F.E.A.R. Perseus Mandate Review (Konrad Bobrowitz)
Even though I enjoyed some aspects of Perseus Mandate, it still is quite bad for many reasons.
As it was the case with Extraction Point, Perseus Mandate was made by Timegate, not Monolith, however the quality took a complete nosedive after the first expansion. It's simply unfinished. Bugs everywhere, undetailed environments, awful textures and lighting not working properly. As a whole Perseus Mandate looks worse than the base game and plays also much worse than both Extraction Point and the base game. The environmental interaction is basicly non-existent, the levels, even though they sound great as a concept and possibly have been polished into something great, are plain, boring and not fun to play through. I was literally speedrunning this game because I just wanted it to end.
Sure there are some additions such as new enemies that have insane ammounts of health and deal insane ammount of damage to you, new and boring guns (+ of course Extraction Point guns which were great) that barely work (except the llighting gun, that one is kind of cool) and friendly npc combat encounters. Oh god. Please no. Extraction point had one such encounter and it kind of worked. It wasn't perfect but it did the job. Perseus mandate has more encouters of this nature but the arenas do not account for extra targets that the enemy npcs have to shoot at. This creates very akward moments in the gameplay and feel janky at best and straight up awful at worst.
The story is a complete dumpsterfire full of plotholes and is overall insignificant, low stakes and uninteresting. It could have been made into something great, I'm sure, but the end result is a dissapointment. The same goes for the horror. There is barely any and most horror encounters are inferior both to the base game and the first expansion.
If you really want more F.E.A.R. I think you could still find some enjoyment here. Perseus Mandate has the same mechanics and gameplay as the base game, it's just that everything else is lacking. They were actually so lazy that they copypasted the same map but backwards from Extraction Point. Just beware that everything in this game screams low quality and even though you most likely own this game since it's a part of the F.E.A.R. bundle, I still wouldn't recommend playing it.