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FEAR 2: Project Origin
(From Here on out I expect you to read "Fear 2" as "F.E.A.R. 2 Project Origin" because, baby, that's how I roll.) I'm going to skip the story details from the first game, which Fear 2 plays well from, although knowledge of the backstory isn't critical since that's really not even the point of it.
But if you're against being in the dark (figuratively, here) without wanting to play the first game, go ahead and read the Wikipedia Synopsis. This game holds few surprises for finishers of the first title, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. I mean, the first one was pretty damn good, right?
So I don't know why I didn't expect insectile cannibals, but I didn't, and they made me jump. I mean, I should have expected insectile cannibals, men turned into wall-sprinting beasts, charging around in the shadows, making each gap between the tiles in the ceiling a font of desperation, every corner a shrine to any higher power who will listen, "PLEASE DON'T MOVE!"   All in all, this game improves on everything that the original had to offer. Clinically, anyway. All of the elements are improved, the hallucinations, the sounds, the voice acting, the hypnotically-rendered gore... I actually liked the first better. Fear 2 seems less scary, which isn't to say that I didn't scream, out loud, sober, at two in the afternoon. But on a scale of one to Pants Status: RED, I'd say this is somewhere in between. If that's something you were looking forward to, then you're SOL, it's time to take your need to evacuate yourself to a less safe environment, like a real haunted school for experimentation on children and cloning. When I started out, I was OK with that. Personally, I've shit enough bricks that subsequently pissed themselves that more terror is not something I was immediately looking forward to, especially having re-played the original gearing up for this. (Oddly enough, the original is also less scary. I've either gotten thick-skinned or the original doesn't look quite so convincing anymore.) No, I played this game out for revenge. I'd been scared, I'd had my fill of walking down the street, swallowing unconsciously, uncontrollably, looking into the dark spaces between houses, just waiting for the game to show up when I least expected it. And Fear 2 let me stomp Fear's thralled throat in. In fact, steeling myself against all the terror I found something interesting. I didn't want to see the horrors, I focused on my objectives, checked my ammo, guessed at where my enemies were, opened the fights with a grenade, finished 'em off with my psychic ability, and came out unscathed. Pretty much every time. The only times things were really frightening was when they were completely unexpected. A couple hours into the game, there's not much left to expect, and as satisfying as it is to mutilate so, so very many "super-soldiers," you stop being afraid. When is that ever supposed to work! Which is where the game pretty much fails. In order to really be frightened by anything, you have to let yourself be. You have to engage the game, not the other way around. Sure, fumbling around in an HVAC duct that's lined with corpses while your flashlight is on the fritz is engaging, but the game never brings together it's collection of elements. And that's just weird, since those elements are so damn sympathetic. It doesn't matter that the plot was lifted from the first game (and actually developed, kudos Monolith) and that the backstory was incubated in a mind socked under a tinfoil hat, that the characters were probably drawn up on a whiteboard in their respective colors, or that, in a game about psychics, Surprise! you're psychic. Because if you were having a genuinely good time being scared to load up the last save, you'd happily gloss over the fact that none of it matters.    
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