Fear Effect

Fear Effect is a good game for it's time, but this port has some serious problems. Weapon spawns that are supposed to occur don't always show up. This can make it next to impossible to proceed. I also want to point out to modern gamers that these controls are going to be a nightmare for you. The original PS1 game is seriously janky at times and it seems even worse than I remember. I cannot recommend this game in good faith to really anyone. If you want to play it, an original PS1 disc isn't that expensive and PS1's are still affordable. You can emulate it just fine on duckstation. Don't waste money and time on this port. The game was cool for it's time and it has a dedicated cult following, but this is not the way that you want to play it.

Controls are ♥♥♥♥.

A game somewhere between Resident Evil and Metal Gear Solid but very much has its own vibe with an eastern sci-fi setting, "cool" unique characters and a certain charm that only a PS1 game made in the late 90s can have. This version comes with save states and a rewind function which greatly improves the gameplay, plus an option for modern character-relative instead of tank controls. A barebones remaster, which I don't mind. There's not much you can do with a PS1 title with pre-rendered backgrounds and for the price, a good deal.

Fear Effect, игра которая по каким-то причинам обошла меня стороной в бородатые годы PS1. Возможно потому, что ходовыми продуктами того времени были классические Resident evil, Dino Crisis и в некоторых моментах Parasite Eve. Сюжет происходит во вселенной киберпанка 2052 года в Гонконге. Главные действующие лица - Ханна, Глас и Дик - они наемники, цель которых похитить дочь одной крупной шишки и потребовать за нее выкуп. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3654929997 Хоть геймплей и напоминает от части вышеперечисленные игры, он имеет и свои особенности. В игре четыре крупных главы, на протяжении которых предстоит управлять всеми тремя персонажами. Одна из главных механик вытекает из названия игры. Здоровье на экране показывается в виде пульса, который реагирует на окружение персонажа в данный момент и физический урон от противников. Например, пульс светится зеленым цветом - это значит оно полное. Побывали в какой-то крупной перестрелке получили много урона, пульс стал красным, но персонаж выжил. Пульс с красного стал оранжевым, но как только появляется малейшая опасность, он снова становится красным. Восполняется здоровье только в строго определенных местах по достижению сюжетных событий, либо при выполнении скрытных устранений противника, решения головоломок и благодаря механики точной стрельбы. Как это работает. Авто прицела в игре нет. Чтобы попадать по противнику, нужно развернуться в его сторону, на экране появляется зеленый квадрат, а внутри появляется движущийся прицел, задача игрока во время прожимать кнопку выстрела, чтобы попадать в цель. Если игрок наносит критический урон, это дает положительный эффект на пульс. Но все это не так просто как кажется, во-первых врагов достаточно много и порой они просто давят количеством. Во-вторых очень неудобный инвентарь, где нужно буквально как на пианино в реальном времени жать по три кнопки. В-третьих если на экране два и более врага, убежать от них тоже становится проблемой, персонаж просто застревает в них. Помимо вышеописанных механик, персонажи могут бежать и стрелять одновременно, делать кувырок, уворачиваясь от атак. Стрелять с двух рук по-македонски. Виды оружия у всех одинаковые - пистолеты, пистолеты-пулеметы, штурмовые винтовки, дробовики. Исключение только Дик (у него есть револьверы). Враги в основном люди, боевая техника, ближе к концу игры появится разного рода нечисть. Есть боссы. Стоит отметить, что Fear Effect оправдывает свое название. Умереть можно не только от врагов, но и от любого чиха во время решения загадок или преодоления определенной местности. Иногда игра предлагает не очень очевидные решения некоторых сюжетных мест. Не сразу можно понять, что от тебя хотят. В основном предстоит много стрелять, разгадывать загадки. В игре три концовки, две из них плохие, а чтобы открыть каноничную, нужно играть на хардовом уровне сложности. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3654920318 Визуально игра аутентична для своего времени, я бы сказал даже кинематографична, передает атмосферу киберпанка. Задники приятные, жаль только, что данная версия для пк - это просто порт, а не ремастер для современных платформ. Fear Effect игра с интересными идеями для ценителей классики и данного жанра. Олдам однозначно рекомендую.

I have fond memories of this as a kid. This port looks like it has a grainy filter over it which is a bit disappointing in a way but also brings me back to old analog tvs so I'm not sure if its better or worse for it but it should be an option. Still.... Same game that I loved back then. The pricing isn't too high so go for it.

this one was better left in the past. lol but for real i don't just dislike the game. its also a bad port with broken audio and ugly messy cutscenes.

This game is pure 90s comic book style. Edgy mercenaries, futuristic technology, Chinese mysticism, and the overall artstyle and dialogue. The transition from cyberpunk-ish action game to horror near the end is pretty interesting. Fear Effect has some cool ideas, but the execution feels really rough in some parts. Every background in this game is a looping, pre-rendered video. Not that special these days, but at the time it was released I imagine this looked really amazing. Unfortunately, I think these pre-rendered backgrounds introduced some problems. I'll explain more a bit later, but, as one example, a few stage hazards require you to just watch a looping video to figure out a pattern. Didn't memorize the whole pattern? Watch that loop again, and again. A lot of this is just a test of patience. The combat for me regularly switched from awesome to annoying. Sneaking up on an enemy to stealth kill with knife? Satisfying. Taking out two enemies at once with dual-wielding sawed-off shotguns? Sweet. Rolling out of the way of gunfire and then taking out an enemy with a burst from the assault rifle? Cool. Spamming rolling like a bad Souls-like player because 3 enemies are constantly attacking and not giving you an opening to stop and shoot? Frustrating. To top it all off, enemies seem to just literally not exist when they're not in the camera. Maybe that's good because they can't sneak attack you when you can't see them, but it sucks in the middle of a fight when you dodge off the screen and now you can't attack [i]them[/i] because the camera angle changed. And then what? Hope they walk into the frame so you can attack? Or move back to where they are and risk getting attacked from a bad position? And then there's the boss battles. Remember how I said a lot of this game is just watching the background video loop? That applies to most of the bosses, too. Just pure trial and error, watching them loop the same animation over and over. "Escaped my sinking platform by dodging down? Sorry, I'm sinking that one next, you should've dodged left instead." And the bosses that [i]aren't[/i] like that are usually just fighting endless waves of enemies, waiting for one to drop an item to use to hurt the boss. And there's even one boss that, since it's just a background animation, can get stuck constantly restarting its animation if you dodge the wrong way and cause a camera angle change. I think there's only one or two "real" boss battles, and the rest feel more like stage hazards with health bars. It takes very little real skill, because once you know their pattern it's incredibly easy to beat the boss without taking any damage. It's not like memorizing boss fight patterns is unique to this game, but the fact that it's a [i]pre-rendered video[/i] with [i]no influence from the player[/i] makes them either dull or annoying. The puzzles are harder than I expected for an action-heavy game like this. Usually they involve piecing together clues from the environment. Some of them require a lot of memorization if you don't have a pen and paper nearby, too. Some of the puzzle hints felt a bit silly to me. The first, for example, is defusing a bomb. How do you know the order to cut the wires? There's an [spoiler]electric sign outside that flashes the exact order. Why? Does the enemies' bomb guy like to take inspiration from his environment?[/spoiler] But you'll feel pretty clever when/if you solve them without brute-forcing. Because of how the inventory works, changing weapons can be a stressful experience. If you don't have the weapon you want out when you get into a fight, you have to spam rolling while cycling through weapon choices until you find the one you want. This release adds cheat features like rewinding and save states. TBH I used them in my first playthrough, because I didn't want to deal with starting over some areas just because I walked too close to an edge and got an instant death, or failed to memorize a boss's attack pattern correctly, or had the wrong weapon equipped when I walked into a fight. If you use these cheat features sparingly, not to brute-force the game but just to retry a few annoying sections faster, I think this game can be a lot of fun.

Got soft locked in the red against two or three enemies multiple times and got fed up. This game likes to take away your weapons at save points and pit you against multiple enemies with machine guns, while only having a knife. I get that it's an old game and unfair difficulty is part of it's charm. Moreover, this is just a plain emulation job without any interference to it's mechanics and that's fine. For these reasons exactly, the game needs the ability to enable cheats. Cheats that existed in the original PS1 version but for some stupid reason the developers chose to remove from this version because they thought that rewind and manual saves would be enough. They are not. Save yourselves from this frustrating experience.