Split-Screen :: The Game-Geek’s Daily Read

F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin, being a true sequel to the original horror and action fest, is now more than a month old but I confess to only recently getting my hands on the game. Besides offering fast and furious gun play, tough enemies and the abrupt, psychological attacks of Alma’s appearances, F.E.A.R. 2 also struck me in the utter simplicity of it’s mechanics, particularly the cover system. Cover system mechanics have always been a hotly debated topic, especially with Capcom’s Resident Evil 5 seeking to implement the same. However, I must confess to how easily Project Origin’s cover mechanics flowed and ultimately, how everything combined for a more open ended, varied approach to fighting.

If you’ve played even a little bit of F.E.A.R., or its under-whelming expansions, you’ll be aware of the slow motion or SlowMo controls that give your character heightened reflexes. You become much faster, have steadier aiming and can use such tactics as shooting a grenade in mid-air near an enemy’s face. Anyway, look at the overall control scheme: Press Shift once and you can zoom in on aiming. Press Ctrl once and you enter the SlowMo phase. Hit C once and you crouch. Finally, simply press E (the same command used to pick up items and switch out weapons) to flip over a table, slide a cart, even open a wrecked car door for gaining cover. It’s wholly possible to excel by using one action at a time, quickly or methodically, whether moving or stationary, and aiming with the mouse.

Compare this to the cover system employed in Killzone 2. To hug a spot for cover, you must hold L2. Where you choose to aim is dictated by the type of cover (if it’s a solid wall, then left or right; a hurdle, then left, right and above). You then press and hold R3 to sufficiently zoom in and aim. You can also crouch at any point but you have to hold down L1. Then, hit R1 to fire. That’s roughly 4-5 buttons for killing an enemy with a weapon, not including the same right analog stick to move your cursor with, grenade lobbing and reloading. While this approach allows for faster initial reactions, it was often cumbersome to manage in the heat of combat especially when reinforcements appear. The AI in both Killzone 2 and F.E.A.R. 2 are both incredibly devious, so it ultimately becomes your proficiency with the control scheme that decides your fate.

Gears of War, another famed cover-heavy game, only required you to tap one button to get into cover but you still had to lean out and hold another button to zoom in. The blind firing mechanic, implemented to fire inaccurately, is mostly useless, especially in the open environments of Gears of War 2. At times, the actions also get muddled, like hitting the cover button only to suddenly roll forward.

Instead of taking a multi-tasking approach towards the cover system, F.E.A.R. 2′s combat is transitioned smoothly between single actions. You have to be more conscious of which action is being performed in combat, and reacting to the sudden appearance of enemies (this being a F.E.A.R. game, there are plenty of such moments) is a tad slower than in Killzone 2. But probably the best aspect of F.E.A.R. 2′s gameplay is that by making it’s cover system simpler and working in tandem with the SlowMo, you’re not confined to taking cover in one place, having your cover blown than moving into another. You could easily kick over a table and pick off a Replicant, hit the SlowMo to throw a grenade in another’s face and shoot it in mid-air, have enough time to dodge the third’s gun fire and when the SlowMo gauge runs out, greet him with a devasting jump kick at the last moment. It’s completely understated yet useful – giving you all the benefits of “cover” without all the complications of a “system”.

Killzone 2 and Gears of War both operate on the premise of extreme chaos and on-going war while F.E.A.R. focuses more on close quarters fighting and improvisation (though to be fair, F.E.A.R. 2 has more enemies in a single fight than the original). However, the point is in simplification. By limiting the total number of controls the player has to wrestle with in any given scenario, you can preserve both pacing and sanity in one go. Surely this should be easier for controllers, where every finger is already situated in the requisite spot, than keyboards where there’s always a chance of hitting the wrong key in a tense scenario.

That being, all of the mentioned games are still great recommends and despite F.E.A.R. 2′s graphics not quite matching up to the others, is still a solid FPS. Not to mention Alma being appearing as a fully naked woman in almost every hallucination, even though most times she’s emancipated and murdering left and right. Oh well. As they say, whatever gets you off (*cough, cough*).