldly feel of your mission, and you better be ready to stay on guard because all-new enemies powered by improved AI don't just act more realistically than their predecessors, they employ advanced combat tactics and know how to use the environment against you. But they aren't the only ones with more resources at their disposal--additional world interaction enhancements allow you to create cover and protect yourself or remove obstacles from your path.

While it may be the horrific action and the details that first catch your eye, the tactical demands and the way story elements are slowly unveiled promise to help keep you interested as gameplay wears on. And for those times when you're not in the mood for a prolonged single-player campaign, this title also offers the ability to battle with or against friends in multiplayer mode.

Product Description

Fear Alma Again

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

101 of 118 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars F.E.A.R. 2: Project Bargain Bin, February 13, 2009

By 

Robbie (Georgia) - See all my reviews

= Fun:2.0 out of 5 stars 

This review is from: Fear 2: Project Origin (DVD-ROM)

In 2005, F.E.A.R. was an incredible experience for me. I loved the combat, loved the story, loved the scares. Which makes this experience all the more painful several years later. Simply put, F.E.A.R. 2 continues the trend of making console ports into PC games, and it's once again a tragic failure.

I will not delve on the story, except to say surprisingly few of the main characters from F.E.A.R. are in there. Sure, a certain little girl roams the halls of this new release, but other than that there is not a whole lot of the First Encounter Assault Recon team in this "F.E.A.R." experience. The story is also quite short, even on the hardest setting, but I suppose this is the trend nowadays. Or perhaps it is for another reason, like the glaringly dumbed-downed enemy AI, or the lack of an "extreme" difficulty setting like its predecessor had.

Which brings me to the laundry list of problems with this game for PC gaming. For starters, the AI pales in comparison to the original. At first I was disappointed that they took the ability to lean out of the game (especially because the enemies can still use this forbidden feature), but then I realized that it was so easy to best the AI in combat it didn't matter. And be careful when using that slow-motion, because it causes the enemies to light up with a glow effect reminiscent of Assassin's Creed, in case you had any trouble shooting them before. Overall, combat is not nearly as polished or as fun as F.E.A.R. The new cover system? Might be helpful if anything you took cover behind actually fit the player; instead, most of your body is still exposed.

And the list of egregious errors continues. There is horrible letterboxing across the top and the bottom of the screen if you do not play on a 16:9 display, meaning all monitors of standard 4:3 and widescreens of 16:10 will be out in the cold. There is a film grain which, when played at the highest resolutions, looks absolutely atrocious and ruins the depth of the graphics, which are a tad dated to begin with. Shadows are glitchy at best: sometimes they appear for certain items, sometimes not, in multiplayer never. The clumsy HUD takes up almost the entire screen. And the best part about all these mistakes? There are no options to disable them. The lack of customization in this game is laughable- it's far more restrictive than the original!

But these are mostly cosmetic fallacies- the real deal-breakers are far more critical. For example, you cannot save/load from wherever you want, but merely from a series of checkpoints. In a PC first-person shooter. Are you serious? This is an extremely visible error that screams console implementation and in no way should be included in a computer game. Want to map your extra mouse buttons as in the original? Not possible. But even that is a relatively small affair compared to the multiplayer woes of this game. In short, there are no dedicated server files or anti-cheat measures. That's right: a game which requires Steam to install and run has no real servers, merely hosted games running on other people's machines. This might be fine for an XBOX or PS3, but it is completely unacceptable in 2009 for a game to have a watered-down MP experience far worse than its 2005 predecessor. Fortunately, if and when you get MP to work it is a pretty forgettable experience. No leaning, no slow-motion, no real difference between F.E.A.R. 2 multiplayer and any other shooter. Call of Duty 4 runs circles around what this games "multiplayer" claims to be. Bottom-line: F.E.A.R. 2 has console multiplayer, and it's utterly absurd on a PC.

Overall, F.E.A.R. 2 is, simply put, the biggest disappointment for a sequel which I can recall in the last decade. Even Far Cry 2 didn't make some of the more tragic development errors F.E.A.R. 2 is chock-full of. Taking the huge PC community which loved F.E.A.R. and giving them a bargain-bin console port is the only thing that really scares me about this game. Monolith, normally a pretty reliable outfit, has gone the way of many other developers and gone after the casual console crowd with this one, and it's a shame.

People who pay one, two, three, or even four-thousand dollars plus on a computer system do not want to play a game that they could have played on a console for a couple hundred. They want the ambiance and feel of the original F.E.A.R., not some watered down garbage that caters to the more simplistic crowd. Sure, the game is scary at times, and yes, the graphics can look good given the right circumstances, but this is nothing like F.E.A.R. Gone is the intelligent combat. Gone is the legitimate feeling of fear. Gone is any chance of a multiplayer community. And, perhaps worst, gone is my fifty dollars on a game I expected to be the best shooter of 2009.

Save your money and your fond memories of the original F.E.A.R. This might as well be the Activision/Blizzard version- the one with the same name but none of the same feel. Monolith should have just left the name as Project Origin and not tarnished the good name of the F.E.A.R. franchise with this console mess. Caveat emptor.

63 of 73 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A welcome update to the F.E.A.R. franchise but requires Steam to play, February 12, 2009

By 

Nathan Beauchamp "ConsumerAdvocate" (Oak Park, IL USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

= Fun:4.0 out of 5 stars 

This review is from: Fear 2: Project Origin (DVD-ROM)

FEAR:2, the long awaited sequel to the original Fear Trilogy (not really a trilogy, but there were three games: Fear, Fear: Extraction Point, and Fear: Perseus Mandate) is finally here and it doesn't disappoint. Walking the footprints of giants in the horror game genre isn't easy, especially when one of them was your previous incarnation, the original FEAR. Gladly, they got it right, and in fact, even better than the original in many ways.

First off the level design is much more imaginative than in the original F.E.A.R. There are a wider variety of environments (No more endless office corridors!) and they are all very nicely done.

Second, the shock value is as good or better than the original with new affects, startling moments, and fast paced action akin to Doom 3. Slow moments are mixed in, complete with visions of the dead, 1st person cut scenes that move the story along, and a few nice nods to the earlier game.

One of the things I liked best in the original F.E.A.R when it was released was the way the weapons worked. They just felt 'right' and meshed with the environments to create clouds of concrete dust from bullets hitting the walls and support beams, fires, etc. That's been taken to a whole new level in FEAR:2. The combat feels cinematic with you controlling the action. It's amazing. Sometimes I wanted to just sit back and watch what was going on, but couldn't because I would have gotten hacked to pieces by one of the swarming zombies coming my way...

This is a fairly short game, and replay value is average. Once you've played it for the story and been shocked out of your socks at a few places, the intensity level will be lower. However, the game play and visuals will keep you entertained nonetheless.

One of my biggest complaints with the game is that they did a poor job of tying FEAR:2's story together at the end. It will leave you with as many questions as answers, in the same way Fear: Extraction Point frustrated me.

I am a huge advocate for DRM free games. I've written many of those 1 star reviews that so many of you dislike. I will continue to write them, because I believe draconian DRM schemes like SECUrom are terrible for the consumer, and unnecessary as well. However, in the case of FEAR:2 and STEAM, I actually am coming down on the side of STEAM (to an extent):

1. Steam is DRM, but it isn't malicious like Securom and does not enforce limited installations on your computer. It does not take root level control of you computer, and does not attempt to disable other software, nor does it potentially screw up hardware profiles for CD/DVD drives. It is in short, about as benign as I can imagine DRM being, and while it does have its problems (see below) it is a compromise that I can in good conscience make.

2. I already have a STEAM account and have had one since HL1 days, and have a completely satisfactory experience with it, including installing multiple games on a series of different computers over time.

3. STEAM does not attempt to control my computer. It does a simple check with the server and then releases me to play my games. In fact, contrary to common belief, you can unplug your computer's internet and play Steam games all you like once they are activated.

However, STEAM has some real negatives as well:

1. Potentially violates the "Doctrine Of First Sale" which guarantees my right to re-sell something that I've purchased. STEAM allows a 1 time transfer of the game to another account, but once it is moved, that's the end. No more transfers. I understand why STEAM does this: to prevent massive rings of gamers swapping games back and forth using their servers to achieve it, bogging up their download severs, etc... While I agree that is a problem for them, I think that limiting transfers violates my rights, and destroys the second hand game market.

2. Requires 'One more program' to be run on my computer. I'm pretty selective about what I install on my PC, and I hate being forced to have yet another program running just to access some of my games.

3. What happens if Steam goes out of business? Will I still have access to my games? How? None of that is spelled out in any documentation from STEAM or VALVE.

So basically I've come into this one with my eyes wide open. It's not that I love STEAM and think it is totally without faults. I just think that its faults are not enough to limit me playing a game as good as FEAR:2. STEAM itself has proved itself reliable in the last 7 years, and so I'm willing to use it to play a game I really, really want to play. The key distinction is that Securom DAMAGES my computer and TAKES AWAY MY ADMINISTRATIVE RIGHT, as well as ENFORCES LIMITED INSTALLATIONS. STEAM does none of those things.

Overall this is a great game. If you can't live with STEAM, I understand, and I honestly probably wouldn't get involved with it either if I didn't already own a bunch of games on it from years past, before I learned about DRM schemes and began to care about such things. Go in with your eyes open, and if you think it's worth the potential risks, the game itself won't disappoint you.

40 of 49 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Glorified Console Game, February 22, 2009

By 

B. V. Dam "California Candyman" (California, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

= Fun:2.0 out of 5 stars 

This review is from: Fear 2: Project Origin (DVD-ROM)

I am not about to rant about DRM/STEAM as this has worked well since Half Life so who cares. What I am going to rant about is how lousy this is.

The game that PC gamers made famous now goes CLEARLY console with an afterthought port to the PC. Jerky graphics, loss of leaning (my prized feature), lame story. FEAR original had a decent (if sometimes incoherent) story with great cut scenes and a creepy factor.

FEAR Original AI was brilliant!! Their reaction to the flashlight, grenades, your movement and they would hide and sneak up it was amazing. Equally amazing is that ALL OF THAT IS MISSING HERE!

PROS
Sierra made lots of money selling out to Vivendi or Warner Bros or whoever is responsible for this steaming pile

CONS
-Went out of my way to buy it and waited in anticipation
-A SLAP in the face of the PC gamers that made this famous
-Clearly a console game with console graphics and action
-Console jerky mouse movement (think 10 year old on Ritalin)
-WHERE IS THE LEANING????? Oh yea ran out of CONSOLE buttons I guess
-AI is STOOOOOOPID and I mean dumb as a box of rocks. On normal difficulty, I can mow then down all day.
-Poor level design (horrible to be honest)
-TOTALLY linear although they attempt to convince you that there are other ways to go
-Creepy factor has been replaced by weak attempt and flashes of Alma
-Completely lacks the original dark feel and story
-Lame dialogue ripe with foul language for no reason. In the original game when the guys would yell F*** or S*** or otherwise, it had a place and increased the realism. They sounded shocked. This just feels like an onslaught of pointless cussing to make little boys giggle.
- Grenades (a fave) are useless as their concussive damage is nil. You drop a grenade in the middle of 3 guys, they run to the wall, BOOM....nothing.
- I could go on but hopefully I have convinced you to wait until $19.99

All in all this is a major disappointment and I mean MAJOR for one of my favorite game franchises. Hell I even bought Perseus Mandate and enjoyed that even though it was an overpriced expansion pack.

Chasing the almighty dollar on console games. TOOLS!

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