There's a moment in "The Shining" -- the book, not the movie -- when the Torrance family beds down for the night in its designated caretaker's quarters at the Overlook, and they suddenly hear the hotel's elevator, of its own volition, begin working in the middle of the night.

"Why am I not scaryyyyyy?"

Voil?: Stephen King just creeped you out more than F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin ever will.

The concept of F.E.A.R., and now F.E.A.R. 2 -- perennial winner of the Most Awkward Acronym Ever (M.A.A.E.) Award -- is novel: Graft a spooky backstory onto a first-person shooter; bake at 375 degrees for 40 minutes. In theory, it sounds good.

In hindsight, the '05 original seems more like a glorified tech demo (cough, LittleBigPlanet, cough) with a dash of sci-fi doom/gloom than it does a bona-fide game. I remember shooting an enemy in brutal slow-motion and watching his bullet-riddled body dance around and then disintegrate before my eyes. Then I did the same thing, with slight variations, to several thousand more enemies for around 15 hours. The once-shocking -- and, dare I say it, pleasing -- over-articulated violence? It quickly became banal.

"Hey, buddy. You're the only one camped outside this GameStop to be the first to get a copy of F.E.A.R. 2."

F.E.A.R.-philes will probably be excited to know that Project Origin ignores the crappiness found in the totally crappy expansion packs (T.C.E.P.): Extraction Point and Perseus Mandate. Those expansion packs were developed by Texas-based TimeGate Studios. Monolith Productions -- developer of the original F.E.A.R. -- is back on the job this time around, making this the series' first true sequel.

The sequel tries to avoid the office/warehouse/office/warehouse level pattern that vexed the original by mixing in a parking lot or two, a factory and the occasional bombed-out cityscape. But it's not the repetition that bothers me so much in F.E.A.R. 2; rather, it's the lack of vision and imagination. In practice, the sequel -- like the original -- winds up being an extremely competent FPS married to some weak-sauce horror elements.

F.E.A.R. 2 is set about half an hour before the ending of the original. The game's protagonist is a bland-faced special forces operative named Michael Becket. You and your squad of dickheads who appear to be moonlighting from my copy of Haze are being sent to arrest Genevieve Aristide, the president of Armacham Technology Corp. when all hell -- literally and figuratively -- breaks loose.

Tom Selleck called. He wants his mustache back, a-hole.

Alma, the dead girl in the red dress with the hollow eyes, is back. Weird Dario Argento-like visions are back. And weird names -- who named these people? Frank Zappa? -- are back. ("Paxton Fettel," anyone?)

So, what's new? You get to drive a Robocop-like mech-thing. (Yay!) And Alma jumps on you a lot more in the sequel. When I say a lot, I mean a lot. (Press the B button furiously, and she'll eventually get off.) Alma appears nude on several occasions during the game, but before you start fogging up your ice cream spoon, she's nude in a shampoo-commercial kind of way. In other words, her stringy dead-girl hair is always covering her breasts.

According to a producer whom I met at a demo in New York, Alma is trying to seduce Becket into, I believe, making a supernatural baby with her. So, in an effort to appeal to Becket, she appears in what she believes is a more sexy supernatural form (aka shampoo-commercial nude).

Why is she doing this?

F***ed if I know.

We once ate 17 pieces of pizza, and when we went to sleep that night, this is what we saw...

Honestly, if the game's producer hadn't clued me in, I'm not sure I would have been able to suss this out from the cut scenes. There's a lot of nonsense about Becket somehow being tied to Alma genetically. It's my job, as a game reviewer, to follow it. I tried like hell, and I failed. This makes me think that either my attention span got shorter (a possibility), or the game presents its story in such a muddled, lazy-assed fashion that it's nearly impossible to make sense of it.

The original F.E.A.R. asked players to check the voicemail on random desk phones. If a phone was blinking, you checked it to hear random and/or unhelpful information. Example: "[BEEP] This is Hank in B-sector. What the hell is going on down there? We heard a big explosion. OK, call me back. We're worried about you up here."

But in F.E.A.R. 2 -- welcome to the future! -- the bulk of the game's random/unhelpful information is doled out via easy-to-ignore data discs scattered throughout the game. There are two obvious problems with this. One, sifting through countless reports and memos makes us feel like we're working for H & R Block. And two, this requires reading, something that has been out of fashion since 1980's Zork.

Mmm. Ketchup.

Aside from the marginally spooky elementary school during its second act, nothing in F.E.A.R. 2 made me truly believe that actual people ever inhabited any of these spaces. Nothing in the game ever made me feel that I was doing anything besides playing through a videogame level.

In a post-BioShock world, this is unacceptable.

What about taking a big, bold leap in a brave new direction (B.B.L.I.A.B.N.D.) and trying to do something -- anything -- different?

There's an enemy that I encountered [spoiler alert] in the aforementioned elementary school, who runs in circles, howling as he resurrects all the corpses in the vicinity. In other words, he brings all the enemies you've just killed back to life so that, lucky you, you get to kill them again. (FPS fans will no doubt recognize him as a high-definition descendant of the Arch-Vile from Doom II: Hell on Earth.)


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Mercifully, this corpse-resurrecting enemy only makes two or three appearances throughout the game. And when you find one, it's clear that Monolith intends the encounter to be A DRAMATIC MOMENT OF THE HIGHEST ORDER. It's supposed to be unnerving. It's supposed to be spooky.

But it's not.

As I chased after him -- he's speedy, which makes him a complete pain in the ass to track down -- the only emotion I felt was annoyance. I was annoyed that I had to re-kill all these resurrected enemies. Annoyed that he used a supernatural speed boost to get away each time I got a bead on him. And annoyed that Monolith's notion of what's scary and dramatic seems so utterly antiquated.

This review is based on a review build of the game provided by the publisher. This review evaluates the single-player component of the game. Check back later in the month for our thoughts on the multiplayer gameplay.