GameScore:7
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Editors Plus Rating: +.6
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In 2005, F.E.A.R literally sliced the PC gaming community in half. Half of us fell in love with the game’s fast paced and crazy Hollywood style fire fights, coupled with the awesome particle effects, beautiful visuals and simply stunning AI, while the other half of us utterly loathed the drab, generic and repetitive environments along with the oh so tiresome selection of, being generous, four enemy types. Simply put, if you hated F.E.A.R, there’s only a very small chance Extraction Point will convert you – but if you loved F.E.A.R, you can quit reading now because EP is simply essential for all first person shooter gamers out there hungry for more F.E.A.R, because to put it bluntly, EP improves upon F.E.A.R in just about every way that counts.

 FEAR was pretty much a blend of (rather mild) horror and utterly intense, Hollywood style shootouts. EP quickly tries to re-establish this essence as the opening half hour alternates between stalking through abandoned, desolate environments peppered with occasional horror interludes – most of which are actually more imaginative than those of F.E.A.R as many of them have a great what-the-hell-just-happened-? feeling to them, rather than just the simple shock techniques overused in F.E.A.R – and participating in fire fights that are so intense they are exhausting and exhilarating in equal measure.

 You can drone on about plot and ‘depth’ all you like, but the single most important thing in a first person shooter is the actual shooting. If the fire fights are bad in a pure FPS, the game is bad. F.E.A.R totally acknowledged that fact, and everything about the game was oriented towards the essence of squad-level military combat. What F.E.A.R started, Timegate (the outsourced EP developers) take to the next level.

 The fire fights are far, far wilder thanks to there very rarely being a single A to B route through any given area, it may be as simple as three interconnected pathways in a series of rooms in a building, hardly anything ‘free-roaming’, but coupled with FEAR’s super AI and its passion for flanking you (the AI is as awesome as ever), you’ll find yourself beset on all sides very quickly and it makes the combat far more intense, and far better in general. F.E.A.R had a very corridor-y feel to the combat as you take a guy down, move forwards a bit, take another guy down – it was great, sure, but it was generic in that respect. In EP, you’ll find yourself being attacked on all sides often, and EP tends to throw far more enemies at you at once, it makes the game slightly harder for it, but far, far more enjoyable too.

 The particle effects have also been used more frequently, making the fire fights even more like the lobby scene from a certain film everyone always references when talking about F.E.A.R. It’s great to have particle effects filling the air during the fights, and there’s plenty more debris sitting around than in F.E.A.R to go flying during combat, too. It’s just such a great feeling to take a guy in the legs with a shotgun, watch him fly head over heels in slow motion as his weapon discharges, taking down a hostile and setting off an explosive barrel, which sets half the room on fire as you desperately run through it as smoke and debris fills the air while part of the enemy squad counter flanks and forces you into a killzone, but a well placed mine and a slowmo headshot later and, before the wood and stone chipping particles clear from the air, the last enemy slumps dead. Every single fire fight plays out like a scene from a Hollywood movie that took weeks to choreograph, and very few – if any – games can compete on this level.

 The two biggest complaints with F.E.A.R were that the environments were too bland and repetitive and that there was a poor selection of enemies to fight – Extraction Point has sort-of-almost-nearly addressed both of these problems. I won’t go in to the details of the plot (because there isn’t one), but it suffices to say that the game literally follows on from the explosive ending of F.E.A.R, and your goal is to make it to the extraction point for, well, extraction. You’ll be fighting in a roughly even mixture of indoor and outdoor environments, and get to enjoy the expansive night time cityscape, while also experiencing all the claustrophobic corridors and building interiors we saw in the original game.

 The enemy selection is also slightly more varied – being an expansion, the learning curve picks up where F.E.A.R left off, meaning they don’t ease you into the game before they throw tougher enemies at you. You’ll be fighting EVEs and the stealth soldiers inside ninety minutes, but as with F.E.A.R, the limited enemy selection feels a little like potential untapped. What EP throws at you isn’t bad, at all, but there’s still plenty of room for improvement.

 You’ll have a couple new weapons to use as you take down the enemy, but they don’t really add much to the game. A disappointingly generic laser rifle and a deployable sentry gun are included mostly as filler, it seemed, but the real star of the show is a minigun. F.E.A.R’s high end weaponry was mainly of the technological or explosive sort, and it’s pretty great to get a high-power mundane weapon in there, as there’s nothing quite as satisfying as tearing guys apart with a massive gun and it will definitely sate your gaming bloodlust.

 The game doesn’t really look any better than F.E.A.R, but the large outdoor environments, the increased use of particle effects and the sheer number of enemies the game throws at you means the game has steeper system requirements than F.E.A.R, and with anything less than a pretty high end system, you may find yourself turning off soft shadows or other hardware-hog features to get a genuinely steady frame rate, but it is still based on 2005 technology, so recent graphics cards will have no problem giving you the full F.E.A.R experience. EP sounds great in the fire fights as explosions tear through buildings and bullets bite holes in concrete and the horror moments sound great too – the game does a wonderful job of teasing out the kind of atmosphere it wants to create with a few simple sounds.

 Extraction Point takes the foundation F.E.A.R set and builds upon it in a great way, the fire fights are more amazing, the horror elements are slightly better and the game is just more enjoyable overall, but like most expansions, it is just five or six more hours of the same thing you’ve already played. If you loved F.E.A.R, you have every reason to pick this game up right now, but if you flipped the other side of the coin and hate F.E.A.R, you probably won’t find much reason to give it a second chance.