The “Horror” game genre is pretty much not much younger than videogames themselves, and it’s had a few notables along the way in the field of horror-FPSes: Corridor7 took the Wolfenstein 3D engine and turned it into a space-horror game to moderate success. Doom, Doom II and to a greater extent Doom 3 all dabbled in the horror element.
But F.E.A.R. took it in a completely new direction being one of the first (that I can think of) popular games that genuinely scared the shit out of most folks on a regular basis. F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin was the much-anticipated sequal to this, and doesn’t disappoint in the horror department.
I’m by no means an expert in the FPS deparment – I’ve said this before – so take my reviews of FPSes with a grain of salt… but F.E.A.R.2 is a reasonably solid FPS in it’s own right.
When I go to scary movies, I don’t usually jump much. Every so often, sure – fuck sometimes if I’m not paying attention I’ll jump at shit that’s not supposed to be scary and just happens all of a sudden. I’m also pretty much a skeptic when it comes to ghosts and such. But this game just generally freaked me out on a good few occasions.
The story mode is a solid adventure, starting out set in the moments briefly before the events of the original F.E.A.R. and continuing outwards. It progresses nicely, and doesn’t really contain any aggravating sections which just completely piss you off because of how hard they were. On the hardest difficulty I found the game’s progression a good solid slog and never really hit a cement wall, which is exactly how a game should be – as opposed to games like Call of Duty 4 and Modern Warfare 2, who have several parts that are just straight up hurdles and then other parts of the game that are smooth sailing.
On the whole I felt satisfied when I got done bashing my way through the story mode, I didn’t pick apart the holes in the story or do anything else I usually do with horror storylines. The campaign didn’t suffer from the “abundance of ammunition” problem most shooters do, it was nice switching between several different weapons just to make it through the mission.
It’s pretty reasonable on the trophies too, but some of them require multiplayer (so forget about platinuming it)… which brings us to:
The downsides? Multiplayer is an absolutely ghost town. If you’re lucky enough to sign on at a time when you can find a game, expect it to be no more than three or four people at a time and for one of them to ragequit at some point. Most of the time when you sign on you simply won’t find a game, or you’ll find one with one other person who AFKed looking for their eczema treatment and won’t ever ready-up.
Given that this game has now dipped down below the $15 mark used, it’s well worth the money for the single player campaign. There’s also one piece of DLC that I haven’t tried yet, but have heard good things about it. It’s a worthy addition to your budget collection. 
