Video Game Impressions: F.E.A.R. / Hellgate: London

I recently had a chance to obtain the Director's Edition of F.E.A.R. Dusting up my machine recently hammered by Quake IV, I knew that my rig is just too slow to even consider tearing through Monolith's F.E.A.R. But I did give it a shot. Running at a pathetic 640x480 medium setting resolution my GPU card was just too old to be able to churn out more pixels.


Screenshot from Guru3D

I went to a mate's home and fired it up there. His system, thankfully, was pretty good. I clocked up roughly one hour of gameplay before packing up. That was one scary hour with that girl in red appearing a couple of times. Plus all those good stuff said about the A.I. is true. Those bastards are really clever (as far as FPS games are concern). In open environment some of the little buggers would sneak away and try to ambush me from behind. This is unlike the other 99% of FPS games out there where enemies would all come running at you. At the same time.



For now I am keeping the game wrapped till Christmas when I head off to Brighton where a nVidia 6600 awaits. Hopefully, with soft shadows turned off I could yield a respectable framerate at 1024x768. The graphic engine is terribly demanding with Monolith themselves advising gamers not to run above 1024x768 on current generations of GPUs.


Screenshot from Guru3D

I am also quite shock that Monolith were able to produce such a creepy game. The last PC games I played that was made by the developer was No One Lives Forever 2, which was an outstanding 1960s spoof spy game (NOLF 1 is also good), and the rather appalling Alien Vs Predator 2. It is like being a character in one of those Japanese horror films.

Speaking of PC games, I just can't wait for Hellgate: London to be released. Just check out the screenies here. The level of detail that went into recreating London seems to be extremely well done. Just look at the screenshot below. Yes that is an actual recreation of a present day London street.



And this is a 1992 Tube Stock. The image has been inverted for some reason but you can still read the destination (Epping) and the unit number (91241). A little googling revealed an actual specimen right here.