My wife and I are binge watching it now. It's very different, and several of the characters are really bloody annoying, particularly Travis and his snowflake sociopath son Chris (GOD how I hate those two little twats!). I initially didn't like Nick at all - maybe he played the junkie way too well - but he's grown immensely, sometimes he's the only adult talking in the room, amusingly, and one of my favorite characters to watch. He's fully accepted the new normal and he seems to be thriving in it as a result. His mom's okay - I liked the actress from Deadwood (Kim Dickens), so I give her a pass for some of the overbearing mom shtick she often espouses. Many of the characters, in their own way, act like nothing's happened, still sticking to the old ways and old habits they embraced when society was still present. Very few have accepted reality the way it's become.
I do find it somewhat perplexing that the US would completely crumble in almost every conceivable way - the government, military structure, literally everything without a trace and all cities carpet-bombed (as seen in both shows), but Mexico seems to be respectably populated by the living with colonies and gangs running around with guns terrorizing people and quite nearly business as usual before the fall. Granted, we're only about 2/3 of the way through season 2 and there's much more to come, but things just seem a little off. Maybe it's because in TWD, the story starts when Rick wakes up from his coma and things have been destroyed for a while by that point and Fear shows everything that happened during the fall, I don't know. If Fear lasts as long as the first show, maybe it will get there too.
Despite the fact that TWD has lost a lot of its interest and Fear was not as good as the original in many ways, we'll still watch it to the end. "Sunk cost" and all that...
