It must be extremely difficult to truly scare a person who wants to be scared. Sure, at a mechanical level, fear is an involuntary reaction to the perception of threat -- but it's hard to upgrade fear to deep, inexorable terror without the element of surprise. FEAR 3's capacity for terror has been telegraphed by two predecessors, executive credits for acclaimed horror-makers John Carpenter and Steve Niles ... and also, the game has "fear" in the title. With a combination like that, fear shouldn't just be feared -- it should be expected.

The most surprising thing about FEAR 3, however, is that those scares never come. For better and for worse, the franchise's latest outing has eschewed the horror classification in favor of a more action-packed, score-centric experience.