The game, while a good shooter, barely clings to its horror status.
Now FEAR is a "horror sci-fi shooter" which is a great genre of games provided they don't pull some retarded **** out of their asses. FEAR, while intense, barely manages to cling to its status of being actually terrifying in any way. It stars one of the Samara Morgan from the ring clones, who does the exact same thing just bloodier, and likes to project her shadow on the wall in front of you. This happens about 50 times a level and thus becomes whole-heartedly predictable and not at all scary.
Every once in a while you get thrown a small team of men who you think to yourself "these guys might be helpful" of course this is until the game throws in another predictable element in which case you will continuously say: "these guys are f***ed". Any time you get guys they send you off to do some menial task like pull a switch and you come back and they're dead. Any time you have multiple guys, turn your back and that rather non-threatening little girl comes and melts your party into bloody shriveled messes. I know that being alone is part of the "horror" but then just make me alone, don't make yourself insanely predictable with the "team elements".
This isn't to say that the game has no successful horror elements, every once in a while you get thrown through a brainf***er that leaves you a little scared; like falling into a sewer but the sewer is filled with blood and looks out a window onto that little girl and some tied up guy, while a severed head floats up to the surface, then you're back in a regular sewer looking at a grate and the head is garbage. The problem with theses sequences is that they try and force the horror on you by making your vision tunneled with this red blurriness and then give you slowed and retarded control if not no control over your character. This makes it seem as if they were trying too hard to make something a lot more terrifying then it actually is.
I also might like the game better if the scenery changed a bit and my character wasn't a speechless sack of crap with unexplained powers and **** but who am I kidding no game is perfect*.