There
are, without question, very few games for the Sony Playstation that appeal to
the adventure gamer. Sure, there’re RPG games (the Final Fantasy series
comes to mind) that excel, but outside of that genre, there simply isn’t much
available. Occasionally a game is released that makes me sit up and take notice;
members of this exclusive club include Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver, the
Oddworld series, and Silent Hill. These games combine excellent
plots with respectable graphics to leave the player with lasting memories. Well,
I’m happy to announce that another game has been added to this list–Fear Effect.

What’s
Going on Here?

The plot of Fear Effect is a great example of
a well-thought-out story. When you start the game, you are given a “catch-up”
movie clip that explains the current situation. The daughter of a rich and powerful
Chinese businessman, Wee Ming Lam, has disappeared mysteriously into the Shan
Xi protectorate. Your job is to rescue her and bring her safely back to her family.
Her father would rather not pay your team’s price, so his “goons” are
also in pursuit of Wee Ming, hindering your progress at every turn. There are
three characters that you control (separately) during the course of the game;
Hana Tsu-Vachel, specializing in covert ops; Royce Glas, a mercenary with a past
in the US government; and Jakob “Deke” Decourt, an Australian assassin
and explosives expert. As the game progresses, you discover that Shan Xi is the
staging ground for the King of Hell’s release of evil onto the earth, and you
must fight undead minions to succeed.

During the course of this game, I
gained a great deal of respect for the writers of Fear Effect; the story
seemed complete, and nothing seemed blatantly out of place during my exploration.
I won’t go into any further detail to avoid spoiling any surprises, but I will
say that I was very pleased with the game’s conclusion.

Overall Plot
Grade: A

How
Did it Look?

Since this game excels in graphical presentation on multiple
fronts, I’ll discuss them separately.

Backgrounds: Fear Effect
uses looping background animation extremely effectively and nearly raises
the bar for PC adventure games in the process. If you’re not familiar with this
style, here’s a brief description; instead of a static scene, the developers create
a loop of about three seconds of an animated scene, and repeat it while the character
moves around. If done properly, you can’t really tell where the loop starts and
ends, and it gives the impression of a living environment. I’m really surprised
that other games have not used this technique as extensively before (Riven,
for example, animates parts of the background but leaves the remaining parts
fixed). The implementation in Fear Effect was not perfect, but it was close
enough to significantly enhance the game.

Character Animation: The
characters in Fear Effect are rendered polygons with anime styling. I’ve
seen polygon rendering before, and I always ask myself, “Does that really
look like a person?” I’ve come to the conclusion that the graphics capabilities
of the Playstation are simply not good enough to realistically portray people.
Thankfully, Kronos did not attempt that level of realism; instead, they decided
to simplify the characters by using anime. Granted, the anime feel to the characters
fits with the theme, but I think it was also a good technical decision. The movements
of the characters in this game also did not disappoint; you can tell characters
apart by their styles of walking! The only negative I found in this area was that
all of the different characters in the game look silly when they run. Not much
you can do about that–so do I.

In-Game
Movies: The theme here is “wow.” The characters in the movies look
exactly like the ones you control during gameplay, so there’s a continuity to
the game that I could really appreciate. The quality of the movies is the best
I’ve seen on this platform; other developers would be wise to figure out how the
high frame rate/low flicker was accomplished.

Did I mention that this game
is presented in wide-screen format?

Overall Graphics Grade: A+

How
Did it Sound?

This game sounds great. The voice acting is first-class
and totally believable–and this isn’t even a pure adventure game, where the voice
acting is even more important. Perhaps I’ve become more sensitive to voice acting
recently, but I’ve quit a number of games simply because the actors don’t seem
to care about the lines they’re speaking, and if the developers of a game allow
their product to be released with substandard acting, they don’t really care about
the game’s quality. I played Fear Effect from beginning to end, and the
acting throughout was done very well.

Likewise, the sound effects in Fear
Effect were also very believable. Sound loops are coupled with the background
loops to further immerse the player in the game’s experience. All of the sounds
were appropriate to the locales being explored; one of my favorite parts of the
game takes place in the kitchen of a Chinese restaurant, where the cooks are throwing
things around the kitchen, talking to themselves and each other. Very nicely done.

There’s
not much music in Fear Effect, besides the main theme that plays during
the startup sequence, but the theme is a great, driving, techno-style tune that
I found myself tapping my feet and bobbing my head to hours after I stopped playing.

Overall
Sounds Grade: A

Was
it Fun?

Fear Effect’s gameplay has good points and bad points.
As a third-person fighting/exploration game, it fares well, although it took some
time to get used to the controls. For those unfamiliar with the Playstation’s
Dual Shock controller, there are two analog directional thumb-joysticks that allow
full directional motion, but these joysticks can also function as buttons by pressing
them down. If you press down on the left thumb-stick, your character performs
an evasive roll–but in the heat of battle, I found myself inadvertently pressing
it, more often than not putting me into a much more vulnerable position. You are
given the option of sneaking up on enemies from behind to eliminate them quietly
with hand-to-hand weapons, which is extremely useful in the early parts of the
game.

Many parts of this game are similar to the old arcade game Dragon’s
Lair, where you had to push the joystick in a particular direction at exactly
the right moment to make progress. This is an interesting concept for this type
of game; you have to pay attention to the patterns of enemies and obstacles before
attempting to engage them. There is a major drawback to this method of gameplay–you
die often. One wrong move and you’re history. This wouldn’t have been such
a bother except that reloading from your last saved position took at least 30
seconds! After dying eight or nine times in the same sequence, this gets very
tiresome (and the developers recognized this, fixing this issue in the upcoming
prequel Retro Helix).

Since I’m on the subject, saving your game
in Fear Effect is fairly simple–as you walk through different rooms, your
cellular phone will ring at certain points, allowing you to save your game at
that location. I found plenty of places to save, but since there is no visual
indication that a save game “spot” exists, they need to be discovered
by exploration.

Three paragraphs and I haven’t even gotten to Fear Effect’s
gimmick! You don’t really have a health bar in this game–the game’s title
refers to the Fear Effect, your character’s level of fear with respect to the
current situation. As you are attacked by bad guys, your level of fear increases,
as does your audible heart rate. Get too scared, and you die. When there are enemies
nearby, your heart rate increases slightly to warn you that there’s something
dangerous in the next room. (For those gamers with Dual Shock controllers, vibration
also indicates your fear level.) When you reach a particular goal, like solving
a puzzle or finding a key, you calm down and your fear level resets. This is an
interesting concept, but I have a hard time believing that finding a key will
make me feel better after being shot five times by a machine gun!

The puzzles
in Fear Effect are quite good; many puzzles have a Chinese theme, which
makes them less familiar and almost (banish the thought) educational. Some puzzles
require you to figure out creative ways to pass by enemies; other puzzles require
placing items in the proper locations to succeed.

The inventory system in
Fear Effect was also very well-done, allowing you to scan your stuff by
weapon or by item, saving time during action sequences. Fear Effect does
implement “item noticing,” using your character’s head to look at items
of interest in a room, but there seemed to be many cases where your character
would have to look slightly away from an object to notice it (which cost me an
hour of gameplay, looking for something that I had already found but could not
seem to pick up).

Overall Gameplay Grade: B+

Fear Effect
is a worthy addition to a mature Playstation gamer’s library. There’s
significant gore in this game, and there are some racy scenes with Hana, so keep
that in mind when purchasing this for the young ‘uns. This game goes on my top
ten PSX list; I would recommend it to any adventure gamer who doesn’t mind significant
action sequences.

Final Grade: A-