anyone else having the same problem?

Only in perseus mandate expansion. No big deal though. In original FEAR the "Bad water" level loads up and program stops responding for me. I have finished the extraction point without any trouble though. I've bought this pack for the expansions anyway so...

I haven't played the expansions yet but it's pretty frequent in the base game.

does the game stay at a black screen or is it just for a moment?

2 seconds at most.

is the "force restart" option on in the display options?

It shouldn't be but I never thought of that. I'll have a look. :)

Good call, stupid feature I didn't even notice was there. Thanks boss. :)

Not a stupid feature because it helps load games faster in current level and between levels once present is loaded, decrease lag and performance problems (not related to HID but the way engine is made with multiple archives and layers, also related to lighting and shadows which never was properly optimized) so you can set higher features. Also remove a lot graphical glitches, prevent save game corruption and broken scripts (very possible if you quick save/load often or your game freeze/crash). Basically the longer game is running, the more performance degrade and harder to calculate complex geometry by engine so renderer restart between maps is to solve that to some point.

and reduces the game to a black screen everytime it saves. Yeah...

Never did that to me in original, besides it depends on your config. ;P

it never did it with my disc and Steam version either so I have no idea what the hell is going on...

Original CD version never did to me black screen unless used on different computer and then the same screen related to performance of my PC (often laptop with integrated graphics) with freezing screen for 1-2 seconds and continuing. Only the new setup with Intel and ATI did black screen to me, including Steam version so it's related to system and the engine. At least you don't need suffer if your only save is quick one and auto-save is the same way, in middle of scripted cut-scene and weird shit happens because scripts aren't perfect as F2 or F3 so only models are visible or my game will crash on load. That renderer stuff is related only with new area load save so it's not technically explainable why it occurs other than your rig. Not the first time when Lith engine is being picky.

I found something that said this:

If 'Soft Shadows' and 'Pixel Doubling' are enabled this will result in black screen on some ATI/AMD videocards. Disable said graphical options to fix the problem.

On my machine this only happens under Windows 8.1. Windows XP doesn't have this issue.

Similar to the Logitech slow-down issue, this also doesn't happen in XP.