I'm just going to get this out of the way up front: it looks like I'm going to be playing a lot of shooters, and I've already started. In that same Humble Bundle that had F.E.A.R., it also had the others in the series, so I'm more or less just going down the line.

F.E.A.R. 2 is a direct sequel to the game whose protagonist can see his feet, unlike our good friend Stanley. It takes the series in a more disturbing direction than a scary one. It starts off sanely enough, taking an evil corp executive into custody, but then a nuclear explosion causes you to black out. This is the same explosion that happened at the end of the first game. When you wake up, you realize something happened to you, but not sure what. Eventually, you get to a school, where evil corp has turned the student body into their test subjects, and where the antagonist came from. About that time, you learn what actually happened when you blacked out and learn about how screwed you are. After that, you chase a perhaps dead squadmate through some subway tunnels to a decommisioned nuclear power plant to deal some psycotic damage.

What I'm more concerned about is that this is a shoddy PC port. First, I wandered why the game would not recognize my fourth and fifth mouse buttons to bind melee and grenades when I tried to set them. Then I noticed that the game is stuck in 1080p, not using the full 1920x1200 resolution on my monitor. That said, the game looks quite pretty, even by today's standards.

The gameplay is broken up by office and school shootings, filling subway tunnels with buckshot, battling on destroyed streets, and sniping dudes from across the building. The street battles sometimes have your squad's van mounted turret to fire. When you're alone, there's sometimes empty mech suits standing around inviting you in. In proud series tradition, there is slow motion time. The enemies are pretty much unchanged from the original, so expect more replicants and ATC "Black Ops" soldiers. Thankfully, there's no dodgy bastards like from the expansions, but there's still those invisible jumpy ones, but they are pretty easy to spot if you're looking and are easy to kill, so don't panic.

I'm glad I got this heavily discounted in a Humble Bundle, because I don't think it's worth its asking price of $15. For that price, I suggest you get FarCry 3: Blood Dragon instead. It has just as much nonsense, but it doesn't take itself seriously. It knows that its a game, and I had magnitudes more fun playing it.