F.E.A.R.

I remember playing FEAR back in its day, and abandon it for being repetitive. But when the whole series was on sale on Steam for a ridiculous price I thought 'what the hell' and bought them all.

Still, my opinion hasn't changed. The gameplay is centered on shooting sections with occasional scary scripted events plus some optional exploration. It's a good display of what 10 years ago was considered as a FPS experience (more advanced than Doom, for example), but boy things have changed!

There was some buzz at the time regarding the advanced AI patterns. Every time you played the layout the enemies would behave different, if memory serves because the game would learn from the player's combat style and adapt. Back in the day I remember that was frustrating to me since I couldn't learn from each attempt what the NPCs reaction would be, and this unpredictability made me fail over and over the same scenario.

Still, I didn't abandon the game because of that but due to be always the same: The enemy variation is not high and some of them are scarcely used. I eventually managed to make my way through the whole game following the same strategy: Get into the combat zone, activate bullet time and headshot the bastards. It rarely failed.

Another semi-failure is the creepy moments. There are plenty of sudden appearances of Alma, the scary girl, but since the player can be looking any place when that happens it's fairly easy to miss them. The story itself is not particularly engaging, and hints more than tells. An interesting choice, but I eventually had to check wikipedia to understand what happened.

On the other hand, the combat systems work fine, the visual effects were ahead of its time and overall it was an interesting mix of genres. Also, it was very useful to me for collecting info about 'how not to do certain things' that I'm storing on a personal wiki to be used if at some day I go into teaching at the University. Yay!