F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin - TV Tropes

F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin is a First-Person Shooter, developed by Monolith Productions and published by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment. It was released in February 2009 on Windows, Playstation 3, and Xbox 360. It is the second game in the F.E.A.R. series, and a direct sequel to 2005's F.E.A.R. First Encounter Assault Recon, ignoring the latter's two expansion packs, which were made by a different developer.

Starting just before the end of the previous game, the player controls a Delta Force operative named Michael Becket, who is sent to capture Genevieve Aristide, CEO of Armacham Technology. Things get worse. Becket undergoes a brutal surgery and experimentation that leaves him a target for Alma, who hunts him down while he himself tries to evade ATC troops and Replica soldiers in order to destroy Alma for good.

A Downloadable Content pack, F.E.A.R. 2: Reborn was released in September 2009. In this DLC, the player controls a Replica called Foxtrot 813, who goes rogue after an encounter with the ghost of Paxton Fettel, slaughtering his entire squadron while hallucinating that they are dangerous creatures trying to kill him.

The third and final game in the series, F.E.A.R. 3, was released in 2011.

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Tropes in this game:

• Abandoned Hospital: Once the "tutorial level" is done with, the game properly starts off in such an environment. Until it becomes clear it's not "abandoned" so much as "hastily evacuated" and the guys they're running from are knocking on the door. Plus, as a bonus, it gets subverted when it turns out the entire hospital is itself underground with a fake holographic skyline, presumably to fool all the patients into thinking they're in a normal hospital.
• Artificial Outdoors Display: The hospital where Becket wakes up after being given his Second Hour Super Power turns out to have this; it's an underground complex with a holographic skyline outside the "windows".
• Attempted Rape: Any time Becket has to fight Alma hand-to-hand. The ending, unfortunately, makes it successful rape.
• The Bad Guy Wins: Aristide accomplishes all of her objectives - using Becket as bait to lure Alma to Still Island and trap the both of them, letting her use that as leverage to try to get her job back - and Alma ends the game pregnant with who is essentially the Anti-Christ.
• Beehive Barrier: The Power Armor and Elite Power Armor units have these as energy shields, while the Replica Assassins have their invisibility shield look like this.
• Body Armor as Hit Points: Played straight here, in contrast to the first game. Only a couple of enemy weapons can piece armor at all.
• Cloud Cuckoolander: Terry Halford who, in the middle of explaining how to survive Alma's rampage, goes off on a brief tangent about hippos and how, when they fight, "they fling shit everywhere."
• Cluster F-Bomb:
  • Colonel Vanek. To quote his words when you fight him:

  "FUCKFUCKBITCHFUUCKBITCHBITCHFUCKYOUFUCKFUCK".

  • One of the intel items shows Snake Fist getting in on it during his IM conversations:

    SnakeFist says: ... Anyway, did you see my conclusions? You know, the part where it says PROBABILITY OF SUCCESS: 3% / PROBABILITY OF CATASTROPHIC SIDE EFFECTS: 84%
    [Your status is now set to Away.]
    SnakeFist says: Bitch
    SnakeFist says: bitchbitchbitchbitchbitchbitch

• Damn You, Muscle Memory!: F.E.A.R. 2 makes a few changes to the default control scheme, including that the previous crouch key on PC is now set to sprinting. The input for the sliding kick has likewise changed, simply requiring you to press the melee button while sprinting rather pressing melee shortly after crouching.
• Depth of Field: Used a great deal, particularly while aiming, to make the camera focus on what the character is notionally looking at.
• Diegetic Interface: In-universe, the HUD is projected onto Becket's Cool Shades. The HUD as such goes missing in one occasion where they're removed, and getting hit by attacks with an EMP effect shorts it out temporarily.
• Double Entendre: The final level of Project Origin is called "Climax." Guess what Alma does in that level. Even better, the Interval that level is a part of is named "Union".
• Evil Counterpart: The final battle against Keegan. Well, not so much evil as succumbing to The Virus, but he has the same powers as you do (plus the ability to clone himself!) and are more or less in the same boat, so it seems to count.
• Fashionable Asymmetry: The Replica Elites in this game have noticeably heavier armor on the left side of their bodies.
• Gainax Ending: The game ends with a literal Mind Screw and pregnancy.
• Grand Theft Me: Paxton Fettel's plan for Foxtrot 813, or, in short, you, in Reborn.
• Happy Place: The recurring hill, tree, and swingset in Project Origin is the closest thing Alma has to one. You come across it in Project Origin: it's small, sad and sits in the corner of a small concrete ditch. If you walk up to the swingset, Alma appears right behind you without any of the interface screw that is associated with hallucinations.
• The Immodest Orgasm: Alma lets out highly distorted cries of pleasure while raping Becket at the end of the game. It's distinctly unsexy.
• I Have You Now, My Pretty: Once Alma's lured to Beckett while he's strapped into the Amplifier, she leans in for a kiss, and the subsequent boss battle is cut with her assaulting Beckett while he's indisposed in order to have his kids.
• Infinity +1 Sword: The Pulse Weapon can turn an entire room full of enemies into crispy skeletons with one shot... and you only get fifteen shots in the entire game.
• Interface Screw: Your interface glasses act weird whenever Alma is around or you run into a EMP grenade.
• Kansas City Shuffle: The background material reveals that the entire ordeal Becket goes through in Project Origin is all planned by Genevieve Aristide to distract Alma so Genevieve's goons can retrieve and weaponize the Point Man.
• Leitmotif: Alma gets a rather touching one in this game, which serves as its main music theme. The ATC faction, in particular Colonel Vanek, have a 4-note militant trumpet one.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: In Project Origin, it's said that all communication in and out of Fairport has been cut off. It's left ambigious if the blackout is a result of the Origin facility explosion or something to do with Alma.
• Mercy Kill: Keegan finally regains himself briefly during the last fight and begs Becket to put him out of his misery, which, if the player succeeds in the QTE, Becket obliges with a pistol shot to the temple.
• Mood Whiplash: Latin chanting begins as you make your assault on the Amplifier, slaying dozens of Replica in your last ditch effort to destroy Alma, then you get in the APC and shoot a bunch of Replicants with the heavy machine gun to almost comical heavy metal, along with one of your squaddies cheering you on, yelling such taunts as "I hear bullets taste like chicken!" and "Sit the FUCK down!", and then it swings straight back into Alma mind raping you.
• Musical Spoiler: The scare chords seem to give away more scares than they create in this game. Not that the first game and especially the expansions didn't have their own issues with scare chords accompanying scares that you just plain can't see from where they're triggered from.
• Online Alias: Snake Fist. There are also four intel items across the game showing that Genevieve Aristide's is "Mme_ATC".
• Out with a Bang: This is pretty much what happens if Becket dies trying to fend Alma off hand-to-hand. It is implied that the Telesthetic Amplifier's enhancing of Becket's psychic power is the only thing that lets him survive being raped by Alma at the end of the game.
• The Password Is Always "Swordfish": "The password should be... Snakefist." Told to you by the guy who is using "Snakefist" as his alias. And Snakefist also happens to in universe be the title of a movie series so popular it has at least seven movies in it.
• People Puppets: The "Remnant" boss enemies. Well, more like zombie-puppets, but same effect.
• Pet the Dog: Genevieve Aristide keeps Alma's music box in her apartment to remind herself of just how guilty she is.
• Powered Armor: The Elite Powered Armor. Much bigger than the REV6 suits you had to fight in the previous game, and packing even more firepower. You get to use one yourself in two levels.
• Rogue Agent: Foxtrot 813 in the Project Origin DLC campaign Reborn becomes this due to an Alma-induced hallucination that causes him to kill his squad.
• School for Scheming: Wade Elementary. Test subjects for TK become psychopaths. Then again, if you've played the first game, you should automatically know anything associated with the Wades is bad news.
• School Setting Simulation: Wade Elementary School is a seemingly normal abandoned elementary school, but secretly houses underground bio-research laboratories that experiment on children. When Dark Signal arrives, they must fight the vengeful Specters and Remnants that inhabit the building.
• Second Hour Superpower: Becket gets his Slow-Mo powers in the second level after his surgical operation, and Foxtrot 813 gets his after his first interaction with Paxton Fettel's ghost.
• Sequel Escalation: The first game had somewhat slow-paced combat and claustrophobic level design. This game ramps up the combat and setpieces, included a few open-air combat sequences, and even threw in two mecha-piloting sequences.
• Short-Range Long-Range Weapon: Averted. If you get close to an enemy sniper, they will drop their sniper rifle and draw a pistol.
• Slasher Smile: Once Alma has Beckett at her mercy and... the subsequent mating... she gives a creepy-assed smile after it's revealed she's pregnant.
• Stalker with a Crush: At some point during Project Origin, Alma goes from trying to kill Beckett to loving him after becoming fascinated with his ability to resist her psychic assaults, though it doesn't become apparent until later in the game.
• Stalker with a Test Tube: In addition to having an eldritch crush, Alma's other reason for being infatuated with Beckett is that she wants babies... and since he's able to resist her powerful abilities thanks to some experimentation from Armacham, he'll do nicely.
• Stopped Clock: All clocks are stopped as a result of the events of the first game.
• Superpowerful Genetics: Becket and Alma's kid apparently has inherited both of their powers, squared, seeing as it has developed the ability to speak before even being born.
• The Unfought: The game promises an incredible psychic battle between protagonist Michael Becket and Big Bad Alma. It doesn't happen. Instead, you get a somewhat anticlimactic Battle in the Center of the Mind with your Evil Counterpart, while Alma rapes your comatose body.
• Video Game Flamethrowers Suck: Zig-zagged all over the place. The Napalm Cannon will cause anyone you hit with it to burn to death with only one hit, but it has wonky hit detection, a relatively low rate of fire, and fairly mediocre damage that means it takes forever for enemies to actually die. The ammo's also extremely rare, starting with twenty shots in the first one you find and maybe two others much later in the game. Notably, F.E.A.R. 2: Reborn, which otherwise goes out of its way to give every weapon that the main game didn't make good use of a chance to shine, never once features the Napalm Cannon.
  • Ironically enough, the Napalm Cannon works better against more elite units like Replica Heavy Troopers and Elites, or Armacham Black Ops Elites and Heavy Soldiers, but not for the reasons you think. The weapon's ability to stun-lock and weaken via fire damage means that these hard-to-kill enemies are much more vulnerable for a coup-de-grace as they are unable to fire back with their powerful weapons. Moreover - and this is the most important point - enemies set on fire automatically drop their primary weapons. Even Abominations are very vulnerable in medium-range as they start to panic trying to put out the flames, making them incredibly easy to dispatch, although they will still attack at close-range. So as a support weapon, the Napalm Cannon does find its uses. Of course, other players may use it simply because enemies flail about in the most overly-dramatic way possible trying to put out the flames.
  • The weapon stops being funny when aimed directly back at the player either in campaign or in multiplayer however. A single shot with its damage-over-time is always a guarantee that 75% of either your health or armour (or both) will disappear. In multiplayer, a tactic that is often used is to hit the target with the Napalm Cannon with one shot, and then do a coup-de-grace with any other weapon. Weaker classes die outright, whilst heavier classes are at the mercy of being taken out with the next shot no matter what the enemy uses. The fire effect also means that the target could barely see anything as everything is illuminated.
• The Virus: Alma gets upgraded to this status, especially with regard to the members of your squad after they get subjected to the "Harbinger" treatment. And poor citizens of Fairport turned into ghosts or zombies.
• Yandere: Alma, towards Becket. Most of the "interactions" you have with her are to stave off her sexual advances, rather than her trying to kill you - not that it makes much difference. Several of your teammates and other enemies also get themselves Stripped to the Bone by her because they're endangering you or getting between you and her.

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