Was looking through the GIF thread
FEAR 1?
Is that the best FEAR to play? Is the AI as good as the old praise and reviews said it was?
F.E.A.R. signal? Here I come!
Yes. Yes. Yes. This game is a must, in my opinion.
The expansions are great too, though not canon (and pretty similar to the main game, so you may get burned on them; personally, although I really like them, I always stop at some point halfway through Extraction Point whenever I decide to replay them). The sequel is excellent too, though suffers from consolization (only one save slot, no manual saves, pop-up tips for contextual actions in the HUD). The third game has a nice co-op mode, but is an awful entry in the franchise. If it were called anything else I could have tolerated it, but as a huge fan of the previous games I can't look at it with anything else than pure hate.
The level design was bland, but the shotgun is pretty awesome.
I have to disagree here. The environments are repetitive (there's only like 3 different ones), but the level design itself is great. It works perfectly well with the AI to make the enemies seem smart. It's a linear game, sure, but it doesn't make it even worse, because it doesn't need
not to be. The encounters would suffer if the level design was any different, because enemies wouldn't be able to navigate it as well as they do here (I've read a document that explained this in great detail, but sadly I don't have the link).
Sorely tempted to pull the trigger on the Max Payne collection but I dunno. I missed them the first time around. Have they aged well?
Played them again 2 years ago and to me they have, yeah. Bear in mind they are very hard, even in the lowest difficulty, so you may have to do some quicksave scumming.
The writing is fantastic in those games, as are the comic "cutscenes". Plus, the first game has a very Matrix-esque style that I appreciated a lot after watching said movie (which was a few years after playing it for the first time).