3's new, ubiquitous cover, gunfights become pretty formulaic: find a piece of cover, get behind it, pop up and bust some heads, get a grenade thrown at you, run to another piece of cover, boom, repeat. They still provide a decent challenge, but with F.E.A.R. soldiers who haven't had a particularly large A.I. Anyway, you spend most of your time fighting F.E.A.R.'s trademark A.I. 2 left off, which is to say that it's so overwrought with angst-cum-horror tropes that it might as well be a Nirvana video directed by Wes Craven or something. The Point Man is a very direct and traditional guns-'n'-grenades-style guy, while Fettel is mostly spectral, and aids the Point Man by psychokinetically throwing objects at enemies, teleporting, and even possessing the baddies' bodies. And, if you've got a friend, you can co-op through the entire campaign. You can play as either the series' usual protagonist (the gun-totin', bullet-time-usin' "Point Man") or his brother (Paxton Fettel, an insane and very powerful psychic). The campaign, though, follows all the standard FPS tropes: You start out escaping from a highly fortified insane asylum, and move on to a blighted cityscape in which you fight all sorts of psychic and physical phenomena. 3 is still a pretty darn enjoyable first-person shooter, especially if you get someone to play with you (or if you delve into one of its rather innovative multiplayer modes). to not be that scary, but whatever - F.E.A.R. I mean, it's a little weird for a game literally titled F.E.A.R. is retooled to allow for cooperative gameplay across the full single-player campaign, and it sure looks pretty - but it just isn't much for the scares anymore.Īnd hey, that's OK. Neither of those show up much in F.E.A.R. ![]() series has always relied on two major factors as selling points: excellent enemy A.I. Just like that, I've gone from being ambivalent about Silent Hill 2, to cautiously optimistic.The F.E.A.R. This is easily the best game Bloober Team have put out yet, and its existence serves to show everyone why they believe they're the right people to helm the Silent Hill 2 remake-and I have to admit, they've convinced me. Layers of Fear 2023 doesn't feel like a remake for the sake of a simple cash grab, or a fallback for a studio out of ideas it feels more like a declaration of intent. Every story, including the new one created just for the remake, in some way deals with the themes of perfectionism and criticism of art-and remaking these titles has given Bloober Team, in conjunction with Anshar Studios, an opportunity to show everyone how much it's improved since 2016. It's hard not to see the stories in Layers of Fear as metaphors for the remake's existence. Regardless, the sections taken from the first game undoubtedly feel like the standouts-but this contrast is thankfully offset by the introduction of the completely new story that ties the content of the original two games and their DLCs together. It's also fair to say that when compared to the original, the updates to Layers of Fear 2 feel somewhat less impressive given that the game is only four years old-although perhaps that’s more of a compliment to how well Layers of Fear 2 has aged compared to the first game. The biggest real criticism I can make of Layers of Fear is that some of the scares do lose their edge the longer you play, especially when you realise how little consequence death has and how generous the checkpoint system is-although rushing through it for review probably made those seams show a little more. (Image credit: Bloober Team, Anshar Studios) There were also a couple of times where picking up items caused them to temporarily clip through the scenery, and reading notes at the wrong time often caused the dialogue to interrupt itself. There was one moment I managed to clip myself out of bounds and softlock myself, but this was solved with a quick reload and only served to lose me about 30 seconds of progress. I did run into a few bugs, though nothing that I'd say tarnished my overall experience. ![]() I was extremely impressed at how well the i7-7820X build performed given how dated the hardware is, especially considering how visually impressive Layers of Fear is. Both builds played the game at an extremely consistent framerate, and I didn't experience a single crash throughout the entirety of my playthroughs. I played through Layers of Fear on two separate builds, one that was somewhat underpowered (i7-7820X, GeForce RTX 2060 SUPER, 16GB RAM) and another that was somewhat overpowered (Ryzen 9 5900X, RTX 4080, 64GB RAM). (Image credit: Anshar Studios, Bloober Team)
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