Project Origin

Format Xbox 360

Developer Monolith

Publisher Unknown

Genre First Person Shooter

7 Comments

The demonstration code that I'm about to watch John Mulkey - Project Origin's lead designer - play through isn't optimised, so the loading times are longer than usual.

This gives me a chance to write down the chapter synopsis verbatim. "Dr Ambrose has revealed that Aristide's plan will result in an exponential increase in Alma's destructive energy. Aristide has rejected the data and is intent on proceeding as planned."

I don't know what Aristide's plan is, just that she's the president of Armacham Technology Corporation and responsible for most of the deaths in the original F.E.A.R..

But, I've seen enough movies to know that when a money-motivated suit rejects a scientist's worst-case scenario, you'll get a thrilling, worst-case scenario climax. And a smug scientist.

Alma Matters

The strange corporate hydra that is Vivendi-Blizzard-Activision may still own the F.E.A.R. franchise in name, but in a presumed moment of stupidity they forgot to ask for the iconic star of the show, Alma.

They managed to release two expansions that did feature her, and took the less-lauded components of F.E.A.R - the repetitive grey corridors and enemies - and created levels so void of opportunities for your enemies to flex their tactical intellect, that they looked stupider than they were.

That's the last I'll talk of Extraction Point and Perseus Mandate - Monolith are certainly ignoring them.

The events of Project Origin promise to bring the player closer - physically and psychologically - to Alma than the flittering twitches of first game allowed.

Your team has been despatched to retrieve Genevieve Aristide, the same data-rejecting president - who, if cast in a daytime TV drama - would be stupider than the mayor who refuses to cancel Mardi Gras, despite the warnings of a pair of plucky seismologists. John Mulkey explains further, without reference to rubbish TV.

"You play Michael Beckett," enthuses Mulkey, a man who's enthusiasm means that he's constantly smiling. "You're going in to rescue Aristide, the president of Armacham - the woman who restarted Project Origin and wakened Alma.

"It starts before the end of the first game, when you (as Point Man, the original game's protagonist) were headed into the containment facility and Wade released Alma and you had to destroy the facility to control her."

This means, mid-point in Project Origin, you'll get to witness the massive explosion that punctuated the end of F.E.A.R., and get the chance to extend your war into the burning streets of a newly bombed town.

In some ways, Project Origin is similar to its predecessor. The guns have a similar look and the distressingly named Penetrator is back, albeit with a couple of tweaks. Mulkey explains that the gun was as popular in-house as it was with players.

"Our principle art lead's favourite thing to do was to go slow-motion, crouch under a guy, shoot him in the chin and pin him to the ceiling. Horrifying, but kinda like a pińata."

The interface has a cleaner, curvier feel to it and the numbered health and armour has been replaced with the console standard of health regeneration.

You still have the powers to slow time - although how you're able to achieve this remains unexplained, for now. An early scene showing you being operated on while Aristide looks on perhaps giving the strongest clue.

The game feels different in other ways. Monolith have engaged with their community - their "Name Your Fear" competition was the source of this game's title. Another thing that the fans wanted and are getting, are mechs.

Monolith have strong form in mech combat - 10 years ago, Shogo: Mobile Armor Division won a devoted following with its manga-themed mecha gunplay.

Shogo is still played today, but would be far better remembered if it hadn't been released at the same time as Half-Life. So it feels like the inclusion of mechs is more a cock-eyed tribute to the meaty metal of Shogo than the tense sinew we loved about F.E.A.R..

A large part of the code I played was this new, mechanised combat. The power feels great - the terrain that felt solid before suddenly crumbles under the miniguns and rockets of your suit.

Men become ants and other mechs feel oddly tiny, making you feel more impervious than you actually are. Rockets steadily chip away at the suit's armour, and you're a sitting flesh duck when you're forced to evacuate.

As much fun as this is, it's hardly any definition of scary. Exhilarating, yes. Cool, possibly. But being the biggest bastard on the battlefield is the polar opposite of atmospheric terror.

In the absence of any evidence of claustrophobic corridors and hallucinations, I had to ask Mulkey if this isn't going against the grain of what F.E.A.R. was about.

Fear is all about

"F.E.A.R. is all about the crazy chaos of combat. It's going into this crowded room, throwing in a grenade and hitting slow-mo," he reminds me. He's right, of course - even with the nods to Japanese horror films, F.E.A.R. was as much an action movie as anything else.

But excellent AI aside, it's the horror and atmosphere that sticks with you, years on. Surely they'll be recreating that?

"We'll still have the tension-building elements, and all that stuff," says Mulkey, with the practised vagueness of a man who knows that he's sailing close to forbidden topics.

"In the first game we introduced the vocabulary of what we were using. You had the scary little girl, it was all creepy and she'd startle you. Now we've established that, we can't really use the same tricks again."

But will Alma be developed into a more tangible threat? She's such an iconic figure that she's got to be developed somehow. "Alma will be more physical, she'll touch you more.

"It's going to be very personal and more up in your grill," he assures. "The first game's child manifestation was a projection of herself in her last moment of innocence.

When her father imprisoned her, impregnated her and forced her to give birth to the player and Paxton Fettel. In this game, we're going to see her at the point where she was at the end of the game, as a hag, and as a woman."

Film Real

One of the levels I'm allowed to play is the first level. This works as a tutorial, as you'd expect, but it also sets the tone of the game. Monolith are no strangers to the movie sensibility - pretty much everything they've done has been directly related to, or heavily influenced by, the love of a good movie genre.

So, when the death-hardened Delta Force squad I'm a part of finds a dead body - possibly the result of Point Man's adventures - it's taken with nervous humour.

"It looks like they hit his aorta," the team's aspiring doctor suggests, and is roundly mocked for this absurd diagnosis. "Argh," screams one of my friends, "They hit my aorta!"

Waiting for the lift, the atmosphere is cordial, friendly, even whimsical. So much so, that I decide to take a look at my fellow combatants close up. The models are better looking and this extends to the enemies you encounter in Project Origin.

As mentioned, the samey look of the previous game's enemies was alleviated only by the fact that they behaved so intelligently.

"On the first game, we didn't have the variety of enemies that we wanted to have. First, you'd have the guy with the face mask with one filter. Then you'd have the guy with two filters. One guy has blue armour and one guy has green. It's the reality of production that forces you to do what you can," explains Mulkey.

"So, one of the things we pushed for on this project was greater variety. Especially the idea that in character design, there's silhouette, colour and motion.

So, if we can get variety in those ways, that's great. So when you fight the Armacham guys, it's not 400 guys with short-sleeved shirts and mirrorshades."

I'm so busy inspecting my teammates and pondering the models that I don't notice the lift has arrived. The banter ceases as bullets fly past me into the lift. This causes my first nervous jump, but it's more down to the fact that I was behaving like a military knob-end.

The level then becomes a series of combat set pieces and tutorials, as I learn to use my new moves.

Body Conscious

F.E.A.R. made you aware of your legs - not only by looking down and seeing them, but by bringing them into view with moves like the slide. There's more of that in Project Origin, as you vault over railings and flip tables over to provide yourself with cover.

This is something the Armacham forces did in the first game, and granting the player the same power helps to make an area feel like a satisfying game of table-flipping murder chess.

The world of F.E.A.R. has its own noises - just as Half-Life 2's health and power stations and the shout of Combine's forces are evocative to the point of bringing on a shudder, the enemy barks and instructions are similarly transporting.

But while it's good to be back in the universe that shit me up all those three years ago, isn't it all a bit... bright, colourful? And aren't these offices a bit... nicer?

"We've done some changes engine-wise. F.E.A.R. was back when per-pixel lighting was like 'Holy cow, we've got to have that'. It made for an atmospheric game, but it was also very stark and shadowy.

We loved it, but at the same time we hated it. There were times where you were fighting guys by shooting at their muzzle flash. This time we wanted to do something with more realistic lighting and softer shadows.

"That's not to say we're going to give you a bright game - it's just another tool. We're still going to throw you in the dark. There are still going to be the little-girl screams." And when he says "little girl screams", he means you, not Alma.

Tunnel Vision

Rumours that the game might be more open-ended have been overstated - it's still all about getting from A to B - the real sandbox element comes from the unscripted AI.

"We really use the notion of the environment being able to play out in many different ways. You're not going to see maybe a 10th of what it can do, because the AI is reacting to your actions. You'll find you anthropomorphise the enemies, saying - 'You bastards, I knew you were going to do that!'"

This is true of the regular levels, although I have to say that the mech levels - by their overpowered nature - feel like a superpowered slog down a corridor. These are the levels that need to prove their place in the F.E.A.R. universe.

Fun as they are, and fan-prompted as they may be, they feel anomalous in a world where you're supposed to be worried about your sanity, rather than your miniguns overheating.

So it was reassuring to see the hospital area, populated with the already well-publicised Abominations. Half BioShock spider splicer and half Silent Hill 2 mannequin, they move with much more fluidity and nauseating grace than their counterparts in Rapture, sliding up walls and launching themselves through doorways, before landing neatly on your face for a quick munch.

Are there any more new enemies? The question is evaded by my hosts: there either aren't, or they're being kept for a press event closer to launch.

As my day in Monolith HQ came to a close, I was convinced that Project Origin has taken a few chips out of the J-Horror camp and put them into the safer bet of the action movie.

After all, the Western romance with movies such as Ring and The Grudge has evaporated. John Mulkey provides the reassurance I needed: "There is this moment that is going to creep you out, it's really nasty.

Craig Hubbard, the lead game designer on the original game, has been doing a lot of story stuff for us, and he came up with this idea that was so creepy that he had to go to the president of Warner Bros. and see if it would be OK to put it into the game."

He can't talk about it, which sucks, Mulkey admits. But having to ask the head of a corporation if something is too nasty to put in the game? Now that's promising.

Jon 'Log' Blyth