My opinion on FEAR was this: certainly a fun game with good game play, and I personally like the ending. Then again, I'm not crazy about bosses. I don't understand the concept of making a game that plays one way for 99% of the game, and then requiring you to completely alter that style to finish a big boss at the end. I guess that is a matter of opinion.
My main beef with the game was the lack of level diversity. Yes, overall there were a number of different settings, but way too much of the game took place inside the office building. The lighting was great and so was the gameplay against the squads, but the surrounding was the same drab office over and over again. Grey, corporate, and uninspired. The actual office I work in looks better than that. That being said, the gameplay is fun and the setting becomes considerably more interesting once you get out of the office building.
The graphics are more sophisticated that what we saw in HL2, but Valve did an excellent job of establishing settings with different moods that went really well with the different parts of the game. Plus, they were pretty unique. FEAR is full of old FPS standby settings: the office, the basement, the elevator shaft, the building under construction, and a decent amount of vent crawling (something quite unrealistic that seems to enter into almost every FPS... why?). Monolith does them well, but do they really think they are being clever...?