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
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.