A regretful purchase.

I suppose you could say that I'm going to review Fear Effect from a 'rental' standpoint, as I didn't finish the game.

I usually write an ePinion after I've gone over something comprehensively. But Fear Effect is an exception. Having read many reviews about how 'great' this game is, I have to take the opposite stance by saying that Fear Effect has a very unredeeming feel to it.

Games like Abe's Exoddus and Abe's Oddysey would give you unlimited lives. If you died, you'd start somewhere not too far from where you failed. I remember reading somewhere that the Abe games were great in that, somehow they never insulted the gamer. The puzzles in the Abe games had a logic and smoothness to them.

Fear Effect insults us, horribly. The puzzles I encountered weren't too hard, but there are other things that make the game a bad experience.

In F.E., if you don't save at a previous spot, you could be well in trouble and have to deal with killing a grunt or solving a puzzle, over and over again. As I went to the 2nd disc (of the 4-disc game), I couldn't help but notice how horrible of a time I was having. I wasn't even enjoying the game anymore, I was more concerned about finding the next save point so that I wouldn't die and have to reload my last saved spot (once you've bit the bullet, you've got to reload your last save, and that takes a horrendously long time, even moreso after dying so many times).

The controls for the game aren't too bad. There is the standard move forward, move backward, crouch and turn 180 moves, in addition to scrolling through inventory (it becomes frustrating when you're trying to access your weapon while having to pass through some items first, in the mist of a firefight).

You can tell me that I shouldn't write an ePinion on this game because I didn't have a chance. But let me tell you something. Any game that turns me off in the first hour and a half has to be pretty bad. If you're interested in buying this game, take my advice: rent it first. You might be glad you did.