So, in general, I’m not a big fan of the horror genre, in any medium. On a surface level, I just don’t enjoy horror movies and books. Having the pants scared off of me just doesn’t fall under the heading of ‘fun’ in my big book of things that I do.

I have made a few exceptions to this rule in games, however. For some reason, I don’t find horror games nearly as frightening as horror movies. Perhaps it’s because in a game I usually have a fully loaded assault weapon in my hands and can do something about the thing that’s scaring me. Probably the same phenomenon behind why I loathed the first Alien film but really enjoyed the second: more guns = more funs.

The first F.E.A.R. game is a classic example of this (the acronym stands for First Encounter Assault Recon, and from now on I will simply call it ‘Fear’ because all those periods get really irritating by about the fourth paragraph). I’m told the game takes a lot of cues from horror flicks like The Ring, but that is of less importance to me than how awesome a game it is. I’ll go into more detail as I continue to write, but suffice to say for now that it ranks among my favorite games of all time, and it has most decidedly not been replaced by its sequel.

The story of Fear 2 is long and convoluted and you can read about it from some other gaming journalist. In a nutshell, it’s the original developer’s vision of how the story of Fear continues, which primarily involves completely ignoring the two abysmal expansion packs which were released for the first game (read: do not play them if you enjoy retaining your intelligence). Sadly, despite promising beginnings, this sequel is largely a disappointment. Allow me to demonstrate by making a list of all the things that made the first game great, and then of how the second game murdered them and left them to bleed out and die.

Story: The story behind Fear is a bit convoluted and I’m not going to recount it here, partially because it would take up a full article and partially because I want you all to go play the game. In short, you are a member of the First Encounter Assault Recon team, an elite group dedicated to investigating paranormal encounters. You’re sent in to investigate Armacham, a giant corporation that has been developing clone super soldiers that can be controlled by a psychic commander. Alma, a powerful psychic girl who mothered the commander of the clone soldiers, has gone completely bonkers from lifelong abuse at the hands of Armacham’s scientists, and through a series of unfortunate events she is released from captivity and immediately begins to kill everyone around her. While it sounds a bit flat on paper, trust me when I say that it’s an absorbing and intense story to play through, which a few twists and turns to keep it interesting.
Fear 2’s story, on the other hand, I was never really able to get a firm grip on. You play a different character, a member of a different military team, sent in to arrest one of the directors of Armacham. The sequel opens a few minutes before the end of the first game, and so some of its events are supposed to run parallel to those of the original. This is rarely taken advantage of, however, and the story sadly consists largely of confusing journal entries and the accounts of badly voice-acted characters.

Perhaps the biggest failing in the story department is that way in which it is presented. In the first game, you are your character. The operative you play as has no personality of his own, leaving a blank slate of sorts for the player to fill in with whatever makes the most sense. You don’t have to try and share in someone else’s experience, or empathize with a foreign character. You are character. And thus the story becomes personal and involving.

Fear 2 went with a different approach, asking you to instead fill the shoes of a pre-made character named Micheal Beckett. While this storytelling technique has been used succesfully in countless games, here it only serves to distance the player from the game’s events, ultimately resulting in my utter lack of interest in what was happening.

Atmosphere: The first Fear game positively dripped with atmosphere. Its corridors were dark, its lighting was spooky, the bad guys were believable, and the scares were genuine. Everything about the game shouted, “I was made by people who care about me.” Fear 2, on the other hand, feels unfortunately like a cash-in on its predecessors success, a smarmy leech riding on the coattails of greatness. While much of the game feels similar, it doesn’t so much emulate the first game as it copy/pastes it, leaving the player feeling more like they’d been promised the real Mona Lisa only to be given a cheap knock-off that looks more like Madonna.

Intensity: the original Fear ranks easily in the top three most-intense-games-in-the-world-ever. The firefights were incredible — gunshots incredibly loud, gun smoke and dust clogging your vision, huge chunks of concrete ripped from walls by stray bullets, the enemies shouting intel to each other about your location while you desperately slammed another magazine into your weapon. And even the sections without a shot being fired managed to spike the old heart rate.

Fear: The original game was scary. Really. Not ‘monsters are jumping out at me’ scary, but truly under-your-skin frightening. The secret to this was the remarkable restraint the developers showed in putting the game together. Many of the most potent scares the game delivered were built upon long sections of nothing happening. You’d be moving through a building filled with scary looking dark corners, muscles rigid because every new corner looks like something is going to jump out and clobber you, but nothing would until you finally began to expect that nothing would and then your guard would be down and then HOLY PANTS TERROR FROM BEHIND!!!!

The game got under your skin because it worked to build an atmosphere of uncertainty and psychological fear. Fear 2, sadly, ditched most of this in favor of a mixture of cheap scares, recycled tricks, and gore. There’s times where it will begin to have success at generating actual fright, but then it seems to get tired of the effort and hangs a mangled corpse in your face. Ooo, scary.

Violence: If it’s not already clear, both Fear games land solidly in the M-rated category. Language, violence, and (in the sequel) some sexual elements make their appearances. But the first game, while violent, didn’t revolve around the bloodshed. It was there, but it wasn’t glorified and set on a pedestal with banners reading, “Look at the blood!” The sequel, on the other hand, revels in the bloodbath, taking every opportunity to shove the player’s face into another gory scene. Where the violence in the first game added to the atmosphere, the violence in the sequel is just distracting and detracts from the experience.

There are a few other categories I could go into, but I’m not going to because I’m tired of writing about this disappointing game. If you’re looking for a top-notch horror game with real scares and incredible action, rent or buy the first game (it’s available for PC, Xbox 360, and Playstation 3) and ignore the sequel.

Jerod Jarvis is an independent gaming journalist and founder of Duality Games. He maintains gaming columns for The Washington Times Communities and for The Outpost. When not blogging madly about games, he freelances for the Spokesman-Review in his hometown of Spokane, Washington and attends school at Whitworth University. Check out his presence on Facebook and Twitter to stay up on Duality Games updates and the inside scoop on the gaming news you care about.