This is not a review, our full review should be up this weekend, this is just my first impressions of the game. I picked up the game today and have played it for about 3 hours. I got to play three levels of the single player and a sufficient amount of the multiplayer.

I will start with the single player. Overall the three levels I played were very enjoyable and left me wanting more. The atmosphere is spooky and tense and while the scares aren’t the best the game still provides a tense experience. You still always have that feeling of dread as you turn every corner and there are some very creepy parts which make playing FEAR a very enjoyable experience.

The single player is quite good. The weapons are cool, the controls are perfect and the gameplay is tight. The enemy AI is also very good, even on easy you notice them re-acting to situations in ways that you don’t see in many other games.

I think the cover system is a bit useless though, while you can flip things up for cover you can’t really take cover, just duck behind the object, I rarely use cover and find the cover system unnecessary. The environments are also a bit bland and repetitive.

Before I talk about the multiplayer let me just tell you that this game has an achievement tracker, it shows you how close you are to getting any given achievement so you don’t have to keep track yourself. Any game that does this is instant win for me as I think every game should be forced to have this.

After playing some single player I decided to hop online. You can not invite friends to ranked matches but you can host a game and tell them what to search for.

This is what I did with some friends. We had alot of fun. You may feel frustrated at first but once you get familiar with how everything works and all the controls, you will see how great the online is. There are only 6 maps but they are all quite big and very fun to play. I played Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Blitz, and Failsafe. Blitz is like Capture the Flag and Failsafe is like Search and Destroy, Failsafe also gives double XP.

All the modes were great fun. You do earn XP in this game and you can rank up. XP can be viewed on the leaderboard but as far as I know there is no way to see how much XP you need to rank up to the next level or how much XP each rank requires. I’m not even sure it is the same for everyone. People kept telling me online that they hit the rank of private at 1000 XP but I hit it at 750 so I don’t know.

Each match has a lobby where you can change your set up, you can change around your armour, weapons, grenades, medkits etc. You can only have certain items in each set up. Every thing balances out, for example if you have heavy armour you don’t get medkits, if I remember correctly. Once you rank up you can use credits to buy more items or change around your set up. I have only ranked up once so I have not really been able to do this.

The online does not do anything special, it is all fairly standard stuff but I absolutely loved it and had a ton of fun. There are still a bunch of modes and maps that I haven’t tried and I can’t wait!

I just wish the XP system was implemented a bit better so I can see how close I am to the next rank.

That’s all I can really say now, I have only spent a few hours with the game but I can’t wait to go back and play it. Once again this is not our review, just a first impression. Our full review should be up this weekend. This may seem a bit long for a first impression but I could have talked about alot more but I did not want to cut into our review which is being done by one of our reviewers, not myself.

Stay tuned to the site this week though as our Fear Alma Again week is going on. We have a few contests running and will be announcing more and our FEAR 2 tournament will be announced this week as while as our review will be up this weekend. If you still haven’t checked out our Monolith interview that is up also.