Appointment With F.E.A.R.

By Tin Man Games

Vitals:

• Choose your own adventure
• Skip it ($5.99)
• 15-20 min. playtime
• High replay value

There was a time in gaming, before the graphical revolution and the implementation of radical control schemes, when story and content was king. When worlds were experienced entirely through text and gameplay consisted solely of choosing the correct path through various mental challenges. Appointment with F.E.A.R. attempts to draw on this bygone golden age of choose your own adventure book gaming, even augmenting it with a thematically appropriate comic book venire, but unfortunately misses the mark on every important hallmark of the genre.

Titan city, home of the most forgetful scientists ever

You play as a super hero who has committed their life to protecting the citizens of Titan City from the forces of evil and calamity. The game attempts to create a sense of customizability by allowing the player to choose their character’s gender, super power and appearance from a list of presets; however the number of options is extremely limited and mostly irrelevant. Even the heroes name must be selected from a predetermined list. Ultimately only the chosen super power ever comes into play beyond cosmetics.

The visual overlay is well conceived and thematically stays true to a classic comic book form which makes the super hero experience feel more familiar. The art for the heroes and villains is also done well in a very distinctly comic book style. The writing is similarly stylized and dialogue is packed with all the melodrama and one liners you might expect from a comic book. It feels though that the PowerPoint presentation that constitutes the entire game is all flash and no substance.

I get to pick a primary AND secondary color!?

 The story has almost zero continuity and the disjointed subplots are frequently left unresolved. In fact nothing about the narrative of this game is in any way satisfying. Even upon successfully navigating through the guess work and chance of an event the only rewards are hero points, which amount to zero in game value and are tabulated only at the end of the game as a score; or clues that might be useful in potential future events which the player may never even encounter.

There is also absolutely no skill involved in this game and only minor deductive reasoning. Combat consists of choosing one of three moves that deal more or less damage and are, respectively, more or less likely to hit. With nothing but chance and some basic arithmetic determining whether the hero or villain is victorious the battles begin to feel boring and repetitive. Even the farcical descriptions of attacks tire quickly, especially after they have appeared for the second or third time. Outside of combat the decisions made, for example stop an argument or investigate a commotion, must be made with limited to no prior information and occasionally dead end without warning as either a complete waste of time or outright death.

It takes a real hero to bite a radioactive dog in the knee

Due to the randomization of events and four selectable character powers the game does have an elevated replayability factor however frequently events will recur in subsequent playthroughs which forces the player to click through actions and narrative that they have already seen. This becomes more frustrating when a successful outcome that the player achieved in a previous playthrough is made impossible because a necessary event failed to occur earlier in the game. This leads to an overall sense of impotence as the games randomization element, and not the players own ability, is the primary factor in determining success or failure.

It’s painful to think how easily this could have been made into an enjoyable game, more painful even since that the game dangles the answer in front of the players face as if to say it wanted them to suffer. A map of Titan City, which highlights all the locations visited so far, is included in the menu. Had the world been opened to exploration the player would be free to uncover and pursue leads as they saw fit. By railroading the story, giving players only two or three options for progression at any juncture and exposing them to only certain, potentially uncorrelated, information and events, the developers at Tin Man sidestepped what could have been an exciting, deep and rewarding game.

Appointment with F.E.A.R. is an utter failure of a game. Players can expect to spend 15-20 minutes on each playthrough. While the game is designed, to a fault, to have a large amount of replay value it is unlikely that most players will have the fortitude to endure more than 3-4 adventures. The game sells for $5.99 but considering its major shortcomings there are plenty of better things to spend your time and money on.