F.E.A.R.: First Encounter Assault Recon [PC]

Download and Buy F.E.A.R. at Yahoo! Games on Demand.

First-person shooter specialist Monolith has a habit of popping up out of nowhere with esoteric and often outstanding shooters... before disappearing for years at a time. So is the case with its new release, F.E.A.R. Breaking new ground in presentation and AI, it's a sometimes-terrifying, always-gripping tour de force that easily ranks among the best single-player shooters of the year.

F.E.A.R.'s plot isn't the deepest, but it manages to keep the standard-fare first-person shooter action in context and be reasonably coherent. As coherent as a tale of psychic (and psycho) little girls and armies of clone soldiers can be, anyway. As now seems to be fashionable, it's mostly told through voicemails and computer files left by the previous occupants of the levels.

But is it really scary? The whole spooky little girl thing is getting a bit tired, but it would be a strong spine indeed that F.E.A.R. can't chill now and again. Far from being constant action, you're often walking eerily darkened corridors hunting for... something, and minutes often pass without seeing an enemy. With careful sound effects and a flashlight battery that never quite seems to last long enough, your nerves will be as taut as piano wires in no time.

Run into a gunfight, and that tension explodes into life. F.E.A.R.'s gunfights are alive in a way no other game has matched. Stray shots blast chunks of masonry loose from the walls or floors. Smoke quickly fills the air. Sparks fly as your shots ricochet off armor plates. One weapon even pins enemy soldiers to the wall with wrist-thick metal rods. F.E.A.R. also deserves kudos for not only including a range of melee attacks, but also for making them useful.

Most times, using stealth is either a primary function of the game or it doesn't work at all. F.E.A.R. lets you play both ways. Sometimes you're the spider, picking off unbeknownst soldiers; and sometimes you're the fly on the other end of the punishment. The enemies are good at spotting you, but not unfairly so. Be careless with your flashlight, or linger in well-lit areas, and they'll pick you out no matter how far away you might be.

Once they find you, they pounce with ruthless efficiency. F.E.A.R.'s smart and convincing AI breaks new ground for FPSs. It's not unusual to see them performing flanking moves, covering each other as they advance, using grenades with devastating accuracy, and generally behaving like a coherent and dynamic force. They're stiff opposition on the higher difficulty levels, where you can be blown to pieces very quickly if caught out in the open.

Assuming you haven't been living under a rock for the four years since Max Payne, you'll be all too familiar with the "bullet time" gimmick by now. But in F.E.A.R., it somehow seems fresh again -- maybe it's the way it recharges quick enough to be on tap for nearly every fight. Maybe it's the gorgeous bullet-trail effects. Maybe it's the way the slow-motion really lets you see the breathtaking amount of work that's gone into making F.E.A.R.'s gunfights look as convincing as possible.

Another particularly strong point (and it's as much a nod to the AI as to the graphics) is the range of moves the enemy soldiers can perform. You'll see them vault barriers, kick down furniture to use as cover, and peer round corners to search for you. Catch them in a shotgun blast, and they'll crumple into the wall in a superbly satisfying way.

We're only docking its visuals rating because the game is quite a system hog -- similarly pretty games run smoother on the same hardware. You shouldn't have serious problems if you're on a new system, but you might have to turn down the graphical bells and whistles a notch lower than usual.

No such gripe applies to the audio. It's outstanding. Much of F.E.A.R.'s gripping effectiveness is down to seriously good sound design, whether it's ambient noise in the hallucinations, the well-acted voice-overs or the just-right weapon sounds. When you're in the slow-time mode, the sound slows down with you, and there's something incredibly satisfying about hearing the pitch go back to normal as you flip it off, leaving nothing but the tinkle of brass as your spent shell casings fall to the ground. Gunplay doesn't get much better than this.

Multiplayer features the standard range of deathmatch and capture the flag modes we've come to expect from FPSs, but there's one twist: The slow-time feature is available in some modes. Before your brain melts at the thought of how you could possibly implement such a feature in a simultaneous multiplayer game, Monolith has a solution:

Time slows down for everyone, but your enemies' movements are slowed down far more than yours. You need to hold a special power-up for some time to charge the ability, and this marks you as a target to everyone else, so it comes at a considerable price. This aside, it's standard stuff, although the fast pace and powerful melee attacks should make it appeal to the adrenaline junkies among us.

Nothing's perfect, and F.E.A.R. does have a few niggling issues, mostly boiling down to lack of variety. The levels blur together quickly, without much to distinguish them in either objectives or surroundings. A few more enemy types wouldn't have gone amiss, either -- and at around 10 hours, it's not spectacularly lengthy.

Nevertheless, F.E.A.R. is the game that Doom 3 should have been. While it can't touch the haunting potency of survival-horror classics like Silent Hill or Resident Evil (thanks to the scare-dispelling power of a semi-automatic shotgun and a belt-full of grenades), it makes up with more adrenaline-pumping moments of sheer destructive glee than anything else on the market. Whether you're a serious first-person shooter aficionado or you just like to tear stuff up on the weekends, it's unmissable.

• -- Watch the live-action prequel videos
• -- Download the Single-Player demo