F.E.A.R. 2 offers greater variety in its settings than the original, but the improvement is incremental at best. Dilapidated office complexes, mazes of hospital rooms, labyrinthine warehouses and military complexes--the levels are so generic. There's nothing here that hasn't been explored in another shooter. Buckling into Elite Powered Armor does bring some fresh appeal, although not enough. Only twice do you suit up in these modern-day mechs, the rest of the time spent fighting Replica soldiers and a few other types of enemies. Unique weapons like the limb-slicing laser and ashen pulse gun are interesting, yet the rarity of ammunition for them limit their use. The elements that differentiate F.E.A.R. 2 from a sea of other shooters are there—but they used so infrequently that the impression given through most of the game is one of conformity to genre conventions.

The plain design of the single player campaign could have been lifted by phenomenal multiplayer; sadly, that’s just not the case here. F.E.A.R. 2 bombs online with problematic servers and wholly unbalanced multiplayer design. Disconnects are frequent, freezes of the console occurred several times, and lag in most matches is incredibly annoying. You can watch as other players seemingly teleport from one location to the next, evidence of game-killing lag. Other annoyances include being dumped back to the main menu after a match, then being forced to sit through user authentication when sifting back through the multiplayer menus to find another match. Why can't you be returned to the multiplayer menu to make jumping into another match easy? Even if you attribute these to release kinks that will ultimately get worked out in the coming weeks, the balancing is inherently flawed.

Disappointing multiplayer and an average single player campaign make F.E.A.R. 2 a frightening prospect if you're searching for a fresh shooter. Still, the mechanics are solid and the campaign is appropriately long. While the action sequences are predictable and often a little too easy, they can satisfy the need for first-person action. The fact you're likely to forget about this average shooter should scare you away from entering with high expectations.

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