Good idea, decent graphics, EXTREMELY mediocre execution.

User Rating: 5.5 | Cold Fear PC
By byshop | Review Date:
Survival Horror. By far, my favorite category of game. It’s a genre that takes the narrative of a movie and combines it with cinematic gameplay, and it’s a melding that creates a truly unique experience nearly every time. I was absolutely in love with the original Resident Evil, which in some ways was the first Survival Horror game (predated only by the PC title Alone in the Dark). Sure, the graphics are horrible by today’s standards, and even by the standards at the time the voice acting was… serviceable at best. But once you got over a couple (HUNDRED!) lines of poorly localized, badly delivered lines (Mmmmm… Jill Sandwich) you had a game that was genuinely fun to play in terms of mechanics, story, and overall atmosphere. Over the years, many a survival horror title has been released. This is refreshing, since for a long time if you wanted a scary non-shooter your options were limited. However, as the genre expanded we were reminded that Newton’s Third Law Of Game Development states: For every Quake, there are at least a dozen equal and opposite DaiKatanas. So we come to Cold Fear, the latest from Darkworks. Don’t let that Ubisoft logo fool you! They merely published it. In case you forgot (which would be understandable), Darkworks was the developer of the forth installment of the Alone in the Dark series. If you don’t remember AITD4, that’s probably for the best. You might actually be suffering from a form of post-traumatic amnesia, although I don’t know if “suffering” is quite the right word for not remember anything about that pile of monkey feces. In Cold Fear you play the role of (Major?) Tom Hansen, a disgraced enforcer of… something… who someone may or may not have gotten his girlfriend killed at some point so he decides to join the Coast Guard for a life of quite semi-reclusion. No, really. That’s the background. You don’t even get all this up front, you actually have to play through a fair chunk of the game to piece together even that much motivation for your character. First, we are treated to a cutscene of a SWAT-team like search party boarding an apparently abandoned ship in the middle of a tremendous storm. After they are cut to ribbons in seconds by boogie-men unknown, Tom’s team is called in to investigate and see who needs rescuing. You, as Tom, are dropped off on one side of the ship and left to rendezvous with your team. Your team, in reality, exists only in the forms of garbled radio screams and giblets because that’s all you’re ever going to actually see of them. The basic gameplay is RE-esque in as much as you have fixed cameras that follow your character throughout the game. The camera will either pan or swoop to follow depending on the area you are in, but it doesn’t always change direction to let you see where you are going. Instead you can often be treated to a shot of your character’s front seconds before you faceplant into an invisible wall in the foreground. Once you get into combat, you are treated to an “over the shoulder” view similar to the game that this will inevitably be compared to, RE4. Movement is clunky at best. You move using standard RE-style tank controls, but you cannot pan the camera while moving. If you want to look around, you have to switch to your first person shooting mode. From this mode, you can move (slowly) and look in any direction for manually aiming/firing. This will come in handy when you are finally assaulted by the non-zombies. I call them non-zombies because THEY AREN’T ZOMBIES! Remember that! They are Exocells! Zombies are dead people who have come back from the dead to feast upon the flesh of the living, whereas Exocells are dead people who have come back from that dead because of a critter in their head to feast upon the flesh of the living. As you can see, it’s a totally new concept! =P Blatant idea grabbing aside, this game really doesn’t have much to offer. The story is weak, the combat is frustrating, and the dialog laughable. Here’s one prime example: Tom: We can’t change the ship’s course. The autopilot is locked! Anna (fire tempered ambiguous love interest): Well then unlock it! Tom: (speaking non-sarcastically, as though the thought had never occurred to him) Good idea! I’ll go find the captain! WTH? The game doesn’t allow you to carry much ammo per gun, which is a pain in the butt since you can’t pick and choose what you want to carry. Each gun has an annoyingly small bullet limit that’s not affected by whatever else you may or may not be carrying. Also, this game has NO MAP FUNCTION WHATSOEVER! You are going to spend A LOT of time trying to figure out just where the hell you are supposed to be going next, or how to get back to somewhere you’ve already been since in a cheap plot device attempt to herd you in specific directions doors will occasionally jam behind you for no apparent reason. Hit locations exist, but they don’t seem to make a heck of a lot of difference. The only way to kill most critters is by headshot, or knocking them down and crushing their very squeezable heads with your foot. In addition to your health bar, you also have a resistance (is futile?) bar. This is essentially your stamina bar. It shows you how much wind you’ve got left in you for running, hanging on ledges, or fending off the unwanted advances of amorous facehuggers and other non-human cuddle bunnies. You also have a “critical hit” ability, which you can pull off only after you’ve been grabbed by a baddie. Your resistance bar indicates how much fighting juice you have left before you start to take real damage, which gives you the opportunity to button mash your opponent off of you. If you have ammo left in the appropriate gun, you are given the option of pulling the right trigger at the end of your fight to pull off a massively damaging critical strike. This is a neat idea, but it’s almost a little too effective. In many instances you are actually better off just letting something grab you so that you can fight it off and kill it with one shot, rather than chasing it around the room plugging it with round after round just to get it to leave you the hell alone. While it borrows liberally from many of the vastly superior survival horror games that came before it, it does have a few innovations to offer. The fact that this game takes place at sea has a great deal of impact on the actual gameplay. The ship pitches and rolls back and forth as you make your way around the desk. Unsecured hooks and cargo provide environmental hazards that you have to avoid, while waves crashing against the boat can injure you or sweep you overboard altogether. You can grab onto railings to stead yourself while shooting, but with only one hand free reloading suddenly is not an option. Saving only occurs at predesignated points in the story, not the map. You can’t even return to a save point if you think you might get yourself into trouble, which is a major disappointment in a game that expects you to wander finding extra weapons and goodies. Graphics are this game’s only saving grace. The character animation is nothing to write home about, but the outdoor environments look great. The entire ship actually sways as you are walking on it, and the rain effects look terrific. Unfortunately they went a little overboard with some of the effects. Sure, it’s neat that the raindrops actually hit the “glass” of the camera, but it also creates an effect like rain is falling directly onto your eyeballs after a while. Blood splatters when you pop someone’s head and splashes on the camera, but that quickly becomes more annoying than anything else. This is especially true when you change cameras during combat and the blood lingers for another 30 seconds. Basically, this game plays like an unpolished version of Extermination with the clunky controls of The Thing. The game’s biggest saving grace turned out to be it’s fairly short playtime from beginning to end, as by about 75% of the way through it was really starting to wear out its welcome. I recommend it as a rental only if you are a survival horror freak and must play every game that comes out, otherwise it’s not even worth that. -Byshop

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