All the weapons have their strengths and weaknesses as far as accuracy, ammunition, and weight. Our favorite weapon, of course, is the cannon that can vaporize most targets in a single shot, but ammunition for it is very hard to come by. Additionally, the weapon is so heavy that it slows down movement. What brings an additional twist of strategy to the game is the fact that you can only carry three guns at a time. So, you have to balance out how you are going to play and measure how much you're going to use each weapon.

If you happen to run out of bullets, or prefer a stealthier approach, F.E.A.R. comes with a small selection of melee attacks. They include the traditional pistol/rifle whip, fist fighting (for those REALLY desperate times), a flying bicycle kick, and a ground slide. The last two generally result in one shot kills. Accompanying all these attacks are some super powers of your own. Your character has tremendously fast reflexes. Activating these reflexes puts you into bullet time, allowing you to dodge bullets and take out enemies quickly before they can find cover. You will learn to love super-reflexes because it often means the difference between life and death. Along the way, you'll find syringes that will increase your total health and duration of your reflex time.

F.E.A.R. relies on a number of tricks to play with your mind, usually through use of shadows and your HUD dimming along with static from the surrounding electronics when something vaguely supernatural is happening. Phantom shadows will run down hallways, and our psychic villains will project themselves to you and dissolve into ashes as you shoot at them in a panic. The tricks don't ever get overused, but you catch on to them pretty quickly and learn that shadows don't hurt you. Psychics can, but not their shadows.

The downside of F.E.A.R. is that you really are fighting an army of clones, and they become overwhelmingly repetitive. Sure, there are cyber-ninjas, missile-toting mechs, and soldiers in heavy power armor, but you only face them every once in a while. In between, you confront room after room of clones. After fighting them for long enough, you eventually learn their tactics and can sometimes predict the patterns of their movements. You can even use your knowledge that they'll try to outsmart you by sneaking around behind you to your advantage. It soon becomes pretty easy to figure out where to lay an explosive trap. Turning up the difficulty not only makes the AI more aggressive in pursuing you, but also lessens their chances of missing, so do it at your own risk! There were one or two instances where the otherwise excellent AI would hiccup, and soldiers would end up firing away at walls and columns thinking they would get to us. Additionally, all these great graphics do take a significant toll on system performance. The game's graphic's stuttered even on fast systems when everything was set on high. Luckily, the game still looks fantastic when the settings are turned down a bit.

There are a sizeable number of multiplayer modes, but a lot of them are simple variations of the same concept. There are essentially three modes: Deathmatch, Elimination, and Capture the Flag. The rest simply include either a team element (Team Elimination) or slo-mo options (Slo-mo Deathmatch). The slo-mo effects don't actually add too much to the game. Basically, players have a chance to find and pick up a special item that controls bullet-time. After finding it, the player has to wait for it to charge. Once charged, it is activated so that ALL players are then put into slo-mo mode. This sort of negates the benefits of going into slo-mo in the first place, which is to have a speed advantage over your opponent. When everyone goes into bullet time, it's usually either wasted on running down a hallway looking for people, or both parties in a fight have the more-or-less the same chance they have in a fast action fight since they're still moving at the same pace. The only difference is that there's more time to aim and there are a lot more special effects involved. Overall, F.E.A.R. multiplayer plays out much like a version of Counter-Strike that takes place in more urban and encloses spaces, with a few sci-fi weapons involved. However, it does feel strange at times that you can fire ten shots into a person and not kill them and all they have to do is do a sliding kick to instantly kill you.

There is no doubt that there are tons of shooters out on the market now. Having one stand out as a shooter and a genuinely scary horror game is an amazing feat, the F.E.A.R. definitely delivers. This is a must-have game for anyone who likes horror or shooting games, because it represents the best that both genres have to offer. This is the kind of game that comes around every once in a while that leaves an experience so great that it leaves players talking about it after it's done.