My relatively in-depth review of Cold Fear

[ncstaunton]

So this is a pretty cool srvival horror. There are some good and some bad, which I'm going to outline for people who are wondering whether they will enjoy Cold Fear or whether they will hate it. Here are the things that will affect your enjoyment, starting with the bad stuff, because it's unfortunately the bad which will hit you in the face right at the start of the game.


The bad stuff you will remember:

The big one: CAMERA / DISORIENTATION

So, the game does the horror pretty well and the level design is realistic and relatively sprawling. That is also a source of frustration in many places, because the route that Hansen has to take is often unclear. The first half of the game takes place on a whaler ship, and you're required to go around from location to location, finding keys to unlock doors which were previously locked. It's likely this part of the game would be more enjoyable on subsequent playthroughs, because when you're new to the ship, and certain doors become locked and others become open all the time in order to force your route a particular way, you do end up banging your head against the wall. It's also more difficult to get a mental map of the ship because the camera is very often (50% of the time?) placed in a fixed location for a more cinematic feel. However, the camera too-often ignores the rules of good cinema by crossing the invisible line between the viewer and the action (imagine a conversation scene in a movie where the camera keeps changing which side of the actors faces it is watching from, except this is an adventure game instead). It often means that suddenly you're orientated backwards and you lose your mental image of the map and have to rely on a memory of which doorway leads to where. Then, of course, you find that the game expects you to take a different route from before, and one of the doors you remembered from earlier is now welded shut. I did have to rely on walkthroughs a few times, because although I knew where I wanted to go, I did not know how to get there, and I don't think this is an experience any game intends its player to have (which means, the camera and map system have been done badly).

NEW TECHNIQUES, BUT NOT PERFECTED

So I'm not going to complain about how this is an old game, because I like a lot of old games - but they do seem to have more control and camera problems, as well as gameplay limitations which are the result of nobody else having perfected the style of whatever they were trying to do. Conversel.y I understand that the best things about many old games are the ways in which they do things differently, and how they use their limitations to present more unique gameplay quirks. But for a second let's look at these difficulties Cold Fear has. In a more modern incarnation, Cold Fear would either have had a God of War style camera setup in which each camera angle blends seamlessly into the next and the map is pretty much always the 'right way up', or it would have a Resident Evil 4-style shoulder camera at all times, allowing the player to orientate themselves.

LEVEL CLARITY

Combine this with the fact that the (early) levels are all brown and rusty and dark, which was the style of survival horror in the early 2000s. It works, but System Shock 2 and Dead Space, from 1998 and 2007 respectively, both showed that great survival horror could be set in a colourful environment and that having some bright or clean or otherwise very distinct environments could help the player orientate themselves well. I believe Half-Life 1 to be a survival horror of sorts, and when thinking back on Half-Life, it's so easy to remember what area links to what, because of such excellent art direction and design. Yes, the higher level of detail which comes with newer technology would have helped Cold Fear a lot. The route a player is required to take in Cold Fear is linear, like it is in most survival horror games, so the joy of exploration is really about making sure you check all the siderooms, so getting lost shouldn't really be a part of it. Credit where credit's due - Cold Fear really tries to make amends by providing something new: Russian text on most of the doors, which translate into English when Hansen points his gun at them. However, text is absent from some doors, and when you're told to find, for example, the Radio Room, you still may not know which sequence of rooms to go through. That's because there's no map. It's likely that a more detailed radio brief from your boss would help sometimes, but it's also likely that a modern remake would remove a lot of the backtracking, and instead make each area (cargo bay, fish hold, poop deck) into a longer level and a unique experience in its own right. These changes are why I personally believe Dead Space 2 to be far superior to Dead Space 1. And make no mistake: I would absolutely love a modern remake of Cold Fear, because of all the great potential which is setup by the already-great positive features mentioned in the second part of this review. I just believe that I should make it clear that the biggest negative which will turn people off this game (and it will turn a lot of people off) is the above.


The good stuff you will remember:

DEDICATION TO HORROR

So Cold Fear was a fresh horror IP that actually came out before Resident Evil 4, and was itself innovative enough to have a laser sight which the player had to use to target enemy weak points (check out this swag, Capcom). This is impressive for a middle-tier game of its time. The concept of a crew member who boards a derilict ship and has to find out what happened there is a great setup and a staple of survival horror (System Shock, Dead Space, Resident Evil Revelations and more), and we get the standard and proven sequence of weak and dying innocent people infected by low-level monsters, through to secret laboratories and of course a young girl whose father happens to be a genetic scientist. Horror games and cinema are usually built on previous concepts and horror completely revels in knowingly recycling its own tropes (look at the RE series and its tongue-in-cheek "use this!" ending which is the comedy punchline to every game). The ocean is rendered beautifully and really looks like it is going to swamp the ship. As the game progresses, the ship lurches more, and Hansen ends up sliding around the deck, crashing into things and getting bruised while trying to keep straight aim. This is something fairly minor that a remake would absolutely have to build on because it's an intrinsic and totally unique Cold Fear thing, which could lead to incredibly memorable and fresh gameplay moments.

The word 'zombie' is never used in Cold Fear by anybody. But while mutant alien infected (very much like 'The Thing') might be seen as cheesy and less scary than reanimated corpses, Cold Fear does its horror moments really, REALLY well. The save checkpoints are quite spread out (yes, this is an old game without manual saving, and, yes, some of the fights are pretty unforgiving, too) and so the occasional jump scare does cause concern to the player. Knowing that you'll have to go back through areas again which may be infected by parasites means that you become paranoid about corpses and you find youeself gruesomely beheading bodies while wondering if any of them are going to reanimate. A lot of the enemies are silent when they move, which must have been a design choice and provides Hansom with a different kind of fear of missing a corner or being flanked (neither of which really happen that much, although, again, sometimes you'll be thrown into a fight straight through a door... sorry, that's something rather 2000s, but let's be honest, The Witcher 1 did it worse). When you get to grips with Cold Fear's horror experience and get into the much more linear and much better game-directed oilrig / laboratory section, you start to feel the thrill of adventure and discovery which is so important to survival horror.

THE WEAPONS

The weapons in Cold Fear are perfect - not because they're powerful or anything, but because they're appropriate to the gameplay. Ammo is scarce (and HP packs, too), so your automatic rifle will only be used as a glorified pistol. But what a difference. The pistol has a light on it which makes it useful to explore with but the limitation that at close range it's harder to see the laserdot, while the AK has no torch at all. Later in the game you find a submachinegun which has a torch, but you will always be saving it for the enemies which are invisible and only show up under torchlight. Ideally it takes two or three shots to kill an enemy, bu when things go wrong and you fire fifteen bullets into one enemy, you feel extremely worried about your ammo levels for a while afterwards. Again, this is survival horror combat done very well. COmbat is not your friend at all here: Hansen's stomp and knockback moves are almost useless. The grenade launcher bounces around and can come back at you before it eventually explodes. If you use the flamethrower outdoors, the storm can blow it back into your face and kill you. There are 'decoy' spears which can cluster enemies, but since you have hardly any grenades, decoy only ever means decoy. And any enemies you burn or explode WON'T drop anything, guaranteed. It's a nice arsenal which feels like a combination of tactical navy equipment and Alien / The Thing equipment. The flamethrower is already done better than Dead Space's flamethrower, because it doesn't have a laserdot (neither does the shotgun... good call), and the flame effect either works or murphies as it ought to. The only thing Cold Fear is missing is more infested dark areas which need to be illuminated using a tiny pilot light-radius around the flamehrower... and of course a phosphorous flare gun!

In summary, Cold Fear is a mixed-bag. There is a foundation of excellently-presented adventure-horror gameplay in this experience, but it is hampered in places by a LACK of the hand-holding and rollercoaster-ride-streamlining which actually spoils so many modern games. How much is enough? How much is too much? Who can say!

[grandaxel]

Thank you for this! Was looking for difficulty level differences. I tried "hard" on my 1st go and was sad with the lack of save spots before I died....😅

[TheBeak]

I have played this in years. Had it on disc and beat it on normal, and hard. Might have to pick this up, and see if it'll run on my rig. I remember having a lot of fun with this, despite it having some flaws and low-budget charm.

Nice review!