FEAR

There was pure fear in his face and his lips kept forming the words no, no, please. Wade almost left my field of view as suddenly the girl appeared at the other end of the glass panel. Alma Wade. She walked towards Harlan, her hair covering her face and her dress soaked in blood.

(Quote translated from German.)

F.E.A.R., that dark and grimy action-shooter full of gore, horror tropes, and bullet-time from 2005 was one of my favorite games as a teenager and definitely had an impact on my developing tastes in terms of genre fiction. Even on a revisit earlier this year, the game still mostly held up as a fun over-the-top shooter, even if the scary aspects showed its age.
But when I found out that some German guy wrote a novelization of this game, I had to hunt it down and see what that was all about. For a while I thought it might have been an official piece of merch too but now that I've made my way through it, I have some hard doubts about that. This really just seems like someone decided to write this soft fanfiction and sell it without any second thoughts about grammar or copyright infringement. But it's out there. It just got “re-released” on Amazon Kindle in March of 2023 and is still available now as I'm writing this review.

Anyway, this book roughly spins a plot about the story bits of the first game. Towards the end, it also briefly throws in at least one location from the second game.
It's not like the actual story of these games was ever very strong or sensical to begin with since it's the corny horror atmosphere and blazing shooter action that actually made those games popular. So, putting it down in text doesn't really do too much. To be fair, there are enough little bits and pieces of cold, bloody tech-horror in this franchise that I could totally see a skilled writer flesh them out and put them together as a genuinely captivating and effective written story. But Dominik Kristen isn't that.
His writing, for the most part, is very flat, riddled with corny clichés and, the further you make it into the book, with grammatical errors. Honestly, if it's the boring writing, it's the frequent typos and missing punctuation that made this book a slog to get through.
But the story also takes a good while to actually get to the core elements of the franchise that one probably expects. The first half of the book reads mostly like dull literary fiction of an ex-cop with a troubled background trying to get a new job and fixing his relationship with an ex-girlfriend. That subplot with the ex-girlfriend especially takes up so much time of this otherwise rather short book and is absolutely filled to the brim with dull romance tropes. When I decided to read a book based on a horror game where you spend most time blasting enemies into pieces of gore with a shotgun in slow-motion, I didn't expect to go through cheesy romance babble and a clunky 10-page sex scene.

When it finally actually gets to the elements of the game, it becomes at least somewhat more interesting. The shootouts can be relatively fun, though that doesn't say much. I was more entertained by how the author attempted to implement some gaming elements into the story.
For example, the game is filled with optional pieces of lore by listening to answering machines in the office environments. The author stops to point out all the answering machines at several points in the book with the protagonist having the odd urge to listen to them without it ever being used for anything actually substantial. It's never an organic subject and it gave me a good chuckle when I realized what the author was referencing.
It was also an interesting experience to read the protagonist, for a while, take account of every single magazine and bullet he took from killed enemies as if one would be picking ammunition from the bodies in a shooter game.
And although the protagonist's path is quite different in this book than the player's in the game, there are some scenes here that are basically one-to-one retellings of previously existing pieces of F.E.A.R. media. For example, I immediately recognized when a chapter started to describe the scene from one of the bonus video that came with the Gold Edition of the game which scared the heck out of me when I was a kid. It was funny revisiting it this way.

All of that doesn't make up for how dull and rough the rest of the book is though. It took me a lot longer to get through this than I expected. And now that I'm done, I cannot believe the author didn't include the infamous shotgun or the iconic nail gun from these games. Two of the most essential objects in this franchise and arguably two of the most remembered weapons in the FPS genre.
This really wasn't very good and at this point, I wish I could ask the author about how this even became a thing. What drove them to write this? But I guess I'll never know.