PlayStation Basement #74 - Fear Effect

This review was originally published on the Console Purist Facebook group on January 25th, 2020.

Welcome to PlayStation Basement, a weekly review of games for the original PlayStation that are somewhat obscure, unusual, or unknown. Games are rated Good, Bad, or Neutral to emphasize the review itself. Now, let’s go!

This is the last week of Future Month 2020; next Saturday, this will all just be the present, like yesterday’s news. It’s a complex web of technical, analytical, chronoscopic intrigue that leads to these sorts of determinations, one mostly based on counts of days and new years and such. In related news, today is also the Lunar New Year based on the traditional Chinese lunisolar calendar. This marks the new year in Vietnam (Tết), Korea (Seollal), Mongolia (Tsagaan Sar), Tibet (Losar), and China (Chinese New Year or Spring Festival). The last of these is the most widely known, as far as I can tell, in the United States, and I remember watching a short documentary every year in elementary school about it. The Chinese New Year is a time for family gatherings, worship, and the cleaning of residences to sweep away the bad luck of the past. As with every other year, 2020 is given an animal and element from the Chinese Zodiac. 2020 is the year of the metal rat.

Today’s game sweeps away the past into a dark night lit by neon skyscrapers of new years to come; I’m not sure there’s really any good luck to find here though. This week’s futuristic game is Fear Effect from major PlayStation publisher Eidos Interactive (Tomb Raider II, Machine Head, Fighting Force, Swagman) and troubled developer Kronos Digital Entertainment (Criticom, Dark Rift, Meat Puppet, Cardinal Syn). Fear Effect was originally published in North America on February 24th, 2000 with a release in Europe following on August 3rd of the same year. Though the game takes place in a fictional, cyberpunk Hong Kong, Fear Effect was never actually released in any Asian countries. The game stars three anti-hero mercenaries, Hana, Glas, and Deke, as they attempt to extort a powerful triad boss, Mr. Lam, by kidnapping his missing daughter Wee Ming. It sounds like a dangerous plan to me, and I’m sure it won’t be easy.

I’m not amazingly impressed with the cover art to Fear Effect. Showing the three protagonists engaged in some kind of unseen gunfight, we have Hana diving and shooting and the other two ready to go. The colors are dark with bright highlights, and the design looks like a comic book. The art is basically the same in both regions, though the European release is brighter, has a wider and deeper camera shot, and the bullet from Hana’s gun is oddly visible. I just wish that the characters weren’t just facing the viewer with little context.

Graphically, Fear Effect looks a lot like the cover art, and that’s a good thing. The game combines cel-shaded characters with pre-rendered backgrounds to create something that looks like Cowboy Bebop, The Animatrix, or Outlaw Star. The characters really look like they could jump out of a still from a 90s anime. I could probably do without the Fu Manchu design of Mr. Lam, though. This is a cyberpunk world that reminds me of the already mentioned in addition to Perfect Dark, Blade Runner, Cyberpunk 2020, and Final Fantasy VII’s Midgar. Fear Effect has some beautiful colors despite the dark backgrounds, and the game takes a cinematic approach to everything. Backgrounds will pan and zoom in certain scenes. These effects are very cool but can be confusing to play through. It also doesn’t help that the backgrounds are not the easiest to navigate, a problem with many of these pre-rendered background games. Resident Evil did the pre-rendered thing much better in comparison. It is really cool to see the gameplay morph right into a cutscene even if the cutscenes tend to have a lot of artifacting and have tons cheesy explosions. Like I said, Fear Effect is very cinematic.

In terms of sound, Fear Effect does the cinema thing once again. Sweeping scores combine with ricocheting bullets, deep explosions, and full voice-acting. The soundtrack has a dark depth to it, and the sound effects are all excellent. The voice-acting, on the other hand, ranges from good to questionable. The main characters sound great, but many of the non-playable people have a… broken English thing going on. There are certainly people in the world that sound like this, but it comes off as kind of racist here. More of that in a bit.

In many ways, Fear Effect feels like a game from the early, longbox days of PlayStation, not something from the year 2000. A gritty action-adventure in Resident Evil’s “survival-horror” style with stealth additions and cinematics from the later Metal Gear Solid, Fear Effect also takes some cues from laserdisc and FMV adventures such as Dragon’s Lair and Time Gal: you will die a lot from choices you make. Some of these choices feel very arbitrary or are not obvious. Some scenes start abruptly and give you seconds to react. Seriously, you will die a lot; Fear Effect craves perfection (or something similar). It’s also not great that Fear Effect is basically an action-stealth game utilizing pre-rendered backgrounds and “tank controls”. Quick-turn buttons, auto-aiming, and an interesting health system make this somewhat more bearable, but the game still feels clunky. Unlike Resident Evil, Fear Effect requires your character to “aim” on the enemy to shoot them. You know you are aiming if a crosshair appears at the top of the screen. Usually this happens pretty fast, but sometimes it doesn’t. It can be rough in a fast action scene or boss battle. When sneaking around, though, the crosshair is used effectively to show when a stealth kill can be carried out. The health system I mentioned works like this: you have a little EKG gauge that is colored based on how healthy you are. It ranges from green to red where green is feeling great and red is near death. This gauge remains higher if you play the game more stealthily and carefully, as it is the “fear effect”; being more scared and unnerved leads your character to die faster. The gauge, therefore, gets lower if you are surprised by an enemy or something. I like this system, as it adds to the cinematic flair and emphasizes that these characters are thieves and killers, people who work with a deadly finesse. Your health refills between some sequences, ensuring that you will probably be okay if you can survive a tough fight. Fear Effect also has a really weird dodging system that allows you to dodge attacks. It might be too good in some ways; I was able to roll through three armed guards without taking much of a scratch. That usually doesn’t work though, so maybe it’s fine.

When I was younger, I remember how excited my friend Augustin was by the sweeping cinematics of Fear Effect, the game recalling a Quentin Tarantino film with similar cruelty and gore. I really don’t love Tarantino, and these same excesses feel a little cartoonish and overly violent here as well. Like Tarantino, there are also some things that feel a bit racist. As mentioned earlier, Chinese characters speak with severely broken English that comes off as somewhat of a caricature. There are also some parts in the game with, essentially, “savage” tribal enemies. These enemies are not actually humans, but it still seems… not really appropriate. Overall, the game is full of cinema: the opening cutscene shows the credits, the game moves somewhat seamlessly between FMV and normal gameplay, and the game features pre-rendered backgrounds that sometimes really do utilize camera plays straight out of a director’s textbook. Sometimes these lead to more confusion; creeping along the edge of a billboard to suddenly find the camera fly ahead and zoom out can cause the player to bump into the bad guys patrolling the area. This game has a lot of difficult scenes that need to be played more than once to skillfully pass, so this doesn’t feel particularly out of place. It is more cool than functional though.

Despite these issues, Fear Effect is still a decent game. The setting and atmosphere are unique, even today, undeterred by the somewhat awkward gameplay. To me, Fear Effect feels more like a Dreamcast or Xbox game, and it could have been more user-friendly had it been developed for one of those later consoles. Hopefully, a Fear Effect developed on one of those consoles wouldn’t have the player character getting stuck on walls or unable to see enemies one screen over (again, this is something that Resident Evil did not mess up, though). Since 2001’s sequel, Fear Effect 2: Retro Helix, was Kronos Digital’s last game, I’m not sure that they would have lasted long enough to create games for consoles that were either brand new at the time or not even in existence. I’m sure that Kronos’ track record of lackluster 3D fighting games Criticom, Dark Rift, and Cardinal Syn (also known as “The Trilogy of Terror”, the first and third of which will appear in future PlayStation Basement reviews) didn’t help them get any publishers interested in their games. Fear Effect did return in 2018 with Fear Effect Sedna from developer Sushee and publisher Forever Entertainment. That game was not well-received, but we may be getting a remake of the first game sometime in the future (even beyond the future that is January 2020). Time will only tell, I suppose, as the game has been delayed for quite some time. Tangential elements (futuristic setting, design of main character, cinematic styling, stealth gameplay) of Fear Effect do seem to appear in Beyond Good & Evil, another forgotten game that also has a new release coming sometime in the future. I hope that we see these games in the coming days, months, or years of our world. Have a good year in 2020 and beyond.

Fear Effect receives a Good. It was a tough call overall, but I want to go back to this game every time I quit. There are certainly many improvements that could be made here though.

Follow EfreetEater on Facebook