F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin

PC/PS3/X360

Warner Bros

Note to shadowy corporations: stop making experimental super soldiers. Honestly, it's not worth the hassle. We all understand your dream of a genetically engineered army of unstoppably powerful clones, we all appreciate how great it would be to have a fearsome force of hive-minded fighting units to send down to the shop to decapitate the owner and steal us some sandwiches, but we all also know that it's never going to happen. There's going to be an accident, an explosion or an unexpected psychic power surge or a rat chewing an important wire somewhere, and it's all going to go wrong. Your test subjects will escape, your scientists will get eaten and you'll be left with a big, bloody mess on your hands and a lot of explaining to do. You'd better hope you were working for the government, or you're definitely heading to jail.

FEAR's shadowy corporation fell into this precise trap. Their super soldiers were lorded over by a freaky little Japanese girl called Alma who lived in a fishtank and controlled stuff with her brain. She went crackers and everything else followed suit, and now we, the player, are in the thick of it trying to fight our way out. Luckily we've got a bundle of guns, the ability to slow down time and a very prescriptive route out through the turmoil. So we'll be fine.

We'll be honest here, we never played the first FEAR and we were drunk when we started FEAR 2, so the plot had to gradually trickle in as we shot our way through the collapsing corridors. It's certainly crafted with care, collectible snippets of backstory dotted around the game and control wrestled from you, Half-Life 2 style, to shoehorn in lumps of narrative. But that's by the by. It's simply an excuse to usher you through a scripted selection of satisfying bullet candy, spiced up with entertaining enemy AI and heavy seams of psychological weirdness.

A stomp in the shoes of an ED209-type mech is a highlight - ploughing through nasties like a wolf through butter - while confusing pathfinding and a tendency towards repetition are key niggles. But combat is meaty, frights are convincing and the world, silly as it is, sticks together with impressive cohesion. In a nutshell, FEAR 2 is a very solid tribute to corridors, guns, slo-mo and horror, and it's churlish to complain when a mix that gratifying is done this well.

7/10