TL;DR – The only thing to fear is F.E.A.R 3 (or F3AR if you must) itself. The epitome of every questionable game design choice made during the 7th console generation, this game is one to avoid unless you are desperate for a cheap co-op experience.
F.E.A.R 3 is one of those games where the marketing department appears to have received a totally different version of the game from the one that was unleashed upon the unsuspecting public. To this day it’s still sold with a range of slightly bizarre promises such as “Best in class mech-combat”, being a “terrifying paranormal experience” and featuring “evolutionary slow-mo”. The store page even mentions that legendary horror film director John Carpenter (best known for The Fog The Thing) was involved with the cinematics, so the unassuming game player would probably expect this game to be a bit scary.
Unfortunately for them, F.E.A.R 3 drank from the poisoned chalice of co-op horror that was the hot new thing at the time and which also killed the Dead Space series. As a consequence, the jump scare sequences didn’t really hit very hard as it turns out it’s hard to feel threatened when you are always co-ordinating your actions with a real life buddy. There are also a few sections where you are escaping from an Almaverse monster that can’t be killed, but these are so highly scripted that you can never really die – even though the game eagerly spreads your screen with jam blood to make you think you are in mortal peril.
The lack of horror wouldn’t be too painful however if F.E.A.R 3 had fulfilled it’s grand promises of being an action packed FPS experience with dynamic enemy activity that meant that no two playthroughs would be the same(!) Alas the combat isn’t really great either, as the enemy variety is fairly small and the AI doesn’t hold up to earlier games in the series. You will find yourself getting flanked or flushed by grenades if the irritating stick-to-cover system is something you can’t get enough of, but as most combat areas are small and the number of enemies is fairly low at any given time, you only really need to focus on overcoming the relatively low max ammo limits. These ammo limits are a pain as you can only have two guns at a time in a weirdly out of place touch of realism (for context you are either playing as a ghost or are perpetually accompanied by a ghost).
That ghost bro is actually one of the very, very few interesting twists that F.E.A.R 3 has to offer however. The crux of the co-op justification is that the two characters are brothers and children of Alma, who are both trying to find her so that Armacham (the generic evil corporation) will stop having her give birth to psychic and/or demon children. One of the erstwhile Super Fear Brothers is the Point Man who makes his return from the first game and functions as a generic FPS protagonist who has slow-mo powers and is about as personable as a gun-totting IKEA Billy bookshelf. The other brother Fettel is the more interesting character and gameplay choice, as he is a ghost after getting shot in the face by the Point Man and as such spends the campaign spouting snarky dialogue in-between possessing the enemy soldiers you come across. Fans of 6th generation games such as Geist or Second Sight shouldn’t get too excited however, as he basically only possesses generic dudes with guns (who are the Point Man without the slow-mo and the facial hair) or occasionally the bigger slightly less generic dudes with bigger guns. To be fair to Fettel, he does also have some other abilities such as the power to stun a single enemy but generally he’s only going to do this in-between possession sessions.
Another twist that game throws out is that there are some mech suit sections sprinkled throughout the story, although I didn’t find them to be particularly “best-in-class”. They aren’t terrible by any means and like any turret or vehicle section in an FPS they exist as a way for the player(s) to blast through enemies they’d normally have some difficulty dealing with – such as enemy mechs or the larger soldiers. Ultimately though they are fairly short and inconsequential and only exist to prevent you from the doing the exact same things in every level.
Another attempt to mix up the gameplay comes in the form of a scoring system which involves completing a bunch of modest challenges throughout each level. Some examples include getting a certain amount of headshots, fully draining the slow-mo bar and using a variety of weapons as the Point Man or stunning multiple enemies which are gunned down and possessing a single enemy for an extended amount of time as Fettel. These scores then impact the ending you receive, as the higher scoring brother gets their own ending cutscene which are a culmination of their respective goals and which both players have to watch get to enjoy.
These goals are hinted at throughout the plot which honestly isn’t great and revolves around the fact that the Super Fear Brothers were taken as children and placed in a basement testing facility by Armacham, where the last place entry for Father of the Year (returning character Harlan Wade) began experimenting on them to turn them into super soldiers. There are multiple scenes showing that this wasn’t the happiest upbringing and that daddy Wade was deliberately turning them against each other, just in case the player(s) had any qualms about killing the man responsible for every other bad thing that happens in the plot. Other than making it very clear that the antagonist is a meanie, the plot generally just follows our super-soldier bros as they hunt down their mother Alma who is giving birth to yet another child and is destroying the world in the process. Oh and you briefly encounter the protagonist from the 2nd game, but like every other returning character he doesn’t have the best time of it following the cutscene where he makes an appearance.
Speaking of cutscenes, F.E.A.R 3 has a surprising amount of them considering how short the game is. I’m not sure whether John Carpenter was really put to use here and I suspect he was involved solely so they could say he was involved with game, but I digress. During these cutscenes our Brotagonists bicker about the best way to find Alma, although the Point Man doesn’t really say such so they’re mainly opportunities for Fettel to alude to the players that he’s a bit evil and is still a touch upset about getting shot in the head. There are also quasi-cutscenes in which you are forced to walk slowly through areas from the brothers past while exposition is thrown at the player in spades. Many of these cutscenes and quasi-cutscenes come about after the Point Man gets another nasty concussion, which serves the gameplay purpose of letting the Super Fear Brothers jump to totally unrelated areas that just so happen to be on the way to where Armacham is keeping Alma. These areas conveniently have a bunch of enemy soldiers hanging around, generally gunning down civilians and doing other bad guy things. Oh and before you fret, as part of the 7th gen cliche commitment the Point Man also gets in multiple aircraft despite the fact that every single one crashes with him in it.
While we’re going over the 7th gen cliches, the game has full heartedly embraced the gritty brown and grey visual style that was so endemic during that console generation. As such most areas are washed out in appearance and wouldn’t look out of place in the dozens of competing FPS games that hit the market during this time. You fight through warehouses, sewers, rubble stricken city streets, prisons and other monotone coloured areas. The graphics are generally fine especially for the time, but much like the enemy design nothing really stands out as being noteworthy or memorable. Even the Almaverse enemies are fairly generic, mostly taking the form of hellhounds that do at least sometimes attack the generic Armacham soldiers.
The last 7th gen cliche on our checklist is the game’s anaemic length. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) F.E.A.R 3 is pretty short and unless you are hunting for the collectables in each of the 8 levels, you’ll be done in around 6 to 8 hours depending on your aptitude. Once you’re cleared the campaign you can go back to hunt for achievements or play a few alternative game modes, including a wave based survival mode called Contractions but it’s hard to imagine anyone putting a significant amount of time into these.
To summarise, F.E.A.R 3 is a slightly surreal attempt at going toe-to-toe with the blockbuster Call of Duty series. It removes the classic health and armour system, which are replaced with the now ubiquitous regenerating health mechanic. The AI and combat are fairly limited and both now make use of a weird snap-to-cover system that seems to indicate there were aspirations of taking market share from the Gears of War series. The campaign is a series of quintessentially triple-A bombastic set pieces broken up with the occasional mech section, helicopter crash and attempt to convince players this is still a horror franchise. The plot isn’t great but is serviceable enough even if Alma is relegated to set-dressing status. Ultimately the only thing worth mentioning is that you can play through it as a sulky evil ghost, but even this isn’t used to it’s full potential. Unless you are desperate to see how the FEAR franchise ends, or are struggling to find a cheap co-op experience, I would skip this one.