These opening months of 2009 have been mostly uneventful, in PC gaming. The majority of PC gamers probably have not minded too much though -- they still have tons of strong releases from the '08 Fall season to play with. Coincidentally, the game we’re about to step into, F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin, was slated to be in that season's barrage of games. The development team delayed the game though, and it was said that the title was being re-tuned and refined to deliver a more complete experience. We’ll find out today if that work paid off. Did the team dodge a bullet with the delay, or did they merely prolong the inevitable, and release a bomb on the FPS community?
Project Origin is set as a proper sequel to the original F.E.A.R. story: but the story pretty much discounts many of the events that occurred on the side, and instead focuses on the state of affairs with the Armacham Technology Corporation. The situation appears quite grim as your team enters into the fray to find Genevieve Aristide and find out what is going on with their projects and the current threat posed. Players take on the roll of Sgt. Michael Becket who runs with an elite military unit that gets redirected into the current situation, with the goal of taking Aristide into custody, and delivering her back into protective custody.
The mission sounds easy enough. Of course though: it isn't. Supernattural and freaky antagonist Alma is back to keep things interesting.
Antagonist Alma is still very much a part of the game, given that things could go either way. Lets touch on the specs for the game briefly, and then jump into the fray that is Project Origin.
F.E.A.R. 2 goes through a series over graphic overhauls, a lot of changes with the handling of physics, HDR, depth of field, motion blur, as well as many other factors. The changes make the game a bit more of a piece of cinema than just a standard FPS; as such Monolith is asking the following hardware requirements are met:
Minimum Spec:
CPU:
- Intel Pentium 4 2.8GHz (3.2GHz Vista)
- AMD Athlon 3000+ (3200+ Vista)
GPU:
- DX9 Compliant with 256MB of RAM (SM2.0b) GeForce 6800 or Higher
- DX9 Compliant with 256MB of RAM (SM2.0b) Radeon X700 or Higher
Memory:
- 1GB (1.5GB Vista)
HDD:
- 12GB
OS:
- Windows XP SP2 / Vista SP1
DirectX:
- 9.0c November 2008
Sound:
- DX9.0c Compliant
Optical Drive:
- DVD (Boxed version only)
Internet:
Recommended Spec:
CPU:
- Intel Core 2 Duo 2.2GHz
- AMD Athlon X2 4400+
GPU:
- DX9 Compliant with 512MB of RAM (SM3.0) GeForce 8600GTS or Higher
- DX9 Compliant with 512MB of RAM (SM3.0) Radeon HD 2900XT or Higher
Memory:
- 1.5GB
HDD:
- 12GB
OS:
- Windows XP SP3 / Vista SP1
DirectX:
- 9.0c November 2008
Sound:
- DX9.0c Compliant
Optical Drive:
- DVD (Boxed version only)
Internet:
- Broadband (768kbit/sec upstream required for 16 players)
Our test system for this review:
-AMD Athlon X2 4800+
-ATI Radeon HD 3850 512
-3GB RAM
-Seagate 500GB SATA II
-Windows Vista Ultimate SP1
-Creative X-Fi XtremeMusic
With that said, let's skip into the game itself and start on how F.E.A.R. 2 stacks up.
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