ᵃⁿᵈ ᵃ ᶠᵉʷ ᵒᵗʰᵉʳ ᵗʰᶦⁿᵍˢ

If I had to describe this DLC in one sentence, it would be that it's just more Elden Ring. More bosses, more enemies, more weapons, and more areas to explore, and that's absolutely where the base game excels so it almost feels like a no-brainer to recommend this DLC.

I've had an absolute blast, pretty much every boss has immediately become a top 10 contender in terms of spectacle and fairness, the new weapons and spells are pretty fun to use, and I am proud to say that the open world has far less recycled content in terms of bosses and dungeons (although it's still a problem, just not as bad as the base game).

So, why am I giving this game a thumbs down? Well, mostly for 3 reasons:

The pc performance is honestly shameful. Not only is the game still locked at 60 fps, but it can't even maintain a stable framerate half the time, specially on bosses. And we are talking about a game where reaction matters quite a lot, so suffering stuttering and frame drops can be de difference between living and dying. It gets particularly bad in 2 bossfights, specially the final one.

The camera controls are really showing it's age in this DLC, particularly on a few bosses that are just too big for the camera to properly track and show what they are doing.

Then you have the final boss (which I won't spoil), I'll just say that the amount of visual noise introduced in their fight makes it far too hard to properly read their attacks, some of which feel almost undodgeable, combined with the terrible performance and high damage they really put a stain in what was otherwise a very enjoyable dlc experience.

I'll also like to add that the actual ending of the DLC was quite underwhelming, no extra dialogue with npcs or a new game ending, just a half-assed cutscene and that's it.

In short, wait for the game to get patched to run better and balance the final fight.

If you are looking into getting into the series, do not start with FEAR 2, play the original FEAR first. The publisher, in their everlasting wisdom, decided that you have to buy all the FEARs in a bundle, so don't pay full price for the bundle, because nearly half of it's package is dead weight.

Now onto the actual review. FEAR 1 had it's shortcomings, but overall it was a superb first person shooter, weapons sounded and felt amazing, enemies were undoubtedly some of the smartest of any first person shooter, and the lighting and destruction was ahead of it's time. Granted, the story and horror sections weren't as good, but if you ask a FEAR fan what they liked about the game, they will probably tell you just what I said.

So what does FEAR 2 do? It throws everything that made FEAR 1 good into the F*CKING TRASH, that's what. This game is nothing but a generic FPS Call of Duty clone with a neutered slow down mechanic.

• The weapons sound and feel terrible
  
• The enemies and level design are so poorly conceived, instead of having the thoughtful and intense firefights with room for flanking for both you and the enemies, you now have linear corridors with a bunch of brain-dead sacks of meat rushing at you just to get popped in the head.
  
• The visuals are an utter joke. There is more color and variety on the levels, which is a welcomed change, but they also stripped the series of it's identity, now everything, specially the weapons and enemies look generic and cartoonish, paired with a ridiculous bloom effect and shadows and lighting that behave worse than the original.
  
• Predictably, the destruction felt inferior in this version as well. On the original game, a firefight would look messy, full of flying pieces of paper concrete and physics objects, the bullets would make sparks and leave sizeable sections of the map rendered completely unrecognizable. These effects are now either non-existent or toned down significantly.

Ironically, the few sections where this game improved were the story and horror sections, but only sometimes, and they are certainly not good enough to make me recommend this game over the first one.

I could talk about the multiplayer, but I don't have the willpower in me to keep playing this game nor can I actually play it, since it used GameSpy, a multiplayer service which no longer exists.

I think the game has a lot of merits, the first hour or so really brought me back to playing Minecraft for the first time, collecting stuff without knowing where to go or what to do, not to mention that the visuals and music of this game are fantastic, I was particularly impressed by how the shadows changed dynamically during a thunderstorm, and even though I didn't have many materials, I was really pleased with how fun it was to build stuff.

In the 14 hours I've been playing, most of my time has been spent running back and forth trying to haul materials, the world is just too big, and at least at the beginning, my character is not fast enough nor does he have a big enough inventory space.

This is further exacerbated by the fact that you get significant buffs and debuffs incentivizing you to both play during daytime and stay relatively close to some form of shelter to have the "rested" status effect, which gives me the following options:

• I can either take a significant amount of time gathering materials and build or repair a building for me to store stuff there (which still doesn't change the fact that I will need to get those items to my main base at some point)
  
  
• Or I can do multiple trips per day collecting stuff until my inventory is full.

I've heard you can get stuff like portals or carts to circumvent these problems, but the experience was just so boring and tedious for me, including the combat, that I have no interest to keep pushing through this game, at least for now.

Even though there are some enjoyable parts, specially the sense of progression, it gets even more tedious later on, Iron for instance is only obtainable very far away.

The teleporters conveniently don't allow you to move the heavy and hard to obtain stuff like ores that are on the other biomes, so I can either:

• Process it on site (aka make tools out of it) which requires hauling back materials that can't be teleported from the base (so even more wasted time)
  
  
• Or transport it using a boat (which might not be possible in the first place thanks to the wind blowing in the opposite direction), and even if you decided to still sail, depending on the distances you will be staring at the screen doing next to nothing for 5 to 10 minutes at least, with the possibility of being assaulted by the sea terrors and loosing all the precious loot.

So yeah, even though I really want to love this game and has some very cool features, I can't really bring myself to fight through all this grind and waste of time.

I will keep this review brief, since I can't be bothered.

I'll give the game it's credit where it's due, the visuals are incredible, there is a lot of variety in terms of cars, and a fairly decent level of customization with how accurate or arcade you want it to be.

I found the characters very annoying, and so was the "gain followers to level up" gimmick we see so often in racing games nowdays, and the avatar customization is laughable, only being able to choose from 12 presets or so, however, by far, the worst part of the game is the:

AI drivers
They drive like if the terrain didn't affect them, moving effortlessly through water, making impossible turns at 200 km/h without needing to slow down, making you fight position for position, but the moment you get the first place, they turn brain-dead, you can literally drive at 60 km/h on first place and they will not overtake you.

Or in better words, break Linux compatibility, add an external launcher with its corresponding store and account linking to play a game I bought years ago.