Fear Factor: Unleashed Review

I don’t usually like reality television shows. Okay, that might be an understatement. I despise reality TV shows. One of the shows I never really understood was Fear Factor. It doesn’t have the slightest bit of reality in it. When was the last time you jumped out of a helicopter looking for some bright colored flags. What is worse about the show is that there should be no sense of fear in that show, because the creators already stated that the stunts are extremely safe (thus the reason why you never see anyone get seriously hurt). This show contradicts the basis of its genre and its title, yet game makers somehow see the potential money in making a game based on this show. Oh that’s right, it has good ratings.

This game is basically a collection of some very short mini-games. The gameplay is appalling. There are two game modes: practice and tournament. In practice, you pick one of the twelve stunts you must perform and try to do it well. All of the stunts are extremely easy and can be finished in less than a minute. They include eating bugs, flying helicopters, and escaping from chains.

In every stunt, you must control your “fear meter” before it goes too far left or too far right. You control it by using the L and R buttons. In tournament mode, you compete with five other people. Since your stunts do not take more than a minute, you must sit through all the AI stunts to lengthen the game. When you beat easy mode, you play normal mode, and finally hard mode. All this will take about an hour. By the time you finish easy mode though, you will probably be bored to death.

The graphics are pretty bad for a GBA game. The person you control looks like a blob of dark color. Super Mario Land 2: Six Golden Coins (a game on the original Game Boy), has better graphics than Fear Factor. The sound is even worse than the graphics. Besides listening to the game’s repeating “spooky” music over and over, you can hear yourself die or vomit from the stunts. Again, Mario Land 2 has a large variety of songs and sounds that are much more complex than Fear Factor.

Basically, at this site, when we say that there is ‘no replay value’ we only mean that if you cannot get through the first tournament or level due to boredom aided with less than an hour of gameplay. This game easily passes both requirements.

Terrible gameplay, atrocious graphics, nonexistent replay value, and the lack of pretty much everything else makes FF the worst GBA game I played this year. Which is worse: the show or the game? It really depends; I hate the show as well as the game. I know some people who like the show and hate the game. I couldn’t find a single person who hates the show and likes the game. Which is scarier: the show or the game? The game wins by a landslide simply because of the thought of someone trying to make a fun game out of such a show.