I've just felt that, even from the start, a lot of the levels seem unnecessarily long. Hopefully it's a game that has a bang-on finish. I do tire of games reasonably quickly now though. I have a tendency to get two-thirds of the way through a game and not finish it, especially with a lot of the more recent FPS games.
It appears that Monolith went completely the other way with FEAR(as compared with TO-NOLF),in terms of level design.I suppose that the FEAR "episode" takes place during the course of a single night,so you can only move to so many places in a space of a few hours.Though Monolith tried for a tight setting for FEAR the office /warehouse levels were so overused that they started to grate.I cant remember 1 single memorable level from FEAR.
I have an AXP 2400+, 2x512MB PC2100, and a 9800P, and I consider it slow. Your 4200 is definitely slow, and may be the reason for no weapon drawn. Just 512MB RAM probably leads to stuttering in newer games, too. Your CPU is the least slow part, but it's not so hot itself (especially if it's FSB533 or less). But your video card is your weakest link.
You should not have everythign maxed out and even 800*600 resolution is questionable. I just tested this game with a Geforce 4 ti4600 and it renders correctly using Forceware 81.98 and the latest DirectX 9.0c update (December 2005). Link to full download If you are missing geometry and having other weirdness it may be that you are running out of video RAM. I've seen that happen with the Source engine, but I didn't try to force it to happen in FEAR yet. It could also be a software or hardware fault. I recommend you launch the game and choose to let the application detect optimal settings for your system. You may want to tone down even further if the problem persists, just for testing. I don't think it's likely you will face such a choice, however, because I was recommended to keep everything on minimal or off.
so so I think the game has some pros and some cons. I'm only in the middle, but this is my experince so far: Whoever has played a Monolith game recognises some of their scenery from earlier titles, mostly offices from Nolif2 and such. It seems a lot of earlier materials have not been changed. Also, did you notice the "ready, press any key" sound hasn't changed, funny nuance really... I like the actual Fear factor in the game, I found it creepier and scarier then Doom III. THe halucination/illusions/psychotic events in this game tapped straight into my psyche in terms of fear, with no bloody demons jumping out of closets. Another thing I would commend is the firefights, messy, bloody, bullets flying everywhere , debris scattering, just amazing. Downside is you have to shoot a guy 50 times on the head to kill him. I also love the AI, smartest bots I've fought yet. I really dislike the performance, these days a game that can't run at medium settings on my rig at 1024*768 is just not well coded. I'm sorry but 90% of the populatioon DO NOT have high end gaming rigs and the performance in some points is just abysmal (actually made me stop and play something else). Seriously, what game gives a 1fps min framerate today? All in all I really value this game (so far), and would recommend it to most FPS lovers, but would tell them to run at low - medium settings at best (which kind of ruins parts of the experience).
did you notice the H.A.R.M. logo? Heating And Refrideration Manufacturers. remember whar H.A.R.M. stands for!
I'm on the 8th episode now (or whatever they are called) and I'm enjoying the game. The fights have a good feel to them, particularly as a contrast to Quake 4 (which I also enjoyed, mainly for what it was - Quake 2 part 2). My only issue with F.E.A.R., and I think it will be more of an issue when I think back on the game after finishing it, is the lack of variety in the environments. There are an awful lot of office corridors in the game. Half-Life 1&2 and Far Cry featured a variety of environments and I'm surprised it didn't occur to the F.E.A.R. level developers to vary things rather more, particularly when they had such a great-feeling game (for people with powerful systems admittedly).
Well, I think FEAR was more story-driven than environment-driven, so the lack of huge variety makes some sense here. Personally, I couldn't care less how much variety a game has in its environments: I just wish more FPS's would integrate even more story into the game. FEAR did an okay job, but the best RPG's out there show us that you can put soo much more story in a game. It's not necessary to have experience and statistics in order to have a story-driven game.
I think Monolith has always had that quality about them, at least as far as I can remember. NOLIF's and Tron 2 both had their respective plots which were quite nice. Albeit that,I don't feel the story is such a driving factor in FEAR since most of the time all you get is eerie falshbacks and only half of them (again, so far...) seem to indicate anything about the plot (or reason for it). SPOILER?? (I'm really not so sure) I think at this point (level 6) the plot boils down to: Mystery girl, Cannibal Beast and mindless servants -find and kill, oh and you might have a relation towards them.... End SPOILER. Oh well, I'm still planning on finishing it over the weekend.
I don't dispute that, but it seems to me that a rich story is more likely to make use of different environments, such as for instance Deus Ex. Anyway, F.E.A.R. finally moved back outside for me last night into a warehouse area, so perhaps more variety is on the way.
Excellent game. I don't rate the story line or the horror element, but the combat and special effects are great. I don't care too much about the graphical quality of the environments as long as the explosions are fairly spectacular and the guns feel like they are doing damage.
Also this game has a man with RTFM written on his belt buckle, that alone increases Fear's standing in my opinion.