Cold Fear

The Good
It looks very good. The ambient is very well depicted, the music is not bad and the voice-over is correct too. The scenarios chosen are awesome: a gigantic russian whaler ship, and an even more gigantic drilling platform. Everything in the middle of the arctic ocean. If you slip and fall, you're dead.

The Bad
It's short, too short, and the story is merely an excuse for a game: there are simply no surprising twists, and everything ends as you first think it will end. The ending leaves some loose ends and looks like it was done in a hurry.

The Bottom Line
It's a Resident Evil clone, but without Capcom's brand eye-candy and character design.

The Good
Starting with the technical aspects of Cold Fear, I must say that the graphics and visual effects match the game to perfection. A large part of the game happens under the open sky, on a heavy storm on the wild sea, so Tom Hansen (the player character) is vulnerable to all sorts of threats that would naturally occur in that situation. The waves crash against the surface of the boat and the boat itself swings to the sides, which makes it possible for Tom to fall off the boat, unless he has taken hold of something. The rain blurs your vision as you move, and the swinging of the boat becomes realistically noticeable in the gameplay.

As for the controls, there's nothing special about them, but they serve their purpose. Most weapons have a laser sight that makes the behind-the-shoulder camera angle comfortable for shooting.

The difficulty and learning curve are near perfect, maintaining a more than acceptable realism. Loads of human enemies throughout the first minutes help you get used to the controls and gameplay, before you face your first zombies, which are considerably stronger. As the game progresses you will discover that you can frequently use and alter the environment to your advantage, sometimes even as a requirement to move from place to place.

If you get scared easily, Cold Fear will not disappoint. If you're not easily scared, turn off all the lights and play alone with your headphones on. Guaranteed to work. Creatures and noises coming from the most unexpected places will make you jump more than once, while progressively injecting fear on you.

The storyline is somewhat above average, but is enough to keep you interested in finding out what happens next. The dialog is usually fluent and makes sense, unlike many other survival horror games. All parts match to perfection, and there aren't any visible plot holes, which adds to the overall realism.

The Bad
There aren't many bad things about Cold Fear, but there is one in particular that bothered me a couple of times. The camera is fixed when you're not aiming with a gun, and often takes new angles all of a sudden. This makes the game even creepier, but comes in conflict with the fact that Tom can't run while aiming. In a specific part of the game, he needs to run on a near impossible time limit. The sudden change of camera angles cost me over 7 attempts to get it right. Other than that, it didn't bother me at all.

Most people complain that the only way to save the game is through checkpoints, but I think its a nice throwback to old school games. The only other thing worth mentioning is that you get used to the scares. At some point, the game may no longer make you jump. Maybe.

The Bottom Line
Overall, it's a game worth picking up, and chances are that you'll like it. It will keep you eager to continue playing, as you will find yourself wanting to know what happens next. Personally, I think it has a great replay value, and it's sure worth the money.

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.