Like a Die Hard movie on crack!
The story is about a girl; Alma. She had psychic capabilities, and was forced to be experimented on to try and create the perfect soldiers, and was also part of a project to create psychic commanders, who could control an army in their mind.
You are a member of FEAR (First Encounter Assault Recon) another one of those secret government units who this time fights the paranormal. Think of it as a violent Ghostbusters story. You start off searching for the one psychic commander, Paxton Fettel. Whom is controlling an army of the supersoldiers mentioned earlier. Fun.
There is a slight lack of story in the game, it's not really handed to you on a silver platter. You learn most of the details from Phone messages and laptops ingame, and have to go from there.
In terms of the game itself, it's awesome. The graphics are perfect, they're not realistic, but hyped up like a Hollywood movie, sparks, explosions, brickwork being riddled with bullet holes. It can even be fun to just spray a wall to see all the dust and sparks burst out.
Unfortunately, the game doesn't really like to give you variety in it's environments. The same corridors and scenery can make it feel repetitive, with the odd highlight here and there. But it does present them in an awesome way.
The weapons are great fun, all of them are balanced as each other. So you won't always have to ditch that pistol after the first level. You can only carry three at a time though, but this does make sense after all. Some weapons such as the shotgun are the ones you'll want to keep from start to finish, there's nothing more rewarding than hearing the screams of a soldier as you let a shot rip him apart.
Then we get to the cool part, the SlowMo, if you thought the game couldn't get any more Hollywood, you'll be surprised. SlowMo is pretty much self-explanatory, everything goes slow, except you, and you can see bullets zip past, pretty much the whole Matrix thing. It's great fun to jump out from cover, guns blazing and seeing the bullets fly into an enemy. Or even better, the gruesome death of a shotgun at point blank range, in SlowMo, you'll often see a red vapour cloud appear, you can guess what that is.
Then we get to the scary part, Alma. She'll be haunting you through the game, along with Fettel, and it does get quite scaring in some parts. You'll be feeling the adrenaline rush through the whole game, trust me. In terms of enemies, we don't see much variety again, with the usual grunts, and about 5 or so kind of heavy bad guys to deal with. The AI is smart, they'll make cover from tables or shelves, they'll flank you, or smoke you out with Grenades, and you may be resorting to SlowMo a lot to fight back against the skilled fighting machines.
The multiplayer is unfortunately not too active, though you could probably find a game, there isn't going to be a massive fan base around. However, there is a fun little gimmick of Instant Action added in from the PC version, whilst this does feel like an add-on so we won't cry port, it is actually fun. You'll be thrown into some environments from the game, and will have to fight your way through to the end. This can be a good bit of fun on harder difficulties.
In terms of Achievements, you won't be getting the 1000 Gamerscore in a week from FEAR. There is a lot of them, and a good few involve online play, which is not too active. Some of them are a little disappointing, giving 5 points or so from doing something quite time-consuming, it's more for fun than anything.
To top if off, FEAR is a great game, it gives you a nice feeling to see something so awesome. As I keep saying, it's like a Hollywood movie, which is something I would like to see more often!