F.E.A.R. Combat – Free? Hell Yeah!

Category : entertainment + f.e.a.r. + games + software

The sign-up for F.E.A.R. Combat is extremely painless, answer some questions and provide an email address (prefferably one where you get spam), then receive a CD-key for the game. Once that’s all good and done, you can download the 1.8 gig installer. Over my AT&T “Broadband” connection it took me a good 8 hours over-night to download the 1.8 gig installation file, and by this morning I had it ready to go. In within about 5 minutes after entering the key, scrolling EULA’s and performing the actual install, it was done.

Like previous Monolith titles, the setup interface is easy to navigate and does most of the setup for you. I selected 800×600 and lowered the settings thinking I could hardly run the game, but the game said otherwise and set me up at 1024×768 with everything cranked up to high. I thought to myself “This can’t be right…” but went along with the games suggestion and proceeded to do my keyboard and player setup anyway.

In order to test my settings I managed to play some multiplayer and “out of the box” I was already having some fun even if I didn’t know exactly what I was doing. Easy enough though, find some enemy players and shoot them, right? Done and done, I already managed to go on a short killing spree and get a few headshots without trying before someone melee kicked me into a corner which made me laugh a bit. Ok, so I’m not godly, but I’m not terrible either as some folks on the server mentioned.

The graphics for F.E.A.R. are great, however there’s some little interface bugs which started to annoy me since the moment I started playing. Number one being that I can’t bind anything to my F1 through F12 keys and I don’t have access to a dev console to see what important messages I’ve missed. This goes hand-in-hand with being able to manipulate Punk Buster settings if the need arises as I’ve already been kicked for switching it off accidently while searching for options in the menus while on a server. There’s also no obvious way to reduce the font size for incoming chat and server messages, I’m certain this wouldn’t be a problem if I could play in 1280×1024 and up resolutions.

Other than those little issues, this is probably the best free game than America’s Army or anything else could be. The game play is very diverse and it’s actually fun even if you’re not great at it from the start. And if you accidently team-kill someone you’re not booted off of the server and sent to some retarded little virtual jail cell with harmonica music in the background. While there’s no vehicular combat or anything spectacular, firing rail spikes at an opponent and pinning them up to a wall is a funny sight to see. Oh and don’t forget the general and grenade splatter. I caught myself a few times questioning whether I just saw someones arm or leg go flying off, it’s surely a sight to see.

On the list of things to do in F.E.A.R. – Pin a players corpse to a ceiling.

+ TrackBack

SiteMap