Part 4: Deeper

Part 4: Deeper

The first hour/hour and a half of FEAR 2 feels like it is much longer that it really is because unlike most of the game you basically wander around the same location with few, if any transitions to new environments that feel wildly different. I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing, the natural progression of the early levels is one of the things I can appreciate about the game; jolting the player between varied environments works for some franchises, but others having a mostly seamless transition between levels just makes sense.

For example, Call of Duty moving you around the world (or space) and between characters works for the story IW/Sledgehammer/Treyarch are trying to tell. At the start of FEAR 2 you can't have the characters hop around the world or even the city the game takes place in, considering they were kidnapped and whisked away to...wherever they are. You also can't just have them magically find an exit and send them to a new location. Instead the developers decided to have a pretty long section where you fight through a small army of people and escape the crazy place you woke up in.

That said, the environments in this first section of the game, thought they start to change, get pretty samey pretty quickly. The hospital sort of sets a tone of "a normal place with something wrong" that gives way to what we see towards the middle and end of the video: utilitarian military and industrial stuff. I really wish that the game spent less time in those environments and more time on the hospital style stuff. As it stands the game is sort of a 50/50 split between the two.