9 Video Game Franchises That Never Beat Their First Instalment

4. F.E.A.R.

Speaking of horror, Monolith's take on blending super slow-mo, goretastic first-person shooting with all-out white knuckle jump-scares was one for the ages.

The original F.E.A.R. is its namesake incarnate, seeing you sever limbs and take down enemy guards in a blaze of bullets one minute, only to climb a ladder and have a zombified child staring at you from the shadows the next. Enemy A.I. was also stellar, forcing you to stay on the move, meaning you had to engage whatever lay around the corner or was right in front of you.

It's this sense of pure cerebral engagement that made the first instalment so recommendable, both to action and horror fans alike. For F.E.A.R. 2, while it's still a phenomenally playable game, by virtue of being a backstory that favours action over immersion and tension, it largely lost a lot of that appeal.

F.E.A.R. 3 then went down the all-out action route, embracing the co-op zeitgeist of the time and putting an emphasis on supernatural player powers to get through levels. Being given to a different dev team, Day 1 Studios, this trilogy still has a great identity, but it's the premiere instalment that always comes out on top.