One of gaming’s most dysfunctional and mostly undead families is back for another round of bloody action. F.E.A.R. Extraction Point (XP) picks up right where the after-credits cliffhanger ending of the original left off, although eager players shouldn’t expect too many answers to the many questions left wide open last year.

F.E.A.R. This

XP is a surprisingly good expansion mission to F.E.A.R., as long as you aren’t expecting anything beyond the intense action that made the original game such a winner. As one of the few surviving members of the First Encounter Assault Recon team, you awake to find the burning wreckage of your ride out of hell. Thankfully, your two team mates also managed to live this long as well, and the three of you (mostly separately) must make it to a new extraction point in the city.

As the game opens, the seemingly lifeless bodies of the replica soldiers stand around like mannequins, but it doesn’t take long before you realize that the feud between you, Paxton Fettel, and the ever freaky ghost of Alma is far from over. F.E.A.R. Extraction Point’s plot really doesn’t cover much in the way of new ground, and while it raises plenty of new questions, the game doesn’t clarify more of convoluted plot than the original did.

There are some nice new touches to the story—such as Alma’s touching display of maternal warmth shown almost entirely by killing people in horrible ways—but mostly XP is clearly meant to gives players more of what F.E.A.R. does best. While the atmosphere is excellently apprehensive and freaky, the combat AI is what gave the game legs. Though certainly not perfect, the game’s enemy troops provide some of the most impressive shooter AI since the Half-Life games.

Gun Tension

XP has countless intense, bullet-saturated combat sequences. In fact, it focuses on them so heavily that by the time you’ve blown your way through the five hour scenario, the gameplay borders dangerously on exhausting. All the creepy atmosphere of the original game is recreated in XP. The expansion pack developer, TimeGate, has managed to make this new mission an almost seamless addition to the main game, and they clearly have the skills necessary to make effective use of sound, light (or more accurately, the lack thereof), and tension.

Same old horror…

There’s not much new here. The mini-gun is a fun new toy, along with deployable turrets that stick to any surface, but most players will stick to the trusty old shotgun and assault rifle. Likewise, the locations feel much the same as the first game. You’ll venture into subway stations and tunnels this time around, but for the most part, the game seems to use environments from F.E.A.R. (and in some cases, Monolith’s other next-gen horror game, Condemned…). There are also a few new bad guys including bizarre, mostly invisible spooks that have a nasty habit of flying toward you while screeching.

Even so, the replicants are still your main foes and the most interesting to fight. They aren’t geniuses, but their ability to detect you by sound or light, and try to flank you makes the battles feel visceral. Unfortunately, since XP brings nothing else new to the table, once you beat the new scenario there is little reason to play through it again. The multiplayer version of F.E.A.R. is available free of charge, after all, so only fans of the first game’s single player game will want XP.

Expand This

At around $30, XP is a tad pricey for an expansion pack. Granted, five or six hours is considered lengthy for a shooter add-on these days, and it is a very well done addition to the F.E.A.R. series. Awesome action, intense atmosphere, fantastic audio work, gorgeous graphics, and plenty of blood and gore make this a worthy gun fix for gamers who still have the original game installed.

Article by: Jason D'Aprile