Warner Bros Games/ PC, Xbox 360, PS3 (£34.99-£44.99, 18+)
In the last F.E.A.R game you put a bullet in the head of your cannibalistic brother, Paxton Fettel. For better or worse, that hasn’t stopped him returning — in ethereal form — to “help” you to stop your psychic (and psychotic) mother from having another paranormally destructive child.
F.E.A.R. 3 has been designed to play best as a co-operative adventure — you either play as the veteran hero Point Man or as the people snacker Fettel. And as with previous F.E.A.R outings, the game plays out as a first-person shooter with horror elements thrown into the mix. Point Man uses the usual arsenal of shotguns, assault rifles and grenades, while Fettel uses gruesome Jedi-esque powers.
If the gameplay is restrictive, with little chance of real exploration, the fast-paced fighting is impressive in places, while the scenes set in the sewers underneath a psychiatric hospital work really well.
Enemies range from well-armed and intelligent commandos to wall-crawling feral monsters. There are also corpses scattered about the floor around you, which, most alarmingly, have a tendency to reanimate suddenly and attack you — I found these to be a particularly good cure for hiccups.
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F.E.A.R. 3 does not bring anything new to the first-person-shooter genre. What it does bring is genuine chills and ferociously fun gameplay.