FEAR on the CheapBox

So how does the demo of Monolith's latest, greatest engine run on a computer valued less than $500? Not bad, actually. F.E.A.R. (which I still think if you name your unit something like that, you're just asking for trouble) auto-detected the video settings to be fairly medium, 800x600 with medium details but no AA. That proved to be slightly optimistic. The framerate seemed mostly OK, but just that slight sluggish that can give one a headache from staring. So I reduced the shadowing from trilinear to bilinear and the shaders to minimal, and it seemed to run just dreamy after that. Clearly not going to drop any jaws compared to a $2,000 rig ... but still plenty pretty.

I didn't get too far into the demo. Died once, went on to Guild Wars. I will go back and try it again, it's definately got some potential. The engine is quite nice and they definately got some spooky going on, but I was finding the enemy AI to be very odd at times, almost like I was chasing frantic children rather than trained supersoldiers.