Appointment with F.E.A.R. Review

I never thought that if I ever get the chance to become a super hero, my name would be Mad Amazing, but this just happened during my first playthrough with Tin Man Games’ Appointment with F.E.A.R. – the latest gamebook from the Fighting Fantasy series released available on iPhone and iPad. And although Mad Amazing’s superhero career was an extremely short lived one and he ended up as a FEAR agent himself after just a few days of playing (and almost without a job), the game itself provided a thrilling experience, one that I can’t wait to repeat and take further during my next playthrough.

Created as an interactive graphic novel, Appointment with F.E.A.R. sends you straight into the bowels of Titan City and challenges you to keep it safe from the villains lurking its streets and, most importantly, discover the location of a top-secret F.E.A.R. meeting and capture its leader, the Titanium Cyborg. Not the easiest job of them all when you have pesky crime to fight at the same time and tons of options to make, never knowing which is the best.

It’s exactly the choices that you have to make, from creating your character and having to choose your special traits and look, to deciding what are your next moves and actions, it’s all the mystery of the unknown and the “what ifs” that make this game so amazing. Combining it with some great writing and awesome art work, you get from Appointment with F.E.A.R. an incredibly satisfying experience, one that will get you back to its virtual pages on multiple occasions to try different approaches and choose different routes. No new game will be the same, and that’s a pretty good thing for a title that’s just $2.99 on the App Store.

The gameplay is based on an already classic “read and tap” mechanic, in which you decide the next moves at key moments during the gameplay. You also collect clues as you play, clues that might and should help you easily solve various encounters with the villains. There are hidden achievements that you unlock while playing, as well as Trading cards that you can collect throughout the game, all of these being sweet bonuses to the overall experience.

So if you’re a fan of Steve Jackson’s gamebooks and you have enjoyed the Fighting Fantasy series as a kid (or, why not, an adult), you will surely love the iOS version of Appointment with F.E.A.R. I sure did and I would wholeheartedly recommend it to every human being on this planet. Just don’t choose the Mad Amazing name, please. It’s mine!

There’s a bit of Appointment with F.E.A.R. gameplay below that you can check out (might have some minor spoilers, but it’s just the first 12 minutes of the game), but you’re probably better off heading over to the App Store and downloading the game for yourself: