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It seems like it wasn’t so long ago that I was bemoaning the constant flood of first person shooters coming out for the newest generation of consoles.  Seemed like four out of every five games was yet another in a long series of games featuring you camped behind a gun barrel, blasting the holy bejeezus out of anything that happened to wander in front of you.

Occasionally, some of them were really good.  Stuff like BioShock, which featured a fairly deep story and some great atmosphere alongside its blasting.  And my perennial favorites, Morrowind, Oblivion and Fallout 3 were all first-person shooters.

And then there were games like Jericho and Doom 3–sludgy, cramped shooters that put me in a little box with lots of turns and never bothered to let me out.  Games like those to this very day give me the worst motion sickness.

One such game that left me wanting to give back my lunch is today’s review–F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin.

Picking up just before the previous F.E.A.R installment left off, you play as part of a Delta Force squad dispatched to recover Armacham’s president Genevieve Aristide.  As the game progresses, you discover numerous secrets about yourself, your relationship to Alma (whom you’ll remember from the last game) who apparently wants to absorb you, your entire team, and your role in something called Project Harbinger.  Also in something called Project Paragon.

At this point you’ll probably be wondering why they called it Project Origin since there isn’t actually a Project Origin mentioned in this story, at least nowhere I could notice.  There’s Project Harbinger and Project Paragon and the downloadable content might as well include Project Everything But The Kitchen Sink, but Project Origin appears to be very much MIA.  Well, the likely reason for this is that the game’s name is actually the result of a contest held by Monolith Productions to name the game.  The three finalists were Dead Echo, Project Origin, and Dark Signal. Project Origin might’ve made a good subtitle for the LAST game, but why it went on to THIS game, well, that’s the responsibility of the fans and developers that made it a “strong favorite”.

Nonsensical names aside, you’ll find this F.E.A.R installment a lot like the LAST one, in which you run around vaguely industrial buildings with lots of corners shooting and getting shot at using an array of vaguely advanced weapons (and a couple outright advanced) while occasionally you hallucinate monsters.  Sometimes these hallucinations kill people.  You’ll also get to use the surprisingly fun but still downright overused Bullet Time, this time called “SlowMo”.  So if you weren’t terribly fond of the first one you’re not likely to enjoy this one terribly much either.

Perhaps the worst part about this game was that I could really only play for about fifteen minutes at a stretch before a wave of nausea seized me in its foul clutches and refused to let go.  And it was kind of a shame that this massive speed bump set itself in my way, because the story was fairly awesome.  Getting Alma back in the game to wreak her special brand of bloodsoaked psychokinetic insanity (is it me or does this chick just really get off on turning men inside out?) is just as creepy now as it was in the last installment, and the addition of character nightmares and twisted monstrousities that burst out of morgue slabs is the kind of thing you WISH you saw in more horror flicks.

It’s hard to say exactly how I feel about F.E.A.R 2: Project Origin–I love the story, but man, I can’t stand the gameplay.  I hate games that require you to keep a bucket handy, and not because you’re watching some twisted horror rip someone’s throat out.  If this had been a movie series I’d probably be all over it.

In summary, the rewards are great in this one (a killer story and some very fun weapons), but the road getting there (the nausea-inducing gameplay) just wasn’t worth it.