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Where's the F.E.A.R remaster?

Where's the F.E.A.R remaster?
F.E.A.R (2005, Monolith Productions)

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You can barely make it a week in video games without seeing games from yesteryear dug up and given a little polish in search of a new audience. Anything is up for a remaster or a re-release, but despite this we're still missing the reappearance of one of 2005's best releases. Where's my F.E.A.R remaster? I've been praying for one for years. 

F.E.A.R is, still, one of the best shooters I've ever played. There are a stack of reasons to love it: the bonkers storyline, the close-quarters shootouts, fun AI or even the fact it spawned the best Rooster Teeth machinima— sorry, but it's true — or my one true love, the 10mm HV Penetrator.

F.E.A.R rules. Here's why.

F.E.A.R itself

F.E.A.R was one of a slew of first-person shooters when it launched back in 2005, coming in the middle of a Monolith hot streak that saw the studio release the excellent Condemned: Criminal Origins in the same year. Between Monolith and Raven Software, my shooter-obsessed teenage self was eating in the ‘00s.

Where F.E.A.R immediately defined itself was how messy things got when the bullets started flying. Squeeze the trigger on a shotgun and you'll tear enemies in half. A burst of gunfire will take chunks out of the wall like you're in the lobby scene from The Matrix. Every room you fight in is a drab square box with no corners, a constraint brought in because of how the AI works, but also a genius move to show off the impressive destruction tech.

See, enter a combat encounter in one of the many plaindrab rooms that make up the game's campaign and you'll warp the room around you as it too becomes a casualty in your rampage. Yes, you are a time-manipulating supersoldier who can easily carve through rows of enemies without a thought. You're also a sculptor.

There's a real sense of achievement when you finish up after a tense fight and you can see the effect you've had on the world around you, whether that's the chunky jam of someone you've hit with a grenade, a partially crucified enemy grunt that you've staked to a wall, or even just the pockmarked walls that tell tales of your poor accuracy.

It's not the only way that F.E.A.R puts on a show. You'll soon come to realise that there aren't any bad guns in the game. Sure, the particle weapon, combat shotgun and the 10mm HV Penetrator— it's a stake gun that can stick people to walls— are standouts, but the pistol, submachine guns and assault rifles all hit like a truck too. The armoury here is generous and fun to use, and you can rip through a crowd with just about any part of it.

Ostensibly, F.E.A.R is a horror shooter. In reality, as long as you avoid one particular scene with a ladder the only thing to be scared of here is the player, armed to the teeth with some of the best weapons in video games.

It's all power fantasy. The AI helps lock this into place, again being performative to show the player exactly what's going on. Many of you who have already played F.E.A.R will remember the razor-sharp AI which feels like it's trying to outthink you, but in reality, the clone army you're fighting is dumb as a bag of rocks and yells everything it's doing at the player like it's a bad anime show so that you notice what's occurring. The AI doesn't need to tell you it's falling back, it's just making sure you know it's scuffling off because it wants you to think it's smart. 

That same AI that can't navigate corners is mostly fighting you with a series of different triggers and animations. Lobbed a grenade? The clone army will stop using its shooting animation and switch to the taking cover animation. Did you get too close? They'll stop taking cover and switch to the melee combat animation. Even knowing this, I'm still always impressed when one of the clone troopers sprays panicked fire over his shoulder as he tries to buy himself a few more seconds to get cover.

The result is that these non-player characters feel like an organised fighting force. But tThey're dumb! This was AI back in 2005 and we've jumped ahead a long way since then, but the big secret is that incredible AI is terrible to play against and that AI doesn't need to be that intelligent to feel smart.

F.E.A.R is, largely, theatre. It's exceptional stuff and from end to end I always leave a session with a smile on my face. Sadly, it's nearly impossible to play F.E.A.R in the modern day unless you have an old console or have a lot of tolerance for janky PC gaming.

Did I mention you can fly-kick people in slow motion? You can do that too. Give me that remaster, why don't you?

Also, this is the first time I've ever written a newsletter, so I'd love to know if you dug this or not. Let me know by emailing a response... which should work, at least.

Additional reading

I want to highlight some of the cool stuff I see around the web, so every newsletter will include some good extra content for you to check out. Here, I've dug up some F.E.A.R bits I liked.