You can define fear a number of ways and each person finds different things scary, granted, but when it comes to looking at something like Monolith’s F.E.A.R 2 you’re looking at a pretty narrow window of horror. Replete with all kinds of psychological mind-bendery and putting the player in a situation where he’s never quite sure what is just around the next corner, the game plays on the player’s mind and for the most part ends up being an enjoyable horror shooter.

If you’re reading that last paragraph and feeling a twinge of disappointment that I am not singing the thing’s praises from the rooftops, let me assure you that I am disappointed too. See, having played the game through to completion and explored every nook and cranny possible to scout out I can sit here and say that, yeah, it’s a well-made game that does quite a lot of what it sets out to, but at the same time it never really gets under your skin and fully absorbs you into what is happening.

Taking place a couple of minutes after the events that curtailed the first game and putting you in the secret op fatigues of a faceless, voiceless chappo by the name of Michael Becket, the basic idea is that a woman who was tested upon and then left to die has continued to go rather bonkers and cause all sorts of slightly curious situations to occur, sadly most of which happens to you and your team of marine fellows as you try to take the head of the company surrounding the whole shebang into protective custody.

Although you don’t have them initially, the major powers on which the game focuses as with the original is the ability to slow down time for a little bit, giving you a slightly unfair tactical leg-up against the waves of AI soldiers who seem intent on filling your body with lead. On one hand it is actually quite useful and you end up using it often enough, but those of you who played and enjoyed Dead Space (good on you, too) will possibly be left feeling a little disappointed that the game never really plays around too much with this in terms of having it as a clever mechanic to solve a couple of puzzles along the way.

What the game does do to mix it up a little bit is throw a couple of tried-and-tested FPS set pieces at you as you toddle on through, such as a few sections spent in large mechanical suits or a selection of moments manning a turret gun. Again, despite breaking up the action somewhat you can’t help but feel that it doesn’t really add all that much to the experience in terms of freshness, rather it merely makes you remember all the times that previous FPS games have used similar sections before.

As said previously, it’s not as if F.E.A.R 2 does anything hugely wrong such as spray acid out of the disc slot into your face, but it just feels like a standard, well-produced corridor shooter and very little else. You have limited melee abilities that are actually quite powerful despite feeling terribly weak whilst the range of guns are the usual rifles, sniping efforts and rockets launchers so that’s reasonable enough, and you do have the ability to knock over scenery to use as cover although to be frank I never found that I needed to employ that particular tactic at all due to having the whole slow-mo thing going on.

You will keep playing it of course, with the game once again leaving the player to search and scout for intelligence documents that pad the story out should they feel the need. It’s entertaining enough for the most part and is consistent enough right through to the rather abrupt, slightly disappointing ending, but once the credits start to roll you sit in front of your television wondering if you were ever actually having as much fun as you thought you were going to be having. In my case, that answer was no, no matter how good it looked (it did) and how well put together it is (it was).

On reflection, a good dose of this is probably due to the game not really scaring me all that much throughout its duration. It’s unsettling, sure, but there were surprisingly few out-and-out shock moments that had me jumping off my seat. The enemies are a curious mixture of suited-and-booted army types and reanimated corpse/zombie type affairs, although the main monstrosities that you very occasionally come across that reanimate everything around them are never really properly explained and only appear a couple of times. Creepy and dark it is, yes, but utterly terrifying it is not.

There is a multiplayer option tacked on and it pretty much follows the same suit as the full game – a nice enough experience, but hardly something that’ll blow your boots off across the five match types and multiple maps it offers. You can’t particularly criticise the inclusion, mind, and yeah – it does extend the life cycle of the game if you’re into a bit of multiplayer fragging.

If you’re the type of chap who enjoys forwarding to the end of these reviews to see the general conclusion and score (hello, nice of you to pop in!) then the easy conclusion to take from F.E.A.R 2 is that it is an easy game to like and appreciate, but a hard game to love. There’s always a sense of the game being somewhat too clinical for its own good, and that no matter how high the production values are there’s always some kind of invisible laminated coating that prevents too much fun leaking out as you play. Whether that’s a problem for you is very much an individual matter, of course, but as far as this game critic is concerned F.E.A.R 2 leads an existence similar to that of a Cadbury’s Cream Egg Easter Egg, in that no matter how much you hope against hope that the first bite will reveal giant gooey fun, it always ends up being somewhat hollow and disappointing.