FEAR Perseus Mandate (PC)

Where the streets and warehouses and train yards have no name.
1/31/2008 12:00 AM | 0 Comments | Page 1 of 2

One of the things a stand-alone expansion pack should do is stand alone. Perseus Mandate, however, goes ahead and assumes that you not only played F.E.A.R., but that you also paid attention to its borderline incoherent plot. It just dumps you into the game, briefly mentioning that you're a second team dropped into fighting between Replicas and the ATC. The who? The what? Armacham? Betters? Huh?

This cavalier attitude about telling a story, or even making any sense, is indicative of the lack of care that went into this collection of B-side material passed off as an expansion pack that works just fine even if you never played F.E.A.R. It makes you wonder why they bother to reference the original game with an unexplained explosion that "releases a torrent of paranormal activity." When Paxton Fettel notes that you remind him of his brother, the developers are obviously assuming you paid your 50 bucks to play the original game. Calling this a stand-alone is little more than a way to raise the price from 20 bucks to 30 bucks.

This $30 joke is on you, since Perseus Mandate looks like stale leftovers and plays like yesterday's news. Didn't F.E.A.R. look better? Has so much changed in little more than a year? When it came out, F.E.A.R. was cutting-edge. But then along came engines like that in Crysis, art direction like in BioShock, gunfights like in Rainbow Six: Vegas, and the degree of visual spectacle found in Call of Duty 4. F.E.A.R. has been thoroughly upstaged by the games that have come out since its release.

The animation and incidentals of the firefights still look good. The smoke, tracers, blood and bullet-hole decals are a minor spectacle. But the levels. Ick. All the boxy rooms, halls, streets, cars and buildings. These tedious and unimaginative office buildings, warehouses, train yards and underground labs. This is all we get for our 30 bucks? Near the end of the game, you find out you're going to a cloning facility on an island. Ooh, goody, an island! That might mean a boat trip! Maybe a level set on a ship! No such luck. The way to this island is through a bunch of underground corridors.

Along the way, you'll see some spooky parlor tricks that feel out of place between the shoot-outs. There are dream sequences and cheap-trick ghosts that come out of the floor. Along the way are a hundred corpses and a thousand blood smears. Alma, the spooky girl from the original game, makes a couple of token appearances, but for the most part, you just get the occasional visit from the ghost of telepathic clone commander Paxton Fettel.

The name of the expansion is a reference to a phone conversation that opens the game. A senator wants Perseus, whatever that is. Hence, Perseus mandate. Robert Ludlum would be proud. You'll eventually discover that a mercenary army has been tasked with the eponymous mandate, and you have to stop them. Yadda yadda yadda.

Most of the story is told via the radio voices in your head, along with messages left on phone machines scattered through the first half of the game. Whose message machines are these, left blinking on random counters and desks? Why does everyone use a Dell XPS desktop or an Alienware laptop? How is it possible for anyone to get any work done in an office with such ridiculously long hallways, winding along their tortured courses? Why are there so many fake doors?