Cold Fear

The Good
Well, it can't be said that this game has good things, it's so average... Maybe the only contribution to the world of videogames is the kind of see storm simulation it contains. Yes, I mean it, is rather curious and you can play some minutes to enjoy it.

Out of that, the game has nothing more highlight. Actually, I remember why I started playing it. You know Resident Evil 4?, I kind of like its 2nd person style for killing hordes of creatures, and Cold Fear has it too. So, if you are a PC only user like me, and you like this, you can play Cold Fear instead of RH4. This is, of course, a very silly reason to play Cold Fear.

The Bad
Nothing to do in a weekend, and, inexplicably, you only have one game to play, Cold Fear. In that situation you can play it, but you should learn to do more things with your life than playing videogames.

At least, this game is short, very short. There is the whaling ship and a petroleum extracting platform, nothing more. In an orgy of lack of originality, you are a cost guard, that was once a hero (like in Far Cry), that gets on an abandoned whaling ship with more cost guards, but end up alone (like in a lot of other games), and find that the ship is not abandoned. No, there are some kind of zombies (like..., you know); later you discover that the way a person can be transformed into a zombie is like in Alien, and that the transformation can be of different types and there a scientific guy that sees this as a way of becoming into some superior being. In the way to defeating this mad scientist, you meet a girl, a pretty one with hot body, and, as a man must do with recently met pretty girls with hot body, you offer your life in order to save hers. Of course, at the end, you fly away in an helicopter and save the day, after killing the technically invincible beast that now is the mad scientist. At least labels are in Russian.

If you still have some doubts about how this game could be, the key word is "average", is so average that hurts. Enemies are random genetic altered creatures, the localizations are what you can expect from a ship and a petroleum extracting platform with a secret genetic lab in it, the weapons are the usual weapons (some have a red laser and some have a lantern) and the puzzles to solve are, you know, average. This is the "deja vu" game for survival horror game lovers. the most entertaining thing you can do with this game is play with your friends to predict thing from this game, like puzzles, guns, monster appearance and situations, then play in the easiest difficulty mode and every time someone guess something right sum a point. The first one who gets 100 points wins.

The Bottom Line
"How would you describe this game to others?" AVERAGE, XD. You know, when an entertainment industry gets enough big, the companies begin developing products of lower quality just because people will still buy them. This products are totally worthless and usually copies of other more popular products, but with less costs. If 1000 people buy Resident Evil 4, you can expect 5 people to buy Cold Fear just by saying "it's a survival horror, like Resident Evil 4", that's the only reason for this game to exist.

P.D.: I don't actually know if RE4 is better, it's just intuition.

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.

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.