F.E.A.R. isn't Monolith's best work, it came out after Half-Life after all, the era when shooters started to take a turn towards the cinematic at the expense of gameplay when they weren't just tech demos to sell you graphic cards, like Far Cry literally was before Jewbisoft got their grubby French hands on that IP. Despite the game design in general of that era being flawed Monolith did deliver one of the highlights of the period, despite what zoomers who speedran growing a brain would
tell you, but who also think they know better than the greats of the past and mod in shitty weapon mods into old games like Unreal and Deus Ex. Every Doom troon modder suffer from the same brain damage, wrecking the carefully crafted weapon and enemy balance and design with meme bullshit and poorly made additions and changes until you got MooM Eternal.
The usual slurry-brain take you hear online about F.E.A.R. is that it's too easy, or that they heard the enemy AI was good and they're disappointed the clone soldiers you encounter in the game haven't achieved AGI yet and isn't solving math equations instead of flanking you. It's true that the game is easier than peak Monolith, but compared to the majority of shooters it's above average in how much the game demands of you, at least on the higher difficulties. If you'd take F.E.A.R. and remove the fancy graphics and turn up the difficulty to eleven you'd get Blood 2, and I don't see that many people who talk about how easy F.E.A.R. is singing the high praises of that.
What stands out about F.E.A.R. going back to it, beyond it being the cream of the crop of the post-HL2 period, is how absolutely crisp it is and how the lighting in the game gives just about any modern game a run for its money. Furthermore what quickly becomes apparent is just how fun it is to just shoot, and that's important in a spectacle shooter like this. It's like that thing Gaben was talking about.
The enemies reacting to what you're doing is just another part of what reinforces that sense of impact. This was also the last period in time before video games graphics totally shat the bed with convoluted ways to make the games demand ten times the hardware power to produce vastly inferior results until even mirrors in games became a rarity. The textures and lighting are crisp, there's a wonderful clean look to the game, and it's perfect for the chaos you're wrecking in the levels as your bullets and explosives toss things around, toss up dust, producing sparks when hitting metal. You might think that a game being carried to such a degree on visuals and effects would have aged poorly, but instead it is more akin to fine wine. The only thing that hasn't aged great is that we no longer consider tiny ghost girls scary but the scares falling flat doesn't prevent them from contributing to the ambience and mood of the game. It's in some ways a spiritual Blood 3 in ways of theming, whereas Blood was a shooter reflecting the horror landscape of the 90's, F.E.A.R. brings you the 00's The Ring era horror, for better or worse.
It's unfair to compare it to the golden period of shooters, the Build era was a faint memory and the great 90's edge fully 3D shooters in the vein of Quake and Quake 2 had been sent to an early grave by Half-Life, and Half-Life 2 had come out the year before. So what did F.E.A.R. compete with? In 2005 you might enjoy the console assfuck that was Project: Snowblind, a rebranded Deus Ex spinoff for the Xbox. Or how about Area-51, remember that classic? No? Maybe the Halo-killer Pariah? The Polish tour de force, Chrome SpecForce? Perhaps you miss Caleb and would go for Darkwatch on the Xbox or PS2? I had fun with it, but when you put F.E.A.R. next to
it becomes apparent how fucking delusional the niggers shitting on it are.
It's not like all games of the period were irredeemable, but the only people making proper PC shooters were underfunded Slavs, and they weren't even free from the Gaylo curse. Croteam blessed us with Serious Sam II, the forbidden entry in the series, that year. Then you had id Software being a shell of its former self, producing tech demos like the System Shock 2 wannabe Doom 3 earlier, and now we got a Quake 4 trying to play catch-up with Half-Life 2. The only thing people remember about that game was an in-engine cutscene of you getting troonshumaned in first person POV. If you wanted something made for PC first that wasn't just a tech demo you'd be stuck with budget titles like Vivisector or ÜberSoldier, you could do worse as current indies have shown us, mind you, but the genre peak was over. F.E.A.R. was a bit of a last holdout, one of the last shooters made first and foremost for PC that kept the focus on the action, were tightly crafted and did the genre justice, and gave it a nice sendoff, just like Prey (2006) did years later. Consoles and overly cinematic and gimmicky shooters like Half-Life 1&2 dealt the first blows, then came a big focus on always online shit, lootboxes, crafting, open-world slop, and the rest of current trends that have kept the PC FPS singleplayer campaign in a deep grave, until indies tried to frankenstein something together to varying degrees of mostly failures but one or two success stories.