The expansion throws you in where the original F.E.A.R ended, not a big deal about it, and it starts off like a similar sequence from the regular F.E.A.R as well. Environments, characters, everything has always been there and is still there, unchanged, on good and bad. First off, this expansion has a variety of updated shaders and more dynamic shadows and will of some reason, even when pulling the settings down a bit eat SEVERELY much more hardware performance in order to run properly. I had a perfect frame-rate att regular F.E.A.R running medium settings with a 40FPS during fights and average of 100FPS but in the expansion it never catches over 50FPS no matter what, even when pulling the more demanding graphical tweaks down a bit. But on the good side, if you do have a real fresh rig then you'll probably come to like the updated shaders and general game experience, at least a bit more. Anyways - despite how demanding this game might be it's still the regular F.E.A.R but with "new" environments, which is quite rare actually since the whole athmosphere is to be set in quite isolated environments it's hard to make it really fresh again, but we've seen most of it before. But that's also a bit of the whole F.E.A.R experience so it's a hard nut to crack for the developers though it seems like they gave it a little too less effort. Most of the time in the game I found myself doing what I've already been doing, but the game still has some twists from the regular F.E.A.R that remain unsolved and catched my interest all the way through, like what happend to the other F.E.A.R operative, Jankuwski, since he just vanished in the start of the regular game. That, together with some new tweaks in the characters sets off the game to be the main reason why to really make it worth playing through - and the horror seems to have changed a little bit into a more screamy kind of visual horror more than the deeper more pharanormal horror from the previous game, but there's sequences where you start to wonder what's really going on, as a positive thing. And you start to wonder what's real and what's just in your characters head. The game also offers a few new weapons, but they all seem to be either overpowered and boring or just generally worthless and pathetic - the minigun is too heavy and will just slaughter everything, you don't even need to think, it's just to shoot no matter what, makes everything turn cartoony. And there's also the Laser Rifle which is simply boring as it is but SlowMo + Laser Rifle is the worst combination ever. In the end the game was a fair experience, but I liked the original game better, not only becuase it ran with 120% higher FPS but also since it had a deeper and untold story while the expansion just continoues on the story we already know most about. But let's hope F.E.A.R 2 will help to compensate this lack of content of the expansion. $19 or $29 is WAY too much for a 4-hour of playing, especially since the game isn't going to have any replay value at all but for some certain sequences you might want to check twice.
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