First Impressions: Fear 2
Today I downloaded the Fear 2 demo. As a huge fan of the first installment you might think me a little biased. However I am not blind to the games imperfections. First off the game looks incredible, the environments are rich and the character models are fairly realistic albeit bulky. The gore is extremely impressive, for example if you shoot someone in the stomach with a sniper rifle they split in half with a blood bath to follow. The Fear series is known for scares and this one doesn’t disappoint. I found in the demo a barrage of scares, which usually diminishes the scare value however this time around it didn’t. The demo is about 10 minutes long give or take and I jumped about 3 times, which is a rarity. Also there appears to be some new weapons and some new effects. One pretty cool effect is being able to shoot out books on a book shelf, however under further investigation you could shoot out all the rows except the top row which was static. It would have been nice to see all the rows able to break away. Also I tried shooting out several lights which had a cool flicker effect, but after some time would come back on to full brightness. That’s just two of the things I noticed that I wasn’t to keen on and I am sure there will be more. I know its a little knit picky, but stuff like that you shouldn’t notice and I did which was a little disappointing. Overall though the game looks like it will be pretty solid when it ships 2/10/09.
-mikey