Fear: Extraction Point is the first expansion pack and once again sees us take on the role of Pointman directly after the events of the base game. For reasons I won’t spoil in case anyone has yet to complete the original, we find ourselves having crash-landed into a building on our helicopter that was supposed to take us to safety. Separated from the rest of our team, we need to both find something to defend ourselves with and rejoin our squad in the hopes of another extraction effort. One thing you will immediately notice is the change of tone in the atmosphere of the environments. They have a far more foreboding and dreary feel to them in comparison to the base game’s mostly dull, gray areas. Horror plays a much more significant role here than it did previously. Thanks to the events that occurred in our last journey, the supernatural aspects have been amplified and are far more extreme in nature and deadly.
Our objective is certainly not trying to clean up this now possibly insurmountable mess. From start to finish, we are just trying to survive and come to grips with how little you actually accomplished your first time around these now destroyed areas. We are left to ponder all of these things for quite some time in relative peace while we try to make our way out of the building, until we reach a perch overlooking the street and see scores of Replica soldiers standing there motionless. It is an unnerving thing to then walk past the same now helpless enemies you’ve spent so much time exchanging gunfire in countless life or death battles. This is also the perfect time to practice your melee skills on these human-shaped punching bags because much like the situation around you, these same hollow soldiers will be far deadlier than ever before in due time.
A new addition to complement the theme of being stranded in a dead, hostile city is the ability to break open crates to search for either guns or medkits. These have a unique texture and are often next to other nonbreakable containers, making finding one a real treat for the intentive players, though they are by no means necessary. Much like the base game, there will always be a ton of medkits around to encourage bolder gameplay. They are much more needed this time around, however. Not only do your health points not carry over, meaning you will have one hundred hitpoints instead of the two hundred you likely had by the end of the base game, but the fights are significantly more difficult. Having rightly assumed you have already played through the last campaign, they take off the gloves from the get-go and force you to put everything you’ve learned to good use. The areas you will fight in are far more open, leaving you more likely to get flanked and having to stay on the move to avoid that.
Your enemies are not only more numerous, their very AI has been improved. The AI in the original is still revered to this day for its dynamic thinking and effectiveness, so you can just imagine what you will be up against. Like your health, your slow-motion meter has also been reverted to its original state, making you objectively weaker than ever before. To offset this, you will have access to Fear’s big guns much more often than you ever previously did to even the odds. These high powered weapons you rarely used before are joined by two new guns. The first is a laser-rifle that shoots a continuous beam that decimates most foes with its pinpoint precision stream of fiery death. Your second newcomer is the minigun, which as you may imagine, tears through soldiers and ammo at an incredible rate, though its recoil does make it difficult for long-range usage. So you have beefier firepower, more enemies to use them on, better arenas to fight in, and less starting health. This expansion makes a hell of an immediate impression.
To help you control the flow of battles in these more extensive areas, they also introduce portable automatic turrets. These will attack any enemy in sight and due to their tiny profile, are quite a difficult target to hit. You can carry up to three and are thrown pieces of equipment, allowing you to toss one into the battlefield from the safety of cover. Not only that, but they also stick to surfaces, meaning that you can place them wherever you please. They are relatively rare in comparison to your other equipment, which may be for the best as they are honestly overpowered. It is thankfully also more infrequent still that an enemy uses them, since dealing with one is quite the pain. Speaking of the enemies, they too have some new variants among them, mostly in the supernatural side that will gladly kill both Replica and yourself alike. The Replica’s main strength still lies in their tactics and possess far more of their heavy-hitting units, such as mechs.
The environments appear to be far more destructible this time around, fitting these considerably more bombastic fights like a glove. Entire pillars can now crumble under the might of you and your enemies exchanging overkill explosive firepower. Your tougher armored foes that once only wielded Penetrator rifles, now have access to the same triple burst rocket launcher that you do. This mad exchange of deadly and inaccurate ordinance as the world crumbles around you make for some truly memorable moments. One hit is all it takes to do you in, and you’ll be glad when you just take splash damage from a nearby exploding car, as you then use your slow motion to reload and dodge the next barrage. These are the type of fights you are in for throughout, and they are glorious. They do a really good job of mixing things up throughout this five-hour adventure and do not overuse the enemies that can kill you with a single shot, which could have easily turned into a huge negative.
Armored Replica soldiers can break through walls to get the jump on you, though those moments are entirely scripted, so that form of ambush is sadly a non-threat in future playthroughs as you know exactly where they will occur. Unarmored grunt enemies can also occasionally wield guns they never previously had, such as the laser-rifle. That makes paying attention to what’s in their hands and prioritizing foes more vital as you can be in for a nasty surprise if you let them get a shot in assuming they are “merely” wielding a machine-gun or shotgun like usual. All of this high powered weaponry is all well and good, though with the addition of more cool new guns, it further highlights the faults of having a three weapon limit. Balancing between weapons is something I found much more difficult this time around due to so many of them now being common. I frequently found myself with really unoptimal combinations as I did not want to give up a powerful one in case I need it later.
No weapon is useless. Even your humble pistols are a force to be reckoned with in the right hands. In fact, conventional weapons are a superior option when dealing with supernatural forces. Unlike the Replica, you can’t necessarily tell when they are truly a threat or just a hallucination that just tricked you into wasting valuable ammo of your overkill weapon. Their nature of hunting you requires a more moderate response. Its two most common forms of threats are Nightmares and Shades. Nightmares are spirit-like entities that appear out of rifts and can only take very little damage before they vanish. Their danger comes in the sheer amount that arise at any one time, and despite only being able to melee, it will take a good chunk of health in a single swipe if you let them get that close. Shades are also melee-based and much like the Replica Assassins, are nearly completely invisible. The main difference is they remain invisible when they attack, or you damage it. An explosive weapon is less than helpful when you barely manage to spot it when it is a few feet away, while on the other hand, a Railgun is not useful against a horde of Shades.
Every firearm has their uses making the three weapon limit that much more of a problem. One moment you may be fighting off helicopters, and soon after, you may find yourself having to deal with ghosts using the same small armament in entirely different situations. The original did not suffer from this as it wasn’t until near its end did the supernatural aspects start becoming dangerous. On the bright side, this unpredictability of your well being does make scares much more effective. The original had a few memorable moments, though Extraction Point blows it out of the water in that regard thanks to all limits now being removed to their power. It is still an action game at its heart, but thankfully now its horror aspects no longer fall flat and will actually give you a sense of unease. The story remains quite interesting too, and the characters finally come into their own. Your squadmates were around during the base game, yet I for the life of me could not recall either of their names even if I just finished it before jumping into this expansion pack.
This is no longer the case. I very clearly remember them this time around as they have received significantly more screen-time thanks to the entire plot revolving around merely escaping this catastrophic situation with the two of them. Not only that, but they actually fight alongside you and are not entirely useless NPCs that only show up for a split-second while you do everything like last time. Here comes the kicker though. All of the events in this expansion pack are no longer canon and have been retconned in Fear 2. It is such a shame as this lore had so much potential, and its replacement was less than stellar, to put it nicely. That doesn’t take away how memorable your mission through this expansion pack will be. I would not let the fact that it is no longer considered canon take away from how brilliant it is overall. It is a rare case in where I consider an expansion better than the base game and is something you should not skip over.
Extraction Point is not perfect, however. It sadly has one rather large technical issue when you finish Interval 3, and it tries to load the fourth. When you reach that point, it will take you to the main menu and give you an error message saying you have been disconnected from the server. That is not the real issue, the servers have long since died, and we are playing single player even if they weren’t. The problem lies with something about this level that causes the game to think that your GPU doesn’t have enough VRAM. Turn the texture resolutions to minimum in the options to fix this issue. You will have to play the entirety of this level like this. Otherwise, your frame-rate will be in the single digits. This is not a deal-breaker by any means, but it certainly sucks that it picked such a good level to begin having issues. It is contained solely to the fourth Interval, every other ran without any problems.
All in all, this was a fantastic experience. It took everything you loved about the original and improved upon it. From the horror, the previously boring characters, and dull gray environments. It vigorously fixed up most of its previous issues. Considering this wasn’t even the same developers that made the base game, it makes this all the more remarkable. Heck, they even went so far as to allow explosives to blow open doors. That means if you hear an enemy beforehand, you can get to a good vantage point, toss a grenade, and get some good shots in before they can react to this sudden turn of events. It is just those type of minor details that they inexplicably decided to add in which shows they were clearly passionate about this IP and what they were doing. Extraction Point is what I consider to be the high point of the entire series and features a journey that is more than worth the attention of anyone that enjoyed Fear.
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