Before we begin, it should be noted that this is an intensely violent game with some pretty terrible stuff being done by really terrible people. If that’s not your thing, consider yourself warned.
F.E.A.R.: First Encounter Assault Recon is a first person horror influenced shooter released in 2005. It was developed by Monolith Productions (who have an interesting track record) and published by Vivendi Universal Games through Sierra Entertainment. The game’s horror elements are heavily influenced by films like the Ring and the Grudge, such as a creepy pale girl with long black hair and unimaginable power. But then, they’d have to make the monster pretty powerful considering how unstoppable a killing machine the player character is.
This will be a subtitled LP by me: Twiggymouse. The game puts a lot of emphasis on atmosphere and “audio logs” to fill in the story and flesh out the game world, so I don’t want to be yakking over the top of it. Videos will typically be somewhere between 10 and 30 minutes, and will be released on Wednesdays and Sundays. There might be a couple bonus videos throughout the LP, but otherwise, it should be pretty straightforward.
Pretty simple:
Don’t be a dick.
Don’t spoil shit. I know this game is over ten years old, but it’s got some decent twists, so don’t spoil it for the people who don’t know what’s up. If you must talk about spoilers, use the tags, yeah?
And that’s about it.
The year is 2025. F.E.A.R., a special branch of the government tasked with dealing with paranormal activities, has been sent to find and eliminate Paxton Fettel, a psychic commander with an army of clones. We play the Point Man, the newest member of F.E.A.R. in his first real assignment on the team.
F.E.A.R. - A government organization that deals with paranormal activities. We play the new Point Man on the team. Apparently, people know about F.E.A.R. since Jankowski makes a comment about how no-one takes them seriously.
ATC – Armacham Technology Corporation is the company responsible for developing the psychic commander program that Paxton Fettel came from, as well as developing the clone army that he leads: the Replicas. It’s unsure what exactly they do, but it’s obviously shady.
The Replicas – The army of clones lead by Paxton Fettel. Betters refers to them as “highly trained and heavily armed”. We know there’s a battalion of them, but apparently taking down Fettel will put them all down.
Name: Point Man
Affiliation: F.E.A.R.
Our player character and the newest recruit to the F.E.A.R. team. He has remarkably fast reflexes (which is why we have SlowMo), but is otherwise pretty unremarkable. We don’t even know his real name.
Name: Paxton Fettel
Affiliation: Replicas
The cannibalistic leader of the Replica forces. He was ‘created’ by ATC, and is the child of Alma, the creepy little girl who’s been following us around. He’s our main target, and apparently taking him out will deal with the Replicas, as well. As of Episode 19, he’s finally dead. He was apparently Alma’s son, and made a claim that we were brothers…
Name: Creepy Little Girl (Not Samara) Alma Wade
Affiliation: ?
A creepy little girl with long black hair in a red dress. She’s apparently the manifestation of Fettel’s dead mother. She most likely looks as young as she does because she was put into a coma at 8, so that’s the last clear image of herself she has. Her psychic powers mean she can cause all sorts of damage just by being around, but she doesn’t seem to be that interested in actually killing the Point Man. As of Episode 19, she’s loose and summoning all sorts of apparitions to kill us.
Name: Rodney “Rowdy” Betters
Affiliation: F.E.A.R.
The leader of F.E.A.R. He’s the voice in our ear and is our go to guy for logistics and information. He doesn’t seem to hate us, which is more than can be said about Jankowski.
Name: Spencer Jankowski
Affiliation: F.E.A.R.
Ostensibly the leader in the field for F.E.A.R., though he tends to bow to Betters and Sun-Kwon, both. He doesn’t have a lot of faith in us, has some issues with personal space, and as of Interval 02, is a creepy ash ghost man.
Name: Jin Sun-Kwon
Affiliation: F.E.A.R.
Sun-Kwon is the technical officer/field medic/forensics officer for F.E.A.R., and as such is in charge of interpreting all the fucked up shit we come across. She’s cool. As of Episode 15, she’s more or less out of commission because of a helicopter crash.
Name: Charles “Chuck” Habegger
Affiliation: Armacham
A dead guy found by the F.E.A.R. team who ended up getting eaten by Fettel. We don’t really know anything else about him. He keeps popping up in voice mails and stuff, so he’s clearly involved in this whole mess.
Name: Bill Moody
Affiliation: Armacham
Another one of Fettel’s victims. We find him almost dead in a chair and he gives us two pieces of possibly crucial information: The name ‘Alma’, and the word “Origin”.
Name: Norton Mapes
Affiliation: Armacham (Aristide)
Mapes is a computer guy in some capacity and also a verified piece of shit. We don’t know why he’s here, but he doesn’t seem too awful fond of us. He’s officially shown back up, and it’s now clear he’s working for Genevieve Aristide. As of Episode 18, he’s officially taken a bullet to the gut from Harlan Wade, and it looks like he’s failed at destroying the vault.
Name: Aldus Bishop
Affiliation: Armacham
A fairly low-level employee at Armacham, he was one of the people dispatched to look into the vacating of Auburn. When we meet him, he’s strapped to a chair with explosives strapped to him, so it’s clear that somebody didn’t want him to talk. As of Episode 09, Bishop talking is no longer an issue, since they blew him up.
Name: Sgt. Douglas Holiday
Affiliation: F.E.A.R. (Delta Force attachment)
Holiday is the guy who’s badass enough to survive all the crazy shit without having super-powers. He’s also our head Delta Force liaison, and is apparently a master of disarming. As of Episode 15, he and Sun-Kwon are just waiting for rescue after a helicopter crash.
Name: Alice Wade
Affiliation: Armacham
Alice Wade is an Armacham employee and the daughter of Harlan Wade, who we’ve heard from but not seen. Well, not in person, anyway. She knows things, but hasn’t connected the dots, and is sort of obsessed with finding her father. At the very least, she’s not shitty to escort, following the “Ashley Graham School of Staying the Fuck Out of the Way”. As of Episode 14, she’s “missing”, and as of Episode 19, she’s been munched.
Name: Harlan Wade
Affiliation: Armacham (Sort of)
Harlan Wade. The guy in charge of Origin and all the other nonsense that’s been going on. I put the “sort of” next to Armacham, because he might be working for them, but he clearly has his own agenda. He seems to hate Aristide with a passion, and is obviously very close to Alma, though it’s unclear why cause she’s his daughter, which makes him the worst person at Armacham. As of Episode 19, he’s a skeleton on the floor by the vault, courtesy of Alma.
Replica Soldiers: They have a number of different guns at their disposal and a pretty decent AI routine that makes them fairly formidable in combat. We’re gonna be fighting these guys in some form or another for the whole game.
Heavy Armor Soldiers: Heavy Armor Soldiers are Replicas in massive suits of armor that sound like monsters. They take a serious amount of abuse before going down and usually have more powerful weapons than the other Replicas. They tend to show up one at a time with a small squad of standard soldiers in tow.
Nightmare: Spooky apparitions created by Alma to attack us. They fly straight at you and do decent damage if they hit, but they’re killed in one shot.
Replica Assassin: Fast and deadly, assassins can cloak and cling to walls. They only have a melee attack, but they move quick and tend to come in packs. The shotgun and some well placed punches are the best way to deal with them.
ATC Security: The Security force at Armacham. They’re not as fast, smart, or deadly as the Replica soldiers, but they at least provide a change of pace in who we’re shooting.
Armcaham Defense Turret: Turrets pop down from the ceiling and fire machine gun bullets at you. They’re fairly accurate and do a decent amount of damage, but they’re also stationary, so it’s pretty easy to find a safe place to plink away at them from.
REV6 Powered Armor: A suit of powered armor worn by a Replica soldier. They take a lot of abuse before going down and pack a pretty strong punch. The rockets aren’t impossible to avoid, but it’s easy to get backed up against a wall, and the splash damage will do what the rockets don’t.
Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (Drone): These little fuckers will fly around and pelt you with lasers until you blow em up. They don’t do a lot of damage, but they shoot quick and can be a huge annoyance. Using something with armor piercing puts them down pretty quick, at least.
Melee
Damage: ****
Range: *
RoF: It’s our fists…
Melee in this game is actually really powerful and quite useful. There’s a basic punch, a bicycle kick and a slide kick, all of which kill regular enemies in one or two hits.
AT-14 Pistol
Damage: **
Range: **
RoF: Semi-Auto
You can dual wield it for extra damage, but otherwise it’s a pretty bog standard pistol. Okay damage and range in a semi-automatic package.
RPL Submachine Gun
Damage: *
Range: **
RoF: *****
Fast firing, but low damage. There’s a specific enemy that this gun is great against, but we won’t really see that pay off for a while. We’re finally seeing that pay off thanks to the mob of nightmares we’re fighting.
G2A2 Assault Rifle
Damage: ***
Range: ****
RoF: ***
The G2A2 is a bread and butter gun for this game. It’s reliable, versatile, and effective against basically everything. Once you pick it up, there’s rarely a reason to put it back down.
VK-12 Shotgun
Damage: *****
Range: ***
RoF: Pump-action
The Shotgun is one of my favorite guns in the game. Mixing power with a surprisingly decent range makes it potentially devastating. Like the G2A2, once this ends up in my rotation, there’s never really a reason to put it down.
10mm HV Penetrator
Damage: ***
Range: ***
RoF: **
The Penetrator is a gun that feels like it should be awesome, but falls a little short. It’s armor piercing is great, but it’s easily replaced by the G2A2, and frankly, I’d rather have the G2A2. It does pin people to walls, though.
ASP Rifle
Damage: ****
Range: *****
RoF: Semi-auto 3 round burst
The ASP is a fairly straightforward marksman style rifle. It fires three round bursts that do good damage and have enough armor piercing to tear through shields. It’s really just a side grade to the G2A2, but I like it a lot. It’s also one of two rifles with a notable zoom in the game.
MOD-3 Rocket Launcher
Damage: *****
Range: ****
RoF: Semi-auto 3 round burst
The MOD-3 is basically the rocket launcher from Unreal Tournament, except it always fires three rockets at a time. It’s pretty powerful, but also not viable as a regular weapon since the ammo scarcity borders on famine for it. Still, it’s more than effective when you get the opportunity to use it.
Type-7 Particle Weapon
Damage: *****
Range: *****
RoF: Semi-auto
I love this gun. I really do. It hits like a hammer and turns people into skeletons. It’s accurate enough (and has a good enough scope) to use as a sniper rifle, and it even makes a pretty cool sound. Honestly, the only thing that’s not great is it suffers from some ammo scarcity, but it’s hardly a famine. This probably gets my vote for best gun in the game.
MP-50 Repeating Cannon
Damage: ****
Range: ***
RoF: ***
You’d think that an exploding auto-cannon would be awesome, but it’s kind of not. It does a lot of damage and actually does explode, but this means it’s suicidal to use it in close quarters. An ammo famine and a lack of really good opportunities to use it make the MP-50 seem way less impressive than it really ought to be.
N6A3 Fragmentation Grenade
Damage: *****
Range: ***
RoF: It’s a grenade… That you throw…
The grenade is everything you’d want a grenade to be. It goes boom and does a lot of damage when it does. If it hits an enemy, it goes boom immediately.
AT-S Proximity Mine
Damage: *****
Range: **
RoF: Again, it’s a grenade…
The AT-S Proximity Mine does more or less exactly what you’d expect. It does a shit ton of damage when it goes off, and it can be used to set traps for enemies. You can pick up ones that haven’t gone off and reuse them, later.
M77 Remote Bomb
Damage: *****
Range: ***
RoF: Fast as your arm can rotate.
The M77 is essentially the same as the regular grenade, except you can choose when it explodes and you can’t shoot and throw at the same time. Nothing too exciting, but they’re pretty awesome when you can pull it off.
Health Boosters: Health Boosters raise your max health by 5. There’re more health boosters than your potential max, so you’d be hard pressed not to end up at full by the end of the game. They also provide you with a full heal on pickup.
Reflex Boosters: Reflex Boosters work more or less the same as Health Boosters, but for your slow-mo. Each one is worth about a %5 increase in total slow-mo time. If there’s a max, I don’t know it, and I’m not sure if they refill your bar, since I don’t think I’ve ever picked one up without having max slow-mo, already.
Med Kit: Med Kit’s restore 50 health on use and you can hold 10 at a time. That’s about it. You use 'em with a button press, so you have to keep track of your health on your own.
Body Armor: Body Armor reduces damage taken by a percentage. You can have up to 100, and it can be a real lifesaver.
RPS article all about the AI in F.E.A.R.
The Alma Interviews are a series of short live action videos where Alma is interviewed by a psychiatrist. https://youtu.be/zQ8LEnmWacY
I remember playing the third F.E.A.R. for the co-op, and even that I don’t remember anything about, so it should be interesting to see what the first game was like; are you also going to do the two expansions?
I’m actually playing through the third game, right now, and it’s a very different sort of beast to the first.
As for the expansions, maybe? They’re not very good and I just don’t have as much fun playing through them. That said, they’re hilariously buggy and add a few new gizmos and gadgets, so I might try to show off that much, at least.
Name: Bill Moody
Affiliation: Armacham
Another one of Fettel’s victims. We find him almost dead in a chair and he gives us one piece of possibly crucial information: The name ‘Alma’.
VK-12 Shotgun
Damage: *****
Range: ***
RoF: Pump-action
The Shotgun is one of my favorite guns in the game. Mixing power with a surprisingly decent range makes it potentially devastating. Like the G2A2, once this ends up in my rotation, there’s never really a reason to put it down.
10mm HV Penetrator
Damage: ***
Range: ***
RoF: **
The Penetrator is a gun that feels like it should be awesome, but falls a little short. It’s armor piercing is great, but it’s easily replaced by the G2A2, and frankly, I’d rather have the G2A2. It does pin people to walls, though.
AT-S Proximity Mine
Damage: *****
Range: **
RoF: Again, it’s a grenade…
The AT-S Proximity Mine does more or less exactly what you’d expect. It does a shit ton of damage when it goes off, and it can be used to set traps for enemies. You can pick up ones that haven’t gone off and reuse them, later.
Nightmare
Spooky apparitions created by someone (the little girl?) to attack us. They fly straight at you and do decent damage if they hit, but they’re killed in one shot.
M77 Remote Bomb
Damage: *****
Range: ***
RoF: Fast as your arm can rotate.
The M77 is essentially the same as the regular grenade, except you can choose when it explodes and you can’t shoot and throw at the same time. Nothing too exciting, but they’re pretty awesome when you can pull it off.
New Stuff this Episode
ASP Rifle
Damage: ****
Range: *****
RoF: Semi-auto 3 round burst
The ASP is a fairly straightforward marksman style rifle. It fires three round bursts that do good damage and have enough armor piercing to tear through shields. It’s really just a side grade to the G2A2, but I like it a lot. It’s also one of two rifles with a notable zoom in the game.
Stuff I missed in other episodes
Heavy Armor Soldiers: Heavy Armor Soldiers are Replicas in massive suits of armor that sound like monsters. They take a serious amount of abuse before going down and usually have more powerful weapons than the other Replicas. They tend to show up one at a time with a small squad of standard soldiers in tow.
Health Boosters: Health Boosters raise your max health by 5. There’re more health boosters than your potential max, so you’d be hard pressed not to end up at full by the end of the game. They also provide you with a full heal on pickup.
Reflex Boosters: Reflex Boosters work more or less the same as Health Boosters, but for your slow-mo. Each one is worth about a %5 increase in total slow-mo time. If there’s a max, I don’t know it, and I’m not sure if they refill your bar, since I don’t think I’ve ever picked one up without having max slow-mo, already.
Med Kit: Med Kit’s restore 50 health on use and you can hold 10 at a time. That’s about it. You use 'em with a button press, so you have to keep track of your health on your own.
Body Armor: Body Armor reduces damage taken by a percentage. You can have up to 100, and it can be a real lifesaver.
New Stuff this Episode
Name: Norton Mapes
Affiliation: Armacham (?)
Mapes is a computer guy in some capacity and also a verified piece of shit. We don’t know why he’s here, but he doesn’t seem too awful fond of us.
Replica Assassin: Fast and deadly, assassins can cloak and cling to walls. They only have a melee attack, but they move quick and tend to come in packs. The shotgun and some well placed punches are the best way to deal with them.
New Stuff this Episode
Name: Aldus Bishop
Affiliation: Armacham
A fairly low-level employee at Armacham, he was one of the people dispatched to look into the vacating of Auburn. When we meet him, he’s strapped to a chair with explosives strapped to him, so it’s clear that somebody didn’t want him to talk.
Name: Sgt. Douglas Holiday
Affiliation: F.E.A.R. (Delta Force attachment)
Holiday is the guy who’s badass enough to survive all the crazy shit without having super-powers. He’s also our head Delta Force liaison, and is apparently a master of disarming.
He’s pretty great, he’s a pisstake on the classic IT goon with sexual harassment, RTFM belt buckle and cheetos stained fingers. I like hating him.
There’s also a pretty great moment at the beginning of the game after the planking Fettel gives you, Jawkowski and Jin are talking and she lays a nice burn on him.
Mapes is as unlikable as the other main male characters in the game, and considering they’re homicidal psychic cannibals and…worse, it says a lot about the character they packed into that ugly shirt.
Pretty much everyone from Armacham that is met in this game are horrible horrible humans.
Thankfully almost all of them are killed in one fashion or another. Mapes lucks out on this unfortunately. A few game over screens for shooting him are worth it.
Before we begin, it should be noted that this is an intensely violent game with some pretty terrible stuff being done by really terrible people. If that’s not your thing, consider yourself warned. 
