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Fear Effect Review
Gavin Frankle
00/12/0000
Fear Effect can be best likened to a good movie. It pulls you in and doesn't let go, but all too soon it ends and you have to return to the real world.
Fear Effect is as immersive as games get, it's storyline twists and weaves and evokes a variety of emotions throughout. But at 8 to 10 hours it ends all too soon, leaving you with the craving for more. That said, I'd rather have 10 hours of greatness than a lifetime of mediocrity.
Fear Effect's anime-inspired look goes a long way to making it feel like an interactive movie(trust me, this time it's a good thing). Cut-scenes utilise the game's engine and thus don't take long to load - a crucial element in maintaining the disbelief the game tries so hard to create. The game's storyline is fantastic and without giving too much away, goes something like this. As a team of mercenaries(you control all three members at different points in the game) your goal is to find Wee Ming - the daughter of Hong Kong's most powerful Triad leader, before anybody else and trade her for a small fortune. Though, like most money-making schemes, things soon go awry leaving our friends little choice but to solve the mysteries surrounding Wee Ming and escape with their lives.
Unique to the game is how fear affects your life meter (hence the name of the game). Depending on how well your character does in fire-fights, how much ammo they have and the number of enemies faced with, their fear meter rises or falls. If your meter drops into the red, one shot will kill you, keep it in the green however and things will be just dandy. The cool thing about this is that when low on ammo you can switch to a different gun(with more ammo in it) and your fear meter will drop slightly, leaving you with more health.
The game controls similarly to Resident Evil, in that up on the D-pad is always forward. However, new to Fear Effect is the way in which you interact with your environment. Everything is context-sensitive, moving near a ladder will give you the choice of climbing down, while facing an item will give you the option of taking it. Your inventory can be manipulated in real-time using the square and circle buttons to cycle through the items. Gone are the days of pausing the game in the middle of a zombie attack to configure your weapons, if you don't plan ahead in FE, you're going to die.
A point of much debate is the trial-and-error gameplay in FE. Many of the puzzles' solutions are only discovered after dying a number of times(with some rather nifty death animations I might add). However, when a death inducing puzzle is nearby, your cellphone rings(the game's way of telling you to save), so you'd be hard-pressed to complain if you died and didn't save. The biggest problem with the gameplay is the load time required to get you back into the game after dying. When you die four or five times before solving a puzzle, load time quickly becomes annoying, though these points of frustration are few and far between.
In a story-heavy game such as this, bad voice acting would be criminal and would reduce the fun factor of the game exponentially. Thankfully, the voice-acting is excellent. Characters say their lines *gasp* as though they actually mean them! Who would have thought? That's right kiddies no B-movie voice-acting hear. You never seem to notice the sound or music unless you make a conscious effort to listen to them, which in my book makes them excellent, because you'd only notice them if they sucked right?
Fear Effect is one of those rare games that pulls you in and doesn't let go. The mature-themed storyline is excellent and save for being longer, there isn't much wrong with the game. It's one helluva ride and well worth the price of admission.
