F.E.A.R. Files
Cut and shut.
As you might expect, that means a few new weapons, too, such as the Quake-inspired Chain Lightning Gun, which dispenses electrical justice upon anything in range, as well as the more conventional Grenade Launcher. One of the stars of the show is the Advanced Rifle, which sports an enhanced scope which as well as providing a small amount of zoom, also amplifies the light - useful in such a gloomy game. Overall, you dance around a pretty varied and useful arsenal, giving you all manner of ways to pull-off slo-mo death - that never gets boring, and helps drag you through the game even when the plot's not really pulling its weight.
Fundamentally, Erica Aged Rapidly
Perseus Mandate's also had slightly more love lavished on it from a graphical perspective, with the early storm drain levels providing adequate evidence of wanting to provide a little more environmental detail than was possible in Extraction Point. Typically, the industrial greyness never lets up, with some regulation trudges through warehouses, city streets, a car park (again), another sewer, and, of course, our old friend, the office complex, before ending up in underground in a top-secret, high-tec facility.
Somehow, the whole thing just hangs together a little better, with an evidently more directed narrative flow giving you a greater sense of purpose in your balletic death dealing. That said, most of its rare attempts at AI teamplay are almost laughably primitive next to Valve's more recent efforts. And after promising to make it more of a squad effort at the beginning, things fall back into the old solo routine for the vast majority of the rest of the game. While this isn't necessarily a bad thing, it would have been nice to see the F.E.A.R. template tested in a few different directions. Still, Perseus Mandate is definitely the better of the two by virtue of having more variety, a more coherent sense of purpose, and a little more effort in the map design. Benefiting from a little more of the open-ended freedom we recall from the original, it comes close to recapturing the original's magic, but not quite close enough. In a game that relies so heavily on slowing down time, if all you do is throw in a few more weapons and a few new baddies, it's not going to take long before it starts to feel a little one-dimensional. Yes, the excellent AI still allows it to rise above the mire, but only just. Too many things are counting against it now - especially the crushing familiarity and the creaking graphics engine.
However, there are some nice additions to this 360 release - predictably the effect that the inevitable Achievement points have on your incentive to carry on, and the way they help guide how you play it. For example, they encourage you to try out the new weapons by setting kill targets with each one, and so on. And unlike the utter miserly number of points handed out for completing the single-player campaign in the original, points are now weighted more in favour of the single-player offering, with the usual bonuses for those mad enough to play the game on extreme.
On top of this, you've also got eight single-player Instant Action maps to plough through. As with the console ports of the original, you get to sample a score-based level against the clock in settings culled from the main game. Although it's a bit much to try and play them straight after both expansion packs, in isolation they offer great bite-sized chunks against wave upon wave of enemy replicants. It's fast, furious, brutal, and utterly unforgiving, but with worldwide leaderboards to play for, it's a great way of keeping the game alive once it's all over. And then there's the online multiplayer for up to 16 players online - there's no big news here as such, but with some new maps to sample, it'd be churlish to complain.
Pitched against some fearsome FPS competition, F.E.A.R. Files was always going to struggle to impress, and so it has proved. Putting both expansion packs in the same package, though, is a sensible idea, though given that neither are actually as good as their parent offering, perhaps it should have been a mid, rather than full-priced offering. Extraction Point, in particular, is a real disappointment, and one for hardcore fans only, though the substantial improvement offered by the all-new Perseus Mandate makes the package a lot more interesting. If you've somehow still not managed to get your FPS fix in among the deluge of top-quality offerings this past few months, then F.E.A.R. Files offers a decent, if unspectacular diversion.