It is said that people never forget a bad experience, but have difficulty remembering the good times. The adage seems to apply to F.E.A.R., a first-person shooter released for the 360 back in 2006. While some fans still recall the game fondly for its expert execution of intense gun-battles and reactive enemy AI, for most people, F.E.A.R. was simply "that game that made you walk around inside boring office buildings for 10 hours”.

To their credit, this did not dissuade developer Monolith from planning a sequel. In fact, their enthusiasm remained unabated despite a change of publisher and losing the F.E.A.R. name momentarily to corporate shenanigans. It's now 2009, and Project Origin emerged as the unlikely labour of love from Monolith. Will F.E.A.R. 2 be just another bad memory you wish you could forget, or can it live on as a positive experience you have trouble remembering? Hmm...

F.E.A.R. 2 begins towards the end of the original game's timeline, just as the city is about to be decimated by Alma's telepathic spooge. You are thrust into the combat boots of one Delta Force squad member en-route to Armacham HQ to arrest its president, Genevieve Aristide, for her role in the events of the first game. However, the board of directors at ATC (Armacham Technology Corporation) have other plans – ones that involve Aristide talking to the muzzle of an assault rifle, rather than to the authorities.

If you are unfamiliar with the first game, you'll very likely find the premise of Project Origin almost impregnable as it is laden with acronyms and refers to previous events often. What could've been a gentle introduction to the world of F.E.A.R. through the viewpoint of a character with no knowledge of these events is foiled right away as your first literal step into the game is a mind-tripping hallucination of Alma that veterans of the series will be familiar with. And for much of the game you'll likely be left feeling as if you've missed school on the day they taught FEARonomy in class. The rub here, is of course that this is almost certainly intentional, as was with the previous game. This is a franchise that is content to withhold plot from you unless you are willing to piece it together somewhat by looking for intel discarded (perhaps aptly) like trash littered throughout the game.

While other games have used intel pick-ups to flesh out story backgrounds, in F.E.A.R. 2 if you're not prepared to have the story delivered almost exclusively through audio/text logs, you may as well give up on the plot entirely. What presented itself as a flawed storytelling attempt through exploration and item collection two years ago in F.E.A.R. now feels like a ten-tonne weight chained to an already bedridden cancer patient of a story. While a few pieces of intel do dispense with brief tid bits that allude to something interesting, most of them reiterate the same information way too much. How many pieces of intel does one need before we work out that evil tech company + school = experiments on children?

I also feel obligated to single out the game's load screens in between levels as the worst offender in lazy storytelling in a title of this pedigree. As if admitting that you'll be hard pressed to understand or care about what is going on in each of the game's 14 chapters (or intervals, to use the game's terminology), the game presents you with a few lines of text that describes the interval you just experienced. However, several times I caught the game patching in additional information by saying, for example, that someone told you something, and therefore you must go somewhere, when that didn't even happen in the game.

Needless to say, for those looking for Monolith to finally capitalise on the interesting premise of F.E.A.R. and tell a compelling sci-fi/supernatural tale, this isn't it. Even if all you are after is some closure, after being robbed of it the first time around, Project Origin is going to disappoint. Its poor excuse of a story falls to pieces way before the game attempts to wrap things up, and you are left with one of the biggest W.T.F. moments in gaming history for an ending.

It has been proven though, in both film and gaming, that one need not have a good or even coherent story to deliver some effective chills. Unfortunately, Monolith misfires here too. Where the horror in the first game stems from a well-paced one-two punch of dread and shock, F.E.A.R. 2 opts for a more highbrow approach. The game is so confident that its beautiful hallucinatory sequences and vision effects will unsettle you that it assaults you with a consistent barrage of them. This quickly becomes more of a nuisance than anything, especially because so little of it has any context. As a whole, the fear in F.E.A.R. 2 is atmospheric at best, with but a small handful of effectively creepy sequences that offer a glimpse of what the developer is capable of when they break from formula.

If I haven't drive you away already with my various disappointments with Project Origin, you may be glad to know that there's a silver lining in all this, so sip your lemonade and bear with me a while longer. I've always had an affinity for the Monolith brand of first-person action, and F.E.A.R. 2 is that at its absolute pinnacle. The game's combat is simply a perfectly balanced split of skill-based gunplay and slo-mo gore extravaganza. Regardless of your skill level, at no point in this game will you not feel like a badass action hero as you riddle your opponents with bullet holes and lay waste to entire squads of elite soldiers in glorious slow motion.

F.E.A.R. 2 achieves some of the most intense battle sequences in memory using a combination of expertly-crafted features. The combat works best in relatively confined quarters connected by corridors, and the enemy AI is fine-tuned to use the environments to full effect. Your opponents always arrive in teams and keep you on your toes as they weave between cover and jump over or crawl under obstacles to come at you. But when things seem overwhelming, you are encouraged to activate reflex (slow motion) mode at the press of a button to dispatch your foes with calculated precision and impunity.

The game also features one of the most satisfying arsenals I've ever wielded in any FPS, from your standard pistol, shotgun and assault rifles to some exotic weapons such as one that nails its hapless victims to the wall. While this may seem par for most shooters, what makes it special is the way these weapons sound, and how your enemies, and their surroundings react to your assault. All the weapons sound appropriately powerful as they're fired, and enemies will be flung backwards or double over as bullets strike them (if they haven't exploded into a bloody mist that is), and you can almost pinpoint the exact moment when their winds are knocked out of them. Walls and objects (although not enough of them) explode into small pieces and dust when struck, and it never fails to please when you wait for dust to settle at the end of a battle and take time to survey the damage. It's exaggerated, but is all the better for it.

As if fearing there's not enough carnage, F.E.A.R. 2 also introduces a few mech piloting sequences that puts you in the driver seat of a suit of ‘power armour' that is effectively a death-dealing robot. It's a welcome addition that allows you to blast the crap out of everything in sight in relative safety (as the suit regenerates if you keep out of action for a few seconds), but is obviously no afterthought either. The experience is so authentic and fully realised that it's easy to imagine it being developed into its own game.

Once you are done with the game's 8-10 hours of single player campaign, you can jump online and participate in a variety of multiplayer modes. These feel like a throwback to the yesteryear (2007 or so) of FPS online multiplayer – before the likes of Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead, and Call of Duty 4 arrived on the scene. All the usual modes are covered from deathmatches to flag capturing, and while the matches I participated in felt balanced and fun (thanks to some great level design that again, make great use of corridors to funnel firefights toward several hot zones) I can't it replacing any of the regular online multiplayer games being played over Xbox Live at the moment.

I have already touched on the presentation of F.E.A.R. 2 briefly, but it's worth reiterating that it looks and sounds phenomenal. The same complaint of having to traipse through samey-looking confined areas can be levelled at the game, but this time round the developers have done a far better job at making the levels feel naturalistic rather than a deviously constructed maze to keep office workers trapped inside in perpetuity. Also, once you move past the first few intervals, the game presents some breathtaking set pieces that will have you stopping to marvel at your surroundings.

As much as I have criticised the supernatural sequences in the game, it's also easy to understand why it's shoved in your face all the time. Monolith has mastered the art of seamlessly transporting you between its carefully constructed drab reality and hauntingly beautiful scenes of fantasy. And while you may scratch your head over the context of some of the less human enemies you encounter, they move so believably that there's no mistaking that they belong in the universe of F.E.A.R.