After a brief overlap with its predecessor, F.E.A.R. 2 picks up from where the first game left off and finds the player, now known as Becket, tasked with eliminating the deranged psychic Alma, making a return in her truer form as a painfully thin, dead-eyed woman. The plot has plenty to pay attention to and will most certainly delight those who revelled in the F.E.A.R. universe the first time around, with various text logs filling in the gaps a la Dead Space as well as other neat touches. Despite these attempts to keep players up to speed, those who couldn’t care less won’t be entirely sure of what is going on and why. Perhaps Monolith was aware of this, shifting the action from one defined scenario to the next in an effort to inject some much needed variety into proceedings. Whatever the reason, there’s something in F.E.A.R. 2 that jars, that just doesn’t sit quite right.

Of course, there’s plenty to enjoy here as a fan of the FPS genre, with the gunplay feeling slick yet meaty, weighty yet elegant. Dropping the tempo into the series’ famous slow motion before capping four or five bad guys is immensely satisfying, even more so when you realise that the enemy AI is positively fiendish – they’re flushing you out of cover with grenades, flanking your cover and storming your position in teams. It’s great to see, and it kept us on the edge of our seats more than the ‘scares’ were supposed to.

Yes, this is part of the main problem with F.E.A.R. 2. Stomping around in mechanical power armour spending thousands of machine gun rounds and a few dozen missiles is undeniably a rush; it’s only when the game decides to get spooky that we begin to lose a little bit of faith. It frequently breaks rhythm, which we probably wouldn’t mind if it was genuinely tense or foreboding. It feels a tad disjointed, occasionally lacks the correct pace, and to make matters worse it’s all a bit predictable. We don’t need our HUD to flicker ominously or none of the lights to work to figure out that something scare-worthy is on the way. Save a handful of moments, very few of the ‘ghost train’ sections convince. For a game that has fear as its actual name, you’d at least think that it would be good at inciting some. Maybe it’s our granite hewn, wind beaten souls that don’t find anything scary, or maybe it’s just one of those facts of life – give an enhanced super human the ability to slow down time and the arsenal to level small buildings, and things just don’t seem that scary anymore. Although saying that, The Matrix Reloaded was pretty horrific.

Whilst not raising bars and lacking the ability to set new standards, F.E.A.R. 2 is nevertheless a great example of a ‘typical’ genre piece that we can recommend to shooter fans, without doubt. Those who have been left scratching at itchy trigger fingers lately due to a lack of decent shooters can now lock and load – this and Killzone 2 guarantee a welcoming reprise for the genre. Don’t expect much in the way of shocks and nervy jumps – those masochistic enough to scare themselves witless would probably find more satisfaction in Shellshock 2, for all of the wrong reasons.

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