3:30itis minus the vending machine sugar rush, curse you exact change only machine!

Who is Alma? If you have never played a FEAR game before you may be plagued by this question for the first hour of your dive into FEAR 2. One of the characters provides a pretty succinct description when asked the same question: Alma is the mother of the apocalypse. A little girl with incredible, almost god like, psychic powers who has been locked away in a stasis tank for almost her entire life. Inseminated and forced to give birth to the first members of attempts to create psychic soldiers; her own father then switched of the power and left her to die inside a stasis tank, all before the age of 16. As you can imagine, this has seriously pissed her off. It’s important you get a perspective on the character because the plot of the FEAR games focus on her. She is the Darth Vader of the FEAR universe. In FEAR 2: Project Origin you play as a new protagonist to the series, separate from the Point Man of the first game. But Alma and her evolving story is the constant.

In FEAR 2 you play as a Delta Force soldier named Becket on route to arrest Genevieve Aristide, the ATC executive largely responsible for most of the events of the previous games. Unfortunately, just as you catch up to Aristide Alma is released by the Point Man from the original game causing a nuclear explosion. From there the game takes a number of bizarre and increasingly weird turns that culminate in a plan to destroy Alma using Becket’s latent psychic ability. Alma has developed a bit of an obsession with your character and chases you throughout the game, sometimes attacking, other times saving you and occasionally giving you glimpses of her own tragic existence, but her overall intentions are unclear until the games conclusion. Like all previous FEAR games the developers keep the needle on the weirdshit-o-meter pretty high before ratcheting it up to eleven for the games brain melting ending.

The Puppet Master offers a surprising challenge the few times he appears

FEAR’s big calling card on the PC when it was first released was considerable graphical grunt making it one of those Crysis type titles that had faithful PC gamers ignoring all the signs of battered wives syndrome they were manifesting and rushing out to buy new graphics cards. Sadly the console ports of FEAR and its expansion packs were created out of house and not by the original developers Monolith; as such they were noticeably lacking the same graphical oomph. So FEAR 2: Project Origin is the titles first official outing of the FEAR franchise on next gen consoles. While the graphics don’t set the bar the same way the original FEAR did they’re still pretty damn good, right up there with Halo, but falling a touch short of your Killzone 2 or Metal Gear Solid 4 levels of wow. Lighting and fire effects, very important elements in the atmosphere of the game, are probably the engines most impressive features and some terrific event moments are pure eye candy. The character models are, at times, a little too doll like with some pretty jerky animations during cut scenes. The developers have also decided to add a grainy render over the whole thing, presumably to give it a bit of cinematic flair. But initially its just a bit annoying before you get used to it.

The Matrix was how long ago? Ten years?

The gameplay is pretty much identical to every previous FEAR game with running a and gunning the main items on the menu. Side dishes include two levels driving a mech suit through sections of a level, reducing enemies to puddles of jam with your miniguns; and two brief sections manning a mounted gun emplacement and covering your squad mates. The slowmo ability is still available giving you a leg up on your enemies who are otherwise outfitted with the same armour and health as you and require more than a few bullets to take down, even on the girly easy level. You now also have the ability to flip tables and pull vending machines down to act as cover. Unfortunately there is no cover mechanic in the actual gameplay and all you’re really doing is reducing the amount of your body that can be hit by bullets while you shoot back. For the most part the gameplay is predictable and rarely very challenging. You fight the same three types of ATC Black Ops and Clone troopers through most of the game with the occasionally startling attack by some creepy wall crawling mutants. You have three melee attacks available as well, a standard pistol whip a flying kick when you jump melee and a sliding kick when you hit melee while dashing. A handy tactic against single enemies is to charge at them blasting and then quickly dash and melee to knock them of their feet. Admittedly that’s more just fun than practical. You occasionally get attacked by ghosts which charge at you and cause a little damage before disappearing. You can shoot them easily enough but its far more fun to hit them with a running jump kick Bruce Lee style. I imagine if the Legend had lived long enough to star in Ghost Busters, the film would have been just like that.

Alma, the huggiest dead girl since, well ever really

Multiplayer is quite forgettable, especially for us marginalised Australian gamers. Yes the dreaded ping meter from such games as Rainbow Six Vegas is a lobby feature in FEAR 2. With its settings ranging from Good, Average and Australian, expect to find yourself booted nine times out of ten. When you do get into a game they can be pretty laggy making it extremely difficult to actually kill anyone given the limited damage of most weapons. A few levels have mech suits available to stomp around in but you can almost guarantee to be fending of both the enemy and your team mates, bitter that you spawned closer to the mech than they did. Maybe I’m being too pessimistic but when there are so many great multiplayer games fighting for your free time FEAR 2 doesn’t make a concerted effort. Its closest equivalent would probably be the multiplayer found in The Darkness; again a great single player campaign hampered by a very average multiplayer.

FEAR 2: Project Origin is a fun and engaging, if uninspired and relatively unoriginal shooter. The real strength lies in the plot and story details which are handled in a refreshingly adult manner and doesn’t dumb itself down. It might not be as scary as previous games but its still scary enough to make a grown man break out in goose bumps. It's not the best shooter coming out this year, heck it's not even the best shooter coming out this month, but despite its relatively derivative gameplay its got enough surprises and interesting plot points to keep your sweating hands and itching eyes staring at the screen until the very end.