Another mediocre game, another awesomely misleading poster.
- Similarly to Frankenstein of older times, Professor Bloodheart believes that by the use of genetic engineering, he can manipulate creatures to become his allies in his quest for world domination.
He has installed himself within a dark and complex tower of secret rooms and passages guarded by the unfortunate mutations of his experiments.
Captured by Professor Bloodheart, you have escaped from his clutches.
Your mission is to fight your way through hordes of his mutants even onwards towards your final confrontation with the Mad Professor himself...
Fears is a 1995 First-Person Shooter developed by a French Demoscene group Bomb Software for the Amiga 1200 (and later the Amiga CD32), with the engine being derived from their earlier 3D demo, published by Attic in Germany and Manyk Software in the UK, and like many 90s FPS at the time, a blatant Doom clone.
Professor Bloodheart, a Mad Scientist, has abducted you and kept you in his dungeons. Intending to transform you into part of his monster army, you managed to escape, obtain weapons, and proceed to battle your way out.
Not to be confused with First Encounter Assault Recon, also known as F.E.A.R. in singular.
Prepare to meet thy doom.
- 1-Up: You collect extra lives, in the form of a blue "1up". They're usually located out of reach and needs some extra effort to pick up, like the first one on an islet around a lava pool.
- Alien Blood: The oversized, head-like mutants bleeds green or purple. Although the humanoid ones which resembles midgets does bleed red.
- Bottomless Pits: The levels tend to be packed with pits of harmful liquids, and a lot of them tend to be inescapable. This makes navigating through narrow beams or even descending from stairs feel daunting, not helped with the narrow field of view and an inability to look down.
- Chainsaw Good: Your best melee weapon for slicing up mutants at close range is a chainsaw, of the circular variety.
- Covers Always Lie:
- Most of the game's promotional materials (including the German release cover above) depicts the player(s) battling scary-looking, reptilian giant monsters, when in actual gameplay the monsters look... less than impressive. You fight some detached heads, Little Green Men-type midgets, a few tentacled creatures or otherwise humanoid-looking enemies, none of them being even near as scary or threatening-looking as the one pictured above.
- Additionally, the same poster sees you in a space-suit and fighting on what appears to be another planet, implying this to be a sci-fi themed game. In actuality you spend the whole game indoors within a maze-like dungeon. (The overworld map in between levels states the dungeon looks like sort of a Creepy Cathedral)
- Cut and Paste Environments: The stages' layouts, environments, corridors, floors and whatever interiors can be counted on one hand, and you'll quickly - very quickly - be tired of seeing the same room or tunnel, again and again.
- Drone of Dread: A lot of the levels tend to feature this in their ambient soundtrack, in a way that can be considered a borderline poor man's precursor to Doom 64.
- Evilutionary Biologist: Professor Bloodheart, the Mad Scientist responsible for creating all the genetic mutants and sending them to abduct people, from that we see in the intro.
- Excuse Plot: Even for a Doom clone, the plot doesn't go very deep. The opening Info Dump fills in the entire story and leave you to kick ass.
- Face on the Cover: The cover for the english release
is almost nothing but a close-up of some pissed of guy's face with Hellish Pupils, with the title and flames at the bottom. It's a bit less misleading compared to the German cover. - Fake Difficulty: Put it this way; the game's stiff POV makes it a migraine to avoid getting hit by onscreen projectiles, and enemies can - and will - constantly decimate your health before you can even see them. Walking on narrow ledges and stairs will lead to you getting stuck in a corner half of the time, and combine that with having enemies swarming all over you lead to some pretty quick deaths.
- Falling Damage: Dropping into a deep enough pit will cause damage to your health.
- Gatling Good: The Machinegun weapon is modeled after a chaingun.
- Game-Over Man: Run out of lives and you'll be treated to a surprisingly chilling shot of a group of mutants - basically all the game's recurring enemies - descending upon you, as dark, dreary, ominous music plays in the background.
- Lava Pit: Shows up in a few areas, where you'll need to avoid falling into or lose a life.
- Little Green Men: If your enemies are not gigantic heads on spindly legs, they're green-skinned midgets in blue jumpsuits.
- Living Structure Monster: The Final Boss is a wall texture monster in a similar vein to the Icon of Sin from Doom II, although it repeatedly shoots out projectiles rather than spawn other aliens (the other aliens instead guard the rooms with the resources, and you'd certainly need those resources.)
- Names to Run Away from Really Fast: The main villain, Dr. Bloodheart.
- The Maze: The whole game's layout of Bloodheart's lair is shaped like one of these. The opening credits even has an "Edit Maze" option.
- Misidentified Weapons: The game manages to invert this with your starting rifle, as it's modeled after a double barreled shotgun (because after Doom II your 90s FPS had to had one) but works more like a rifle, as not only it is accurate but not as powerful as you would expect from a double barreled shotgun, it shares ammunition with the Machine Gun.
- Plasma Cannon: You can collect one called a Plasma Gun, who serves as one of the game's better non-automatic weapon with burning plasma making short work of mutants.
- Rule of Three: One of the ways the developers designed their engine to fit the confines of the stock Amiga 1200s is limiting the amount of enemy types loaded per level up to three, with the encountered roster varying per level. Most of them still behave rather similarly to each other.
- Tech-Demo Game: For all of its faults, the developers certainly tried to code a Doom-like game with multi-level architecture for the machine not known for its 3D capability.
- Universal Ammunition: The machinegun shares the same ammunition with the rifle.
- Waddling Head: Most of the mutant monsters are gigantic heads on spindly legs that waddles towards you, with the red ones being the first and most common goomba.
