F.E.A.R. Extraction Point Review (Konrad Bobrowitz)
If you liked F.E.A.R. I think you'll also most likely enjoy Extraction Point. You might as well give it a shot because afterall, it's not like you can just buy what you want, it's all a part of a bundle.
Made by a different studio, Timegate, Extraction Point still has the same gameplay, same enemy AI, same weapons (with some additions), runs on the same engine and has comparable environmental detail with a variety of environmental settings instead of just offices (unlike the first game). I'd say that the encounters match the base game's quality and intensity and in some cases even exceed the base game. That's a really high bar to pass and this expansion deserves all the praise in regards to the action, set pieces and combat encouters it got over the years.
Most of what's new is a great addition and I think it uses the base game's mechanics in the right way to get the most of the gameplay loop while also putting you into new sitiuations which prevent the game from feeling stale. However, even though you get more lore here and some characters get fleshed out, the story overall makes little sense and a lot of plotholes are present. That is perhaps why Monolith have ruled out the plot relevancy of both the expansions when creating F.E.A.R. 2 and onwards (but it's not like it helped them in any way since F.E.A.R. 2 and 3 still are... what they are).
Unfortunatelly, Extraction Point is a buggy mess of a game. I've even nearly put it down just because of the ammount of crashes, stutters, frame rate issues etc. I've encountered . I eventually found a guide on how to make it more stable, but the game still ran badly on my pc. For a game that's seventeen years old, this behaviour is uneccaptable. Thank god for those guides.
If you wanted more F.E.A.R., Extraction point is here to satiate your apetite especially when it comes to the combat encounters. It's not long but very well paced and polished (not in the optimization department though). I'd recommend you try it out because if you have F.E.A.R. there is a high likelihood that you already own it so there isn't much to lose.