About this time last year, the likes of Doom 3 and Half-Life 2 raised the bar for first-person shooters (FPS) so high as to seem unsurpassable. Guess what? It's indisputably surpassed with Monolith's F.E.A.R, simply the best FPS game to date - and easily the game of the year.

Boasting the eye-poppingly gorgeous graphics you'd expect in such a competitive genre, F.E.A.R (First Encounter Assault Recon) also features the finest artificial intelligence system yet seen in a computer game. Enemies not only dynamically participate in their surroundings and the situational appearance of you, the lone super soldier, they actually react like it matters, taking cover behind boxes or pillars or deaks, shrewdly tossing out grenades, covering each other, repositioning themselves, flanking you or running away in hysterics, dead scared of dying when wounded, all with a simulated strategic reasoning that heretofore seemed impossible for game developers to produce.

You, meanwhile, are given an arsenal of smartly balanced weapons, each with a strength and a shortcoming and precious little ammunition, which makes you think before you shoot (or not shoot at all, but go stealth and use quiet martial arts in a "one punch, one kill" sort of way). Plus, you can actually lean around corners, keeping your body behind cover while poking your head and shoulders out for a view or a shot, which is only remarkable because so few games include the plainly useful attribute of full body articulation. Add to that the occasional act of slow-motion berserking and you've got the whole ball of wax.

More than surreptitious running and judicious gunning, F.E.A.R plays out a X-Files-ian plot of paranormal activities and clandestine science gone awry, which often has you creeping down corridors - teeth firmly clenched - as you suspect a ghostly apparition or clone-soldier ambush lying in wait, which might be the case, or not, or both. Awesome.

In spite of a few technical flaws - the most glaring of which have been address in a patch and the lesser of which can be blamed on the under-powered PC you might try to run it on - F.E.A.R is as good as it gets.

• TIP: When playing F.E.A.R (single player), hit "T" then type kfa to get all weapons, full ammo, full armor and full health.