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also confusing, but was quite unnecessary to the enjoyment of the game and could have been left out totally.

There are instances in the game where you come across laptops and unanswered phones with voicemail and you can access these to gain information and help figure out what's going on. It's a nice touch, but it doesn't actually tell you much more than you'd figure out yourself anyway.

The enemy A.I. comes is also worth mentioning. It's not real A.I. as you might expect, but the enemy at least appears to be smarter than your usual FPS foe. They use cover, blindly shoot around corners, hoping to hit you, team up and probably most noticeably, if you fire off a couple of shots and leg it back to a vantage point, they won't follow you, instead waiting for you to come to them. This helps make the game a bit more challenging and forces you to use different tactics to other FPS games.

I've briefly mentioned the game engine before, but it's not perfect. Rather, it has one large flaw in that light sources are indestructible. It would have been nice if the player could have shot out the light sources to be able to stay hidden or even up a fire fight when you're bathed in light. That's only a minor gripe in a very good game engine, though.

It's the gameplay that counts and overall, F.E.A.R. is a good game. The game engine coupled with the atmospherics, some of the extra touches (weapon selection, searching laptops, combat and bullet time etc) and the overall story does provide a good package. Played at a fairly tough difficulty level and you'll get a goodly amount of game time out of the game up to 20 to 24 hours for the single player game alone, depending on how good you are at this kind of game.

F.E.A.R. is definitely a game for older gamers with gore levels set pretty high, plenty of language that your mother wouldn't use and the fact that it will scare the bejesus out of you if you play it in the dark. If you think of it as a cross between Half-Life (game) and The Ring (film) and you're probably not far wrong in terms of atmosphere and gameplay.

There is an online multiplayer aspect to F.E.A.R. but as yet I haven't played this.

F.E.A.R. Minimum Specifications:

Windows XP, x64 or 2000 (with latest service packs installed)
DirectX 9.0c (included on DVD)
1.7 GHz CPU
512 MB of RAM or more
64 MB GeForce 4 Ti or Radeon 9000 video card
16-bit DirectX 9.0 compatible sound card (with support for EAX 2.0)
Broadband or network connection for multiplayer games

I played the game using (where different from above):
Athlon 2500+ CPU
1GB memory
Sapphire Radeon 9600 Atlantis 256MB graphics card
Soundblaster 7.1 soundcard

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