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Cold Fear

Moby ID: 17599

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Critic Reviews add missing review

Average score: 71% (based on 23 ratings)

Player Reviews

Average score: 3.4 out of 5 (based on 15 ratings with 1 reviews)

More like "Cold Apathy"

The Good
I remember seeing the case for Cold Fear in the store. I grabbed it, turned it around and immediately began salivating as I spotted the great looking screenshots on the slick. I hadn't heard anything about it, nor had I read any reviews however the presence of the word "Darkworks" on the case was enough to compel me to part with $50 for the game.

Cold Fear has a serviceable story. A SEAL team is dispatched to investigate a floating tanker, there is death involved and Tom Hansen; a Coast Guard, jumps on board with a small team to mount a rescue. When the rest of his team dies Tom is left to combat the horror alone.

Cold Fear does some really interesting things. Not only must you battle your enemies but your environment becomes an enemy itself. The ocean churns and crashes violently into the side of the tanker rocking it precariously and sometimes knocking Tom off his feet. When you see the ship begin to tilt it is smart to grab onto a railing and watch your enemies slide down the deck and off the side of the ship. Occasionally jets of water force their way onto the deck and can damage you as well.

Tom himself is very responsive, he controls very well and fires his weapon with the camera over his shoulder. Alternatively you can tell the camera to stick to a fixed perspective like a traditional survival horror game. He's also a fairly resourceful fellow, being able to scavenge weapons and ammunition from corpses, although if an enemy is blown up or burned odds are your loot will also have been destroyed.

The Tanker and later on the Oil Rig are very detailed, with flickering lights and an accomplished sense of atmosphere. A fair degree of effort has been put into making offices look like they were boarded up and barricaded in a very makeshift fashion with chairs and tables. Corpses lay on floors, hunched over tables or dangle from wires while eyes glow in the dark and leave trails that linger menacingly in the murky twilight. There is some seriously good texture work going on here. The detail they add to environments is to be applauded, with the most praise going to a selection of doors throughout the game which feature high resolution, vivid texturing. Enemies and NPC's generally animate well, with some expressive gesturing and fairly competent design.

The Bad
Now, onto the bad. Which there is a lot of. You'll notice the majority of the "good" section of this review is comprised of praise for the graphics or the general inventiveness of the environments. That's because in general Cold Fear ends up coming across as a mixed bag of good ideas wrapped in a veneer of graphical sumptuousness.

The overarching themes of the story are insipid and derivative. A creature called the Exo Cell is released by a drilling operation and it infects some people after efforts at studying it fail. The explanations of how the Exo Cell work seem like nothing more than window dressing. Every mutation is variable, following no set formula or logical premise. The general situation, with Tom struggling to survive in a hostile environment is Survival Horror 101. His friends all die quickly, leaving him the sole survivor to fight alone. It's just weak. How could Darkworks, the studio behind the masterpiece that is Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare write a story this bad?

Tom himself is a mystery. His past is alluded to, but never elaborated on. He apparently had a girlfriend that he may or may not have had a hand in killing but she is only mentioned once, not before and never again. If you're going to bring up small incidental plot points then put some effort into elaborated on them. If not, don't bring them up at all.

The game play leaves a lot to be desired. While Tom controls well and is quite responsive at times he feels over responsive and the pixel perfect contact your bullets need to make to make precious head shots becomes frustrating if you're not using the Shotgun. The idea behind sourcing things locally is all well and good but there is no tangible benefit from doing it. You can't stock healing items and there is no depth to the healing. There is a health kit and that is it. In games like Dino Crisis and even Resident Evil there was some strategy involved in healing your character. In Cold Fear if you need healing, the game will provide.

The enemies in the game are typical, underwhelming and exasperating. There are the standard Exo Mutant enemies, a thing that can turn off the lights, a thing that can turn invisible and human mercenaries with guns. There is little variation and little incentive to keep gunning down the hallways with the flickering lights to find out what new aberration you will be facing.

The horror elements in this game are weak. While the environments and the enemies look pretty good with glowing eyes and a cool motion blur emphasizing their inhuman qualities the game just fails to be scary. There are a few reasons for this. To begin with Darkworks seemed to have missed some really basic synching issues. Audio fails to synch up properly with certain situations and the ugly, jerking camera transitions to the badly paced "horror" sequences just come off as weak. Tom's general lack of emotion and dumb lines only emphasize the farcical nature of the horror elements of Cold Fear.

My first time through this game I finished in around 5-6 hours, which for a Survival Horror game is a cardinal sin. If your first play through takes less time than a repeated play through of a game you are familiar with then there is something wrong. There is no incentive to replay this game, no New Game+ option and only the reward of some very boring concept art to reward your suffering from sitting through the inane story and terribly forced Russian accents.

The Bottom Line
Cold Fear is a weak Survival Horror game. If approached solely as an action game, there is some merit to it. If you want some mindless gore with a lightweight story then you are in for a good 5-6 hours of play. Looking good though doesn't make up for the insipid story, deplorably emotionless voice acting, awkward combat, badly designed item system, longevity issues and a big middle finger at the end of the game in the form of a Marilyn Manson song.

PlayStation 2 · by AkibaTechno (238) · 2010

Contributors to this Entry

Critic reviews added by nyccrg, Mr Almond, Patrick Bregger, Wizo, Sciere, Jeanne, Alsy, Big John WV, chirinea, Jacob Gens, Vovo 30.