F.E.A.R - First Encounter Assault Recon

[CX]

This is one of the best games I've ever played, which had the misfortune of coming out at the same time the powerhouse Halo 2 came out. As a result, even most of my gaming friends have never heard of it. That being said, it crams a lot into just one $20 game. It's a very extensive experiance - it took me 2 days to beat on the easiest level - and it's also very epic, with a well thought out plot that rocks. There's a lot of violence, a lot of cussing (mostly by the guys you're shooting at), but there's also a lot of suspence and mystery. There's a lot of weird and scary stuff that happens as you play the game, and discover more about the main bad guy, Fettle, about Project Origin, and about your own character. Speaking of, your character has some pretty neat abilities, one of which is hyper-fast reflexes. As far as the gameplay is concerned, this gives you the ability to put the game into a kind of slow-mo mode for a limited amount of time. You slow down, but since you're technically more advanced than the guys you're fighting, you're just a little bit daster than they are and can inflict some pretty extansive damage on them in order to get out of some pretty intense situations. The cool thing about this game is that while it's a first person shooter, tehre's enough developed plot and background to actually make a pretty good movie. It's actually pretty dramatic, and for as frakked up as some of the things are that happen, there are actually points that you feel sorry for the bad guys, the main one of which is Alma (the little girl in the red dress and also the woman heard screaming at several points during the game).

Want a look? Here are a couple trailers:

XBox trailer

PC trailer Fear is a basic human emotion. What frightens you more? The fear that you know? Or the fear that you don't know?

Someone also uploaded basically the whole game from the way it looks. They edited out some of the non-action parts (wandering around the map), but most of it is there. You can watch the first one here without spoiling yourself too much, and it sets up the plot of the game. The video quality isn't that great though, unfortunately. The text at the beginning basically says that in 2002, the US Army greated a special response group with training to deal with unusual situations and that they named it First Encounter Assault Recon.