Extermination Meets Resident Evil on a Ship...
If you have played both Extermination (2001 release) and any of the Resident Evil games, you'll know what I mean by that title if you play Cold Fear. However, I think the setting - on a ship - is quite unique and I was definitely into the game from the start because of this unique atmosphere. Plus the graphics are quite nice in this game, probably the best of any PS2 game that I've played (I played RE4 on Game Cube). However, at least in the first half of the game, you are on board a Russian whaling ship and the ship is completely dark in most places. You do have a flashlight, but though the set designs are good, usually you are viewing them with only a flashlight view. However, when you are on the deck of the ship you can see the nice detail in the waves that are hitting the ship.
There is a good "scare" factor in this game as well. You probably aren't going to be laying awake at night sleepless, but there were a few times that a mutant came out of a locker or through the ceiling when I wasn't expecting it and it made me jump! LOL - fun...
It takes awhile to get used to both the controls and the camera angles on this game. And I think there is a fairly serious flaw in that they only designed one action button. So sometimes you need to use the action button to crush a mutants head but if the body lands next to an item you can pick-up by using the action key, then when you hit the action button intending to step on the mutants head, you might actually pick up an item 1st. This may allow time for the mutant to get back up and get some damage on you. They should have caught this during the beta-testing an implemented a two-action key system, but they didn't! It proves to be less of a problem later in the game as you become familiar with it and as you get better head shots on mutants, the necessity to crush their head with the action key will become less and less necessary.
I liked the length of the game, though I thought it was much shorter than other games of this type that I've played but I liked that. After a few hours or days playing the same game, I start to tire of them, so I was glad that I was able to beat this game in only about 10 days and playing it only an hour or two each day. Experienced gamers can probably finish this game off in a much shorter time frame.
Another minor criticism of the game is when you go from the end of "chapter 1" to the beginning of "chapter 2" in the game, you lose your weapons except for your pistol, but you quickly and basically without effort get them all back in a matter of minutes. Now, I like that better than a game like Metroid, for example, where you lose all your weapons and then have to spend hours and many separate missions to get them back. But this game was probably too easy to get your weapons back - basically you are just walking along a path and you encounter the weapons and pick them up. There is only one of the weapons that takes any real effort to find. I don't want to give away the story as to WHY you lose your weapons when at the mid-point of the game, but I thought either they should have made it more difficult to retrieve them or simply don't have Tom Hansen (the main character) lose his weapons in the first place!
Another minor critique of the game is that you spend quite a lot of time, about half of the game running around the same areas of the 3-deck Russian whaling ship. I was so glad by the time I got off that ship and onto the second half of the game because I had grown bored of the first environment.
However, the second half of the game was quite fun as you encounter many new "mutants" none of which are particularly difficult to beat. I used the shotgun almost entirely throughout the game. I occasionally used other weapons but you can go through most of the game using the shotgun and then switch over to the AK-47 or Sub Machine Gun if you run low on shotgun ammo and there really isn't any difficulty in beating the enemies that you find. There are enough health packs lying around to keep you alive as well - plus there's a Sick Bay you can return to at times to get health, though sometimes you will be too far away for this to be practical.
I didn't, however, like the final boss battle. Actually it's really the only boss battle other than fighting a few new creatures along the way. And in the final boss battle the skills you've acquired throughout the game and the use of the shotgun are useless on the final boss. This is a pet peeve of mine for these types of games. I understand that the final boss should be difficult, but I don't like how the weapons I never really favored in the game (namely the AK-47 or Sub Machine Gun) are the only ones effective on the boss battle - that and running away!
And once you beat the game, no unlockables, so there really is no replay value. So though I think the design of this game is quite good despite the aforementioned flaws with the action key and the camera angles, etc. on "fun" I had to drop it to 3-stars because the final boss battle is a bit silly in my opinion and there are no unlockables in the game, nor is it a game you are likely to want to replay.
(played in 3rd person view)