F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin (Xbox 360)

F.E.A.R. 2 isn't a game to go easy on the blood and gore

Horror games and first-person shooters are genres that seem to be made for each other, so it's quite surprising that the two of them "don't get it on" more often. Monolith managed to oversee a successful cross-pollination in 2005, and the result was F.E.A.R. - a creepy-as-hell survival outing that mixed satisfying gunplay with a Greatest Hits list of Scary Things. Ghosts? Check. Cannibalism? Check. A creepy little girl? Check. Lots and lots of blood? Check and check again.

It all added up to a rather unnerving experience - and thanks to a labyrinthine plot, it was a pretty confusing one, too. A pair of expansion packs continuing the story were later put out by TimeGate Studios, but for this true sequel Monolith is returning to the point reached at the end of the first game. In actual fact, F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin will kick off thirty minutes before the climax of its direct prequel... a setup that will leave just enough time to ease you into the game before you experience the massive explosion that closed off the story the first time around.

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The opening level of F.E.A.R. 2 sees you assuming control of Michael Beckett, a sergeant in the US Army's Delta Force and a man with lots of problems. Beckett isn't like the other boys, he's special. He has some innate psychic abilities. This means that he sees lots of weird stuff that goes unnoticed by his work mates, so get ready for plenty of Am-I-Going-Mental moments where everything starts changing and shifting around you. At any rate, Mike's job at the start of the game is to help his unit rescue Genevieve Aristide, president of the Armacham Technology Corporation - the shadowy company which played a large role in the events of the first game.

Needless to say, collecting Genny turns out to be more than a matter of knocking on the door and saying hello. One of the ATC board members has despatched a small army of Black Ops gunmen to forcibly terminate MS Aristide's career, so you'll find yourself under fire within seconds of the game starting. F.E.A.R. 2's combat takes no prisoners, and you'll swiftly find that your enemies put up quite a fight, even in the opening stages of the game. Firefights feel pretty brutal too, with plenty of breakable scenery and lots of the red stuff splashing about in an impressive display of physics-based gore. The strafe-and-gun gameplay itself is largely what you'd expect, but the weapons feel highly satisfying. You're also able to flip over tables and other objects to use as makeshift cover - a small touch that nonetheless makes the action feel a little more free-form and dynamic.

Indeed, your whole perspective is slightly distorted with a mild fish-eye effect, with the result that you feel you're watching the events through a concave visor of some kind.

F.E.A.R. 2's twisting narrative hits the ground running, and since the preview code we were playing comprised of several different levels from throughout the game, it wasn't too long before we rather lost the plot. Still, from what we saw it looks like Monolith have put a lot of effort into its set-piece moments - the pivotal explosion which closes the first level was particularly satisfying. In contrast to the current trend for shooters the game does feature a heads-up display, but this is designed to look like something being projected onto the inside of your helmet. Indeed, your whole perspective is slightly distorted with a mild fish-eye effect, with the result that you feel you're watching the events through a concave visor of some kind. It's a small touch, but an immersive one - and immersion will surely be the key factor in how scary the game is.

Did we find F.E.A.R 2. to be creepy? Not especially, but since we were playing at a packed press event, that's to be expected. The game certainly puts a lot of effort into its dark atmosphere, so in the right conditions we'd imagine it could be pretty unnerving. The first two levels we played had a heavy emphasis on gun battles, but the horror elements really came to the fore in the third stage we tried, which was set in an abandoned primary school (a brave move, since this is exactly the kind of thing that winds up the Daily Mail).

As in the first game, F.E.A.R. 2 does its best to play with your mind.

The first supernatural enemies we encountered were Spectres - spirits stripped of their physical presence by the big bang from the start of the game. To all intents and purposes, they're just ghosts - but their wispy appearance looks impressive. They also appeared to have a liking for turning out the lights on us, which resulted in a nice moment where we ended up running down a corridor in the dark, our muzzle flashing as we blasted at the not-so-friendly Casper who was trying to get a piece of us. Better still are the Remnants: hollowed-out humans who are doomed to endlessly repeat certain actions from their former lives. The one we encountered was playing a piano, but as soon as we disturbed him he stood up and attacked us by reanimating the corpses of the dead soldiers in the room. Each of these new zombie attackers was linked to their master via long, spectral threads; this puppet-master effect looked awesome, particularly in the way that defeating the host caused all the bodies to drop back to the floor. It's a neat, well-designed concept - so let's hope to see lots of original enemies like these in the final release.

As we said before, the levels we tried during our play-test came from various moments throughout F.E.A.R. 2, and this jumping about left us feeling a bit schizophrenic (which is fairly appropriate, under the circumstances). What was clear, however, is that the game is going to contain a lot of variety. At one moment we were in full-on trip-o-vision, when walking through a harmless-looking door suddenly transported us to a sunlit field, where Alma stood waiting; then a few minutes later we found ourself battling a Mech-like walker that smashed into the school playground. Another scene found us battling snipers among a crop of ruined buildings; yet another saw us climbing aboard our own Mech, mowing down wave after wave of troops with machine guns and rocket launchers. It was a bit like a Fruit n Fibre bowl of FPS flavours, but they all seemed to be done with a high degree of flair - and they were fairly challenging to boot.

Of course, what you really want to know is whether on not it's scary. The answer is that it's largely too early to say. The kind of horror that F.E.A.R. 2 is going for is the slowly-build variety, the kind that relies upon growing a sense of dread - and that simply doesn't happen when you're jumping between levels with no real sense of the plot. There will certainly be no shortage of action in the final game, but hopefully the creepier side of proceedings will also come together. Like we said at the top, Horror-FPSs don't come along all that often, but this has the potential to be a real scream.

F.E.A.R.2: Project Origin will be released on PC, PS3 and Xbox 360 on February 13.