Summary
The ultimate action game for Playstation
The Good
"Fear Effect" combines
Resident Evil-like survival horror gameplay, some cool action-oriented additions, and superb storytelling into one of the most remarkable, stylish, and thrilling games ever. From futuristic Hong-Kong into the depth of Chinese hell, your heroes experience an adventure such as never seen before.
The game is set in a country which is the main cultural inspiration of Japan and a popular stage for Japanese games - China. The huge world of Chinese folk beliefs, mythology, and superstitions is shown in "Fear Effect". What starts as a relatively "earthly" mission in a typical futuristic Asian city, slowly develops into a nightmare that leads you directly into Chinese hell. All kinds of demons await you - not only the obligatory zombies, but also the King of Hell himself - Yan Lou Wang (or
Yim Lau Wong, as pronounced in Cantonese, a Chinese dialect spoken in province Guandong, which also includes Hong-Kong). But there are also many human enemies: in the first part of the game, you don't encounter any non-human opponents at all.
The story of the game seems quite plain and trivial in the beginning, but it soon becomes a macabre, profoundly disturbing tale, full of bizarre, "gothic" events, and sudden plot twists. The more you play the game, the more supernatural appears on the stage, and you can gaze into the souls of your heroes. In the end, this story appears to be much more than just background information for an action game. The game's style mixes futuristic setting with fantasy - but a strictly Chinese fantasy, with demonology and mythology typical for the Chinese. The game reveals a solid knowledge and understanding of the world of Chinese superstitions, and present an adequate picture of what could have been a horror story by some Chinese author of the Middle Ages.
The game has a distinct erotic flavor. The main heroine is one of sexiest video game protagonists I know, and the outfits she wears in the game (yes, she changes her clothes!) are more revealing than concealing. A large part of the game is set in a brothel, and there are some beautiful scenes, such as the shower scene, which are definitely not intended for little children. Although there isn't much horror in the game, the few horror scenes are quite strong - like the dreadful encounter between Mr. Lam and Glas in the end of the 3rd CD.
"Fear Effect" has an exceptionally brilliant event design. There are a lot of scripted events in the game: floors crash, ceilings collapse, paths are set on fire, etc. Often you'll have to think and act very quickly. The game is extremely tight, events follow each other so rapidly that you can hardly breath while switching between watching a fasinating short movie and leading your character to a safe spot. The game is distinctly separated into small sections, most of which are linear and have one task to accomplish. Once you finish such a section, you'd want to breath in relief, but another dramatic events occurs, and you have to act quickly again. Since your characters die a lot in the game, and since many situations require precise timing, "Fear Effect" is one of the most suspenseful and nerve-tickling games I know, easily compared to such masterpieces of tension as
Another World and
Heart of Darkness.
Well, on to the gameplay, which is also great. It is a mixture between survival horror and pure action. The controls are typical for survival horror games, as are the certain clumsiness of combat, the necessity to save ammo whenever possible, the abundance of scripted events, and the linear development of the game. However, there are lots of other strategies which are less common for survival games. You have many different moves at your disposal. You can run, crouch, sneak, roll, and quickly turn around. Rolling proves to be very efficient against many enemies, especially some of the bosses. Sneaking is a great feature that is more than just a gimmick. When you are low on ammo and health, and see a corridor where guards armed with assault rifles are walking along, you'd often have no other choice but to sneak on them and to kill them silently with a melee weapon. You also have to aim at your enemy: if you just shoot blindly, you won't hurt a thing.
The boss battles are very cool in this game. All bosses follow a certain pattern in their attacks, so if you figure out this pattern, the boss battle will become very easy. If not, it is most likely you won't make it alive. Of course, you usually die and restore again while fighting those bosses, but once you finally understand how to avoid the attacks, the battles turn to be quite an enjoyable business.
Shooting occupies the largest portion of the game, but there are also many arcade-like parts, where you have to avoid obstacles, think and act quickly in order to stay alive. Typical for this game are parts where you have to run over sinking stones, collapsing tiles, or fire. Much like bosses, such arcade sequences usually follow a certain pattern - precise timing is all that matters here.
The puzzles are almost perfect for such kind of a game, although I found some of them slightly too tricky. Well, not really tricky - I wouldn't probably even notice them if they were a part of a pure adventure game. But in the middle of a shooter, it is not always comfortable to shoot enemies while trying to figure out what might provide a clue to a puzzle solution. It's hard to think of survival and of puzzle-solving at the same time. But what I really liked was the fact the puzzles require mostly sharp observation rather than some annyoing clue-gathering or tedious thinking. Of course, there are also "thinking" puzzles, like the majestic "Hana's ages" puzzle near the end of the game. But some of them require just looking around and noticing things, separating the important from the unimportant. Many puzzles involve recognizing Chinese signs and other attributes of Chinese culture, which bears a high educational value. How many games you know will require you to learn and memorize Chinese characters or famous patterns from the ancient book Yi Jing? Overall, I found the puzzles very interesting and refreshing.
A very interesting and original feature of the game is its fear meter. Instead of a health bar, you have a "fear bar". If you think "fear meter" is just a fancy name for hit points, you are wrong. It doesn't work at all like a HP bar. First of all, you cannot restore your fear level by yourself. There are no healing items in the game, and no ability to rest, so healing is not possible. Besides, your fear level will be raised (which is a bad thing!) not only when taking damage. When you enter an area and sense a presence of enemies, your fear level will raise, and you'll often be on the verge of dying. However, this system also gives you bonuses you don't have with usual health bars. The more enemies you kill, the lower your fear level become. So if you enter an area with enemies while your fear level is very high (marked by red color on the fear meter), you have a chance of lowering it by killing the enemies. Of course, physical damage also raises the fear level, until you die, but I often found myself entering a fierce combat with a red fear meter, and ending it not only alive, but with the fear meter reduced to green. Besides, each time you accomplish an important task, you'll receive a "rush" - your fear will drop completely. You also have such rushes before and after boss battles.
The graphics are awesome, to say the least. In fact, "Fear Effect" ows a lot of its supreme quality to its wonderful artwork. The background graphics are very similar to those of
Blade Runner, the great adventure game for the PC. The pre-rendered backgrounds are perhaps the best of their kind, which now became almost obsolete. No other Playstation game I know has such wonderful pre-rendered backgrounds, not even
Final Fantasy VIII. Just like in "Blade Runner", they are fantastically animated. Since Playstation couldn't handle real-time 3D graphics very well, I think it was the best solution for the game. It is amazing how lively those backgrounds look. Creepy shadows crawl over desolate landscapes in Chinese hell, neon lights flash in Lam's building, and cockroaches quickly cross the kitchen floor in Madam Chen's restaurant. But the real "graphical trump" of "Fear Effect" are character graphics. No fan of animé should miss this game, simply because it features superbly created animé-style 3D character models. They fit the backgrounds perfectly and make the game look stylish and cool. And if it weren't enough, CG video sequences appear at every opportunity. I have rarely seen a game with so many videos, that were so brilliantly incorporated into the gameplay. The transition between a video and an in-game part is extremely smooth. Often you won't even notice the video has ended and you now have control of your character. Sometimes you can even control a character when the video is still running - especially in short sequences where you have to escape quickly.
The Bad
The controls. The controls. The controls. If you happen to know, by any chance, the name of the guy who first invented character-based controls for 3rd person perspective games (wasn't
Alone in the Dark the first game ever to have them?), the type of controls usually referred to as
Resident Evil style, let me know and I'll tell him personally what I think about his idea. In case I haven't made myself clear: those controls
suck. And you know what? Those who made this game know it too, otherwise they wouldn't have bothered to let us choose a different type of controls (camera-based, the one and the only way to move around a character) in
Retro Helix. And Konami wouldn't have introduced the same option in their wonderful
Silent Hill 2, after the
first Silent Hill game was also plagued by this disease. I think that except for some hardcore zombie-fans nobody in his right mind would prefer this kind of controls, that became - alas! - the standard for horror/survival games. Such controls are more or less okay when you are fighting enemies who use melee weapons or monsters who can't attack you from far away, but they make a game where your enemies often use guns ten times harder than necessary. Just think you have to
turn around every time you want to make a side step! Using walls and other objects as a cover becomes an absolute pain in the neck. When will they finally stop forcing us to use such dreadful controls? A 3rd person shooter should be played as naturally and as smoothly as a FPS. I see no reason for making the player fight against his natural instinct to control his character
as if this character were himself. So when I want to move to the right, I don't want to pretend there's some weird 3D thingy running around there, and for
him (or for her) right might not be the same as for me, who is actually sitting in front of the TV.
The Bottom Line
"Fear Effect" is a stylish, dark, bizarre masterpiece, balancing on the narrow path separating life and death, normality and insanity, solid old-fashioned gameplay and features unseen before. It proves even a silly demon-killing survival horror kind of thing can become a great game if handled properly. Once again, Playstation shows it beats all other contemporary consoles when it comes to quality games.
