I played some more F.E.A.R., in expansion form. In as few words as possible, it's just more of the same. Extraction Point was the first expansion, so I figure that I'll start there.

Extraction Point is a direct continuation of the first game's story. You walk around trying to find your team and figure out just what happened. The usual paranormal and horror elements abound: blood is dripping and smeared everywhere, and skeletons are lying around.

Perseus Mandate follows another squad that is working in parallel with the point man during the first game. You go through a office building to investigate what evil corp was doing. In an unsurprising move, you get separated from the rest of your team, instead of being killed immediately. Don't worry, they get killed later. At some point a mercenary company of cloned soldiers shows up, so you can pile even more dead clone soldiers on top of the ones you were already fighting.

Both games possess remarkable similarity to each other and the original. There is still the walking down the hallway effect where things go wacky. Like plenty of other FPSes, you crawl around more air ducts than you care for. Product placement is still present in the form of Alienware laptops and Dell XPS desktops, although since Dell bought Alienware, whose laptops appeared in the first one, it makes sense to have both. I almost think the limitations of technology forced some game design decisions. In order to be more immersive and to answer the question of 'why do these soldiers all look the same', why don't we say that all of them are clones?

Both expansions look exactly like the original too, which is sort of the point. I'm not sure if they run faster or not. I recall that back when the original was released in 2005, it was pointed to as the reason that single core CPUs were faster than dual cores. People pointed to F.E.A.R. and said that you couldn't get more single threaded than this. As a programmer, I scratch my head at how one could make a single threaded program even more single threaded.

As a whole, I can't imagine ever playing these games again, aside from the curiosity of what happened. I hear that the sequels completely disregard the expansions and build on the base game instead.