Preview: F.E.A.R (PS3)

First Encounter Assault Recon is another terrifying offering from Monolith Productions, who scared Xbox 360 owners with Condemned: Criminal Origins before following it up last year with the well received F.E.A.R. As with the Microsoft version, conversion duties are being handled once again by Day 1 Studios.

You take the role of an elite soldier who is specially trained and equipped to deal with supernatural situations. But this isn’t a military equivalent of Ghostbusters, instead you and your unit will be confronted by foes that are worthy of the game’s acronymic title. While cut sequences do exist, central to the plot is the ability to hack laptops (just like Doom 3’s PDA’s) to add depth to the storyline and provide answers to what is going on.

What criticism F.E.A.R. has received comes from that fact that it was first released for PC in 2005. This makes it an easy target, however Day 1 has introduced some new features exclusively for the PlayStation 3 edition. Rob Luftus (senior producer, Sierra Entertainment) explains, “We added a new game mode called Instant Action, which is an arcade style shootout that scores the player on their ability to contend with a ramping up of the FEAR enemy units and their AI evasion routines. We’ve also added a new weapon and a bonus mission that lets the player jump into the shoes of the Special Force Operational Detachment (SFOD) soldiers that investigated the original Armacham disturbance – basically the incident that was the trigger for the events of FEAR.”

The foundations of the storyline remain as it was “but we’ll certainly be adding to it with the bonus mission. You’ll get to see what happened to the SFOD squad that the FEAR team is trying to locate in the original storyline.” Whereas Condemned was purely a solitary experience, F.E.A.R. incorporates a sixteen-player online death match mode. Yet Luftus remains tight-lipped on any downloadable content, as “It all depends on the demand. If people want some more FEAR on the PS3, we’ll certainly look at ways to make that happen.”

The good news is that the PlayStation 3 transition has been positive because “developing on a new platform can be difficult at times as there is not a lot of fresh experiences with the hardware to contend with. There is a very deep level of engineering expertise that Day 1 brings to the product, and they’ve done wonders ensuring that the transition of FEAR to PS3 has been as painless as possible.” But PSP owners hoping for some interactivity between the PS3 and the handheld will be disappointed as it won’t be supported in this release.

The possibilities of the SixAxis controller have also been ignored, with the team confident that the storyline is strong enough to cope without the introduction of motion functions, and the lack of rumble. Whatever your thoughts are on paying a premium price for a PC conversion, this did not stop Gamestyle awarding an impressive 8 out of 10 for the Xbox 360 edition. Just how the PS3 version shapes up alongside, we’ll know shortly as the FPS genre starts to show promise on Sony’s latest format.

Words by Jason Julier