izigame.me

I am admittedly way late to the party on this one, but I felt I had to post nonetheless in order to (hopefully) save a few die-hard fans of the series from wasting their time and money on this heap of garbage.
Disclaimer: I knew full well within the first 30 minutes of the game, that I should have gone for my Steam refund on this one. But I wanted to finish out the series, and give it a full chance. It is somewhat satisfying having closure to the cliff-hanger that was FEAR 2, but I cannot with good conscience recommend this game to ANYONE. It is objectively bad in almost every aspect of its making, and it's a terrible shame that the fans were left with this, when so much more seemed to be in store.
FEAR 3 was set up by its predecessors extraordinarily well to be a truly epic ending to a series. But then it almost immediately demonstrated that it was going to be a complete and total LETDOWN. First things first: if you've played any of the previous FEAR games, throw out everything you know about the gameplay. FEAR is now a cover-based shooter, where even the dumbest and weakest of your enemies will kill you quickly on higher difficulties if you don't play by the new rules, covering often while you heal. FEAR 3 feels so disjointed at times from all of the cobbled-together aspects, that it's painfully obvious that this is no longer a FEAR game. It's a feeble attempt to mimic other "successful" games on the market (*cough*CoD*cough).
The guns all feel watered down with only one or two exceptions. I wasn't the biggest fan of the ASP Rifle in the first FEAR, but it was effective. In FEAR 3, its equivalent, the G3A3 Assault Rifle (which ironically by name SHOULD be the successor to the G2A2 Assault Rifle from the first game, but clearly ISN'T) is the ONLY gun that frankly didn't suck in some way. The shotgun was OP in OG FEAR, but in FEAR 3, it neither has the imposing sound nor the deleterious effect of turning your enemies into a red mist, so it's kind of useless except against certain enemies. Grenades just can't be thrown with any reliable accuracy; more often than not you'll end up with the grenade rolling off into some area NEAR your enemy, but just far enough away such that it won't KILL your enemy. And all the specialty weapons either don't exist, or are only handed to you so sparingly throughout the campaign that you don't really have all that much time to fall in love with anything they might have to offer.
Movement is also quite different. Now that FEAR is a cover shooter, say goodbye to all that frenetic, high-energy dancing all over the map with your enemies. Because this new cover mechanic is entirely BROKEN with the addition of your slow-motion abilities, I basically cheesed my way through nearly every single fight.
I will admit that the vehicle fights were at least entertaining, though not particularly challenging. It was indeed fun to engage in a slugfest with other mecha enemies from time to time. Without this addition to break up the monotony, I have no doubt that the new gameplay loop would have felt like an infinite slog towards... somewhere... maybe?
The story. Oh dear GOD, the story. What in the actual **** were the writers of this game thinking? LITERALLY mindless writing leaving you with a POINTLESS conclusion regardless of which ending you get. I'm Not buying the idea that "Point Man" from the first game is going to play ball with Fettel, and I'm not buying that Fettel cares or "needs" his brother's help to escape whatever facility the game starts in (he's a freaking GHOST). The loading screens and occasional cutscenes try to indicate that seeds of distrust have been sewn between the two brothers, and that they are somehow competing with each other for... IDK, their mother's approval (literally that at the end... BLEH). But Point Man's look says "I just wanna kill all of you paranormal freaks" and Fettel's actions throughout the game are there to do nothing other than provide the occasional moment of deus ex machina for you at seemingly impossible scenarios that need a paranormal touch to resolve. But I guess, when you're in a paranormal playhouse of sorts, you'll take whatever handouts you can get if they'll help you to survive. The story just sort of meanders around aimlessly, and you sort of just find yourself at the end going "uh, what?", or in my case "WHY??!".
Speaking of the paranormal... Alma. Good GOD what they did to Alma... Without giving any spoilers away, let's just say that she isn't a threat anymore, and therefore she isn't SCARY anymore. Now realistically any time you see her for the split second they put her in an area, you're likely going to still get that skin-crawl effect that has been burned into your very core from the trauma you experienced completing the first couple of games, but then you stop and say to yourself "oh right... she's "good(?) in this game" and then immediately wonder why they put that creepy little tidbit in if it does nothing to serve the story and actually shouldn't be scary (not really anyway) in the context under which she's being presented (protective mother...maybe?).
So if Alma isn't the enemy here, who is? No spoilers, but let's just say you've seen him before, and until now there was ABSOLUTELY NO REASON TO BELIEVE HE HAD ANY PSYCHIC ABILITIES, but yet somehow he seems to be a very real threat to all three of the uh... anti-heroes in our story.
The ending. WHOOOOAAH buddy. That ending. Again, no spoilers here, but yeah... In FEAR 2 you were left with one HELL of a surprise CLIFFHANGER of an ending, one that I didn't see coming, and although it's a bit asinine if you think about it, was shocking enough to at least put your mind into that "OH MY GOD" state of despair and terror at the prospects of what was implied. FEAR 3, on the other hand, well... the short bus came in hot with its riveting story and absurd plot points. I suppose that a large portion of what happened here, is that in the other FEAR titles, you're playing as the opposing team (the ones trying to fight Alma and Fettel). Now that Point Man has apparently switched teams (or HAS he? GASP!), and everything is about "family" (UGH), I guess the veil has been peeled back a little bit, and you get to see that all of that terror and mayhem (of which there is still plenty, BTW) was really just being caused by a couple of dysfunctional kids who didn't like having psychic powers and so decided it was their entire purpose of existence to END everyone else's, and that most of the chaos was really just Alma being in a lot of physical pain--for a ghost.
The aftermath. I was left with a lot of questions. WHY does this game exist? WHO approved it, and HOW did they think that any of the writing was in any way passable when standing next to literally any other entry in the series? I could have forgiven the developers for selling out on its gameplay mechanics; for abandoning their aesthetics to mimic modern titles at the time; heck, even for the absolutely ATROCIOUS level design throughout most of the game (invisible walls and lazy flow ideas abound). But FEAR always had one thing going for it that set it apart from its competition: a COMPELLING story with incredibly EERY content that could make your skin crawl just from the ideas being spawned inside your mind. FEAR and FEAR 2 were thoughtful and original treatments to the horror genre, translated extremely well over to the interactive medium of video games. FEAR 3, however, decided to dump that formula, adopt generic horror tropes and mediocre jump-scares instead of truly HARROWING content and ideas we've come to expect; attempting to glue it all together with a poor copy-paste of the CoD FPS mechanics. And that's what we got. A mediocre FPS, a cheap set of thrills that only truly reaches the point of being "scary" once or twice over its entire stay, and a dumpster-fire ending for Alma and the brothers that held SO. MUCH. POTENTIAL. Poor treatment of excellent source material.