16. Fear Effect

(Playstation, Kronos, 2000)
Remember when EVERYTHING was like The Matrix? There was this awful period of time where all games, films, TV shows, adverts and music videos used effects and styles blatantly stolen from the acclaimed Wachowski movies. As part of this trend, a slew of futuristic techno adventures hit the home consoles. Try to remember three of them... see, that's how great they were.

Fear Effect was one of these hip games. Three mercenaries are hired by a wealthy but crooked Hong Kong businessman to look for his daughter who has been kidnapped by a bizarre doomsday cult. Our anti-heroes venture into a grimy steampunk-esque version of Hong Kong armed with an array of automatic weaponry and some highly dubious moral standings. The player alternates between the three characters (two grizzled dudes and a sexy girl) as they search for the missing girl, fast becoming trapped in a nightmarish world of Chinese folklore and demonology.

Fear Effect was similar to many survival horror games of the time, all fixed cameras, rotating tank controls and logic puzzles. The kick here was in the game's visual style, Fear Effect uses sprites made of shaded polygons to create a very angular, comic book look. These sprites are overlayed onto animated FMV backgrounds. This approach has mixed results, while very stylistic and cool, the sprites can look horribly "stuck on" and on occasion you can clearly spot the moment where the background animation loops, which really takes you out of the atmosphere. Overall though, it's a pretty groovy concept.

The player guides the characters through various locations over the game's four discs. Death results in the game cutting to some often incredibly violent cut-scenes depicting the character's demise followed by a varied and classy Game Over screen. These scenes further emphasise the cinematic feel Kronos were working toward. The game features frequent puzzles, but as a twist, the answers to many of them of hidden amongst the game's decor. For example, the solution to a colour coded door lock may also be the colour pattern of a neon billboard in a previous screen. This can make for some backtracking and physical note-taking, but is at least a novel approach and a welcome change from "Find gem, place gem"

Fear Effect is not an excellent game, the visuals are very stylish but do not always blend well. The combat is awkward and the characters have awful leg animation that makes them look like they have no knees. The game also suffers from some nasty load times after death. It is a game of great intentions though, with atmospheric sound, impressive cut scenes and a creepy storyline. I often think that Fear Effect may have been a little ahead of its time and had it debuted on the PS2, all the ingredients would have worked together a little better. A sequel was released which improved upon many issues but also tacked on a cringe inducing bisexual sub-text that was both immature and embarrassing, setting back the "Adult gamers are adults act" by about fifty years. I like gorgeous pretend women as much as the next freak, but sometimes it can go so very wrong.

Seriously. Grow the fuck up.

Fear Effect was a legitimately good game, I just think it was born a few years too soon. Work began on a PS2 sequel, but was scrapped for budget reasons. Maybe it's time for a new adventure for Hana and friends, their morally dubious lifestyle would fit today's plethora of videogame scumbags perfectly.

Kane and Lynch vs Hitman vs Fear Effect. Make it happen Eidos. Oh, right.