Cold Fear offers a good mixture of shooter and survival horror but fails to deliver a good story.
User Rating: 7 | Cold Fear PS2
Cold Fear is an action game, a shooter, highly inspired in the survival horror genre but without a deep storyline behind. In fact, the game's background is its main flaw. The game puts you on the shoes of an American hero who must investigate an apparently abandoned Russian vessel. Sounds bad, doesn't it? Soon enough you discover that the ship's crew turned into some kind of zombie-like creatures that won't hesitate to cut you down. Luckily, the game's atmosphere detracts you from the storyline. The environment is mainly composed of enclosed, poorly lit areas, strewn of corpses and torn members. The music also contributes to a very tense experience as you walk slowly through each room, hoping not to find a zombie with a cleaver. Combat adds much to the already tense game play of Cold Fear. The zombies generally employ melee weapons of all sorts and are quite deadly at close range. As the game lacks open spaces, you'll walk very slowly and peek around every corner before moving around. The bad side is that the whole story is shallow and mixed with classical shooters’ background. The bad guys (Russians) find an alien species that is capable of infecting human beings and reproducing at a very fast rate. Instead of warning the world, the madmen decide to study the creatures and unscrupulously infect their own marines to obtain better results. The zombies, as well as other well designed monstrosities are the products of the Russians... hhmmm... I prefer Resident Evil. The story gets worse by the minute so I tried to focus on other aspects of Cold Fear. The graphics are fine and the setting fit the survival horror genre well. There’s plenty of gore and blood on the game. Every time you blow an enemy head, the screen will drip blood as if the shot had smeared the camera with it. Nice touch. The enemies looking menacing and the corpses look vivid. As for game play, I’d say Cold Fear is above average. It’s all designed in classical Resident Evil style: you gotta find keys, move objects around and pull levers in order to unlock your way through the game. Combat is frantic and tense as it’s hard to aim on a ship’s deck during a storm. The game’s camera is not that nice. You can alternate between first and third person view, the latter being almost useless unless you want to run around or flee. It does not hurt the game tough as you probably get used to it in the first hour. Another nice touch is that some weapons, like the pistol, are equipped with a lantern and laser sight for better aiming while others, like the shotgun, simply don't. You gotta be careful when choosing what weapon you should use on each environment. I found myself in a pitch dark corridor with only shotgun (no lantern nor laser sight) ammo left. Bad memories. All in all, I’d say it’s a nice game with a bad story behind it. 
