Metachronos overall score = 7.9 / 10
Positive
- This is still one of the creepiest games that you can play, thanks to incredible atmosphere
- Intense, kinetic firefights where every bullet damages the environment
- Excellent sound and lighting
Negative
- The story isn't so much interested in telling a story as it is in just prolonging the experience of the original game
- Not much replay value and no multiplayer
Extraction Point offers up a lot more of the same, though there's not anything particularly wrong with that if the action is as good as it is here. The plot could be described as a five-hour epilogue to the campaign in F.E.A.R. You begin amid the wreckage of the Black Hawk helicopter that was ferrying you to safety. From that point, you must fight to get to the extraction point, where yet
another helicopter will ferry you to safety. There's no grandiose story to save the world or anything like that, which is a refreshing change for a shooter.
Thankfully, the killer gunplay and advanced artificial intelligence featured in F.E.A.R. remain completely intact in Extraction Point. Firefights are a lot more memorable in this game than they are in most first-person shooters because they're incredibly visceral. Bullets fly, objects are knocked over, showers of sparks erupt everywhere, choking clouds of gun smoke fill the air, and bodies slump everywhere. The replicants that you battle are incredibly smart and tough for computer-controlled bad guys, as they're constantly maneuvering to try to get a better advantage on you. In fact, some of the battles would be darn near impossible if not for your character's enhanced reflexes that let you kick in bullet time for short bursts at a time. Aside from the familiar replicants, you'll also encounter a few other types of foes, including the armored walking tank and the invisible assassins that you met in the original game, as well as a strange, seminvisible spirit reminiscent of the figure in Edvard Munsch's painting, The Scream.
Unfortunately, when you're done with the single-player campaign, that's pretty much all there is to Extraction Point. That's because the multiplayer component of F.E.A.R. has already been split off from the single-player game, and it's been made available on the Internet for free under the name F.E.A.R. Combat. You don't even need to own F.E.A.R. or Extraction Point to play it. That means there's not a lot of replay value in this expansion. You won't miss much if you don't play Extraction Point, but if you do like your action and horror blended together and you liked the original game, you should give this one a try.