O boi. What the hell happened here? Oh, studio change. Makes sense.

Ok so where do I start? It departs from the original 2 games almost entirely. Names and characters are F.E.A.R., the plot is F.E.A.R. -ish but is it a F.E.A.R.? No. I feel someone just wanted to make a Modern Warfare clone with some spooki stuff going on. There's even a firefight through what looks like a favella just like in a Modern Warfare game! Ugh. No, this is not what I was expecting. I just played through all 3 one after another and this is the end I get!?

Credit where credit is due, the game looks great. Clean graphics, great looking environments and plenty of gruesome imagery. Corpses, gore, exploding people all is still looking as good as the previous games.

Now where the problems start rubbing me the wrong way, and there's a decent amount.

Firstly the story. We are the 1st games protagonist again! How? They state in the 2nd game the 1st recon team sent in was torn to shreds and we all know how the 1st game ended as well. Fine, they do a sorta decent job at tying this game into the main canon but it seems very shoe horned in. Alma has gone full world destroying Deity at this point and is tearing the city to pieces with her psychic shock-waves and you are gonna go stop her. The story has not changed much.

Weapons. You can only carry 2. TWO!? 1st game gave us 3 and the 2nd gave us 4, they went backwards! 2 weapons is very limiting. Not to mention your melee options have also fallen to... Knife. We could previously gun butt peoples faces in with anything. Now we get generic slice animation with an occasional back stab, which we barely get because once spotted you are hunted and there's no way to sneak behind someone.

Enemies & Gun play. They are all aimbotting you into oblivion. You poke your head out for a second and you get pin cushioned. Blind firing enemies hit you dead on every time. You can even be hit while behind low cover! Considering the whole game is basically forcing you to move cover to cover (way more than the previous games), how is it fair to give the enemy perfect aim and can hit you in cover... Oh they also grenade spam you and when you move you get rinsed. Maybe I just suck at FPS games but I don't think I'm that s**t. Oh, one thing that's different and improved. Head-shots actually mean something! Enemies will die to head-shots for a change.

Previous sequences make a return with you piloting a couple of mechs, a small and big one. This happens a few times but don't stand out in any significant way. I can't actually remember if there was a turret section and I just finished the game an hour ago... See how forgettable and generic this is.

The game as a whole. The game runs on some new never before seen in F.E.A.R. point system. WHY? It has you absorbing corpses and collecting points through little achievements like pick up X amount of loot or kill X people with X weapon. I didn't understand the point of this. Until I saw whenever you finish a level with the main Protagonist you can change Character to another person (it's a small spoiler so i won't state who). If you play the game multiplayer the points basically determine who's ending you see at the end of the game: good or bad depending on who gets more points. In single player this doesn't matter at all. Ok, it give you levels an unlocks tiny bonuses. Otherwise you can get ending by just playing the last level with either character. The team would have been used their time better making the game work rather than adding this system.

I think I've harped on long enough. The game isn't horrible or unplayable, far from it. It's a totally fine generic shooter with some creepy elements. It's not F.E.A.R. and that's where my beef lies. It's an unsatisfactory end to an otherwise great franchise. I'm going to have to give this 2 ratings:
As a game about shooting things and some spoopy stuff: 5/10. Average.
As a final edition to F.E.A.R.: 3/10. Big sad.

As always, the only time I would hit the Thumbs Down or not recommend, is if the game is absolute ass, broken or completely unplayable. All games deserve a shot, someone has busted their ass to make them and it's not them who chose to ruin the stuff below (that was upper management).