I recently finished F.E.A.R., and it underwhelmed me. It had been hyped up as some awesome FPS with high destructibility and great AI, but it's the easiest FPS I have ever played.
The AI would stop in the middle of hallways, not detect me, or turn around and stand still, and it couldn't detect environmental noise. I made it a habit to break every piece of glass or electronics I could with the melee attack, which someone thought was a good idea to map to the right mouse button, and the AI never detected it. It would detect mines and grenades, but when I broke every glass pane down a hallway, there was nothing. Slides and jump kicks are useless because stealth is half-baked and guns do too much damage to use it in the middle of active combat. It also doesn't break environmental objects, so you can't do leaping kicks through glass panes or open doors, though I know Extraction Point fixes the latter of these. You can't shoot out lights. Instead, you can only make them flicker, so you can't make the most of stealth. The inclusion of non-clone human enemies in the latter chapters borders on pointless. It is far easier to kill them than it is to kill clone enemies, yet they don't appear in great enough numbers in encounters to justify their presence. On the flipside, mech enemies are almost unbalanced because they spam rockets. The ASP Rifle shouldn't exist, for there isn't enough long range combat to justify its presence over the Particle Rifle. The Auto-Cannon feels like a last minute addition and should have been something you rip off of mechs. The inclusion of slow-mo breaks tension in combat as much as having a gun breaks tension in horror.
The level design is passable, but it's extremely easy to intuit the designer's choices, even if you only play the game once. The game encourages you to look for alternate routes, but it also has areas that could have been fully mapped but weren't (i.e. the areas past gates which open high enough that you could reasonably slide under them), weird environmental limitations (i.e. the multiple windows that you can break and should be able to use to get into rooms, but the game doesn't let you pass through them), and lacks mobility, the most notable fact of this being the absence of a crouch-jump. The level designers have multiple masturbatory levels where they encourage exploration by forcing you to use vents, for that's almost all encouraging exploration really is. The turret-exclusive level can be almost entirely bypassed by using vents, rather than wasting resources. That's not exploration, that's an alternative. There are multiple open areas where there should be enemies or could be cool entrances for hard enemies to chip away your resources, but there are no enemies present. For example, the area where the clone soldier helicopter deploys enemies when you reach the exit. There are only two enemies in that open area, and you can spawn camp the soldiers as they leave the helicopter if you have mines or grenades. The level was obviously designed with the intention of having you retreat from an overwhelming force, something the introduction of the ASP Rifle makes clear, but it didn't work in execution.
The game's environmental destructibility is overhyped in a major way. As I mentioned in the first paragraph, you can't kick through doors or windows. Most electrical boxes don't explode or shoot electricity. You can't shoot through thin walls. Concrete pillars barely chip. I think the hype around destructibility comes from the obvious, almost obnoxious, placement of explosives by the level designer. Be they explosive barrels, electrical boxes, or fire extinguishers, you'll have a dopamine-inducing explosion that sends up smoke which almost completely obscures your vision, a graphical technique meant to replicate the stunt powder overused in Hongkonger cinema. This gives the illusion of destruction when there really isn't much of any. Also, bullets don't ricochet.
The tone is split terribly between a deconstruction of FPS plots through the bumbling of the corporate suits who are trying to cover up Origin and the horrific nature of your vaguely Arab half-brother and Alma, all the while trying to capture the feeling of Metal Gear Solid. The first half of this is conveyed through optional poorly mixed voicemails and CODEC-ripoff files, but these aren't truly optional. Unless you listen to them, you will barely know who the people you are interacting with are or what is going on, and this is a shame, since the meat of the story and its personality is in them. This tone of corporate bumbling is undermined by the comical presence of Mapes, the fat bastard whose antics pad the game and soften the game's premise yet are expected to be taken seriously. The other half of this, the horror aspect, is greatly underused yet forms the basis of the game's driving force. The hallway scene must have been someone on the team's favorite, for it makes up the majority of the game's horror sequences, and does so to diminishing returns. There's a clone army made by a failing defense company, and most of the soldiers who compose it are normal guys. The heavy and stealth enemies are underused in favor of reskins who lack cool designs or attacks. There's nothing horrific about them. They're just copies of people. I should be getting claustrophobic and questioning whether I should use vents to bypass enemies because there are invisible stealth soldiers crawling through them rather than facing what may as well be the same enemy with some stat changes over and over again. As for environmental horror, most of that is reduced to occasional gore and overused audio stings as you see Alma or the vaguely Arab antagonist, the same antagonist who may as well not be in the game because of how forgettable he is. Most of the game's horror segments that aren't what I've already described are large, open office or utility settings with creepy music. The ghost enemies only appear in these settings at the end of the game, and they're all the same enemy, paper-thin grey guys who move fast. I appreciate the game's tone at times, but the designers should have chosen one tone and stuck with it. Instead, it's a weird split between the two that lands neither.
Finally, the game and its protagonist lack a personality. In Half-Life, Duke Nukem, and Max Payne, you can feel the character's personality in more than just his commentary or what others say about him. How he reloads guns, what guns he uses, what he uses in his environment to solve his problems, how he moves, and other visual and gameplay aspects define the character and leave him in the mind of the player. Who is Pointman? He's not the foil to the vaguely Arab antagonist. He's obviously Alma's second son from the moment you learn about her. He's not recognized by Harlan Wade as his grandson. His melee attacks are just hitting things with the butt of his gun. His methods of solving problems are pressing buttons. He's barely around his squad. The intention behind him may have been to deconstruct the typical FPS protagonist by revealing that he's not only like his enemy, but also someone who may as well be one of the clones he's fighting, though we're never given any indication of who these are clones of, despite the most obvious answer being Pointman. However, his concept of not having a backstory is senseless when what the game presents is taken into account. It wasn't as if he was grown in a test tube. He is implied to have had a childhood and a very brief history with his squad and was born from a mother, yet everything we know about Pointman as a person is from his half-brother, who gives an exposition dump at the end that Pointman is nobody. The only good part of this is Alma's last words, "I know who you are." It gives an impression that she is in his psyche while he was in the facility and that his mind might have been wiped prior to joining F.E.A.R., things that could have been explored in sequels.
Despite having typed five paragraphs in which I rail against this game, I don't hate it. F.E.A.R. is a very mediocre and unimaginative game that I desperately want to like, but I was completely underwhelmed by it. Given everything about it, I have to say that it's a fancy tech demo like Half-Life 2.