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Cold Fear Review - PS2

What would happen if you mixed Tom Clancy with H.P. Lovecraft? You’d get Cold Fear, a game that does away with the conventions of a tired genre and successfully blends military action with survival horror.

Cold Fear is a naval themed survival horror game from the folks at Ubi Soft, best known for their Tom Clancy games like Rainbow Six and Splinter Cell. The game starts out with a very Tom Clancy feel. You arrive on a ship, tossing rather dramatically on a very stormy sea, sent to investigate a fishing trawler which is on its way to a previously abandoned Russian oil drilling platform.

It doesn't take long for things to go to hell. Your team is soon wiped out by some freakish monsters, even ripped in half in a lavish display of affection. Your mission is to rescue a certain doctor who has been working on strange experiments. Apparently the oil drilling platform was closed down for good reason: the drilling disturbed something beneath the surface; something hungry.

I didn't say the story wasn't clichéd.

Right from the start Cold Fear feels familiar. You can wander around from the fixed perspective easily, with typical camera angle problems, but when it's time to play melon popping with your zombie adversaries, you can switch to an over the shoulder targeting view. This takes care of one of the major flaws in previous survival horror games. Now, if only RPG’s would get rid of random battles…

Of course, given the game, or first half of the game at least, takes place on a ship in the middle of a stormy sea, aiming is suitably difficult. Due to the rocking ship, your laser sight will weave all over the place, making for a realistic experience and adding to the intensity of the battles, struggling not only against your foes but against the environment itself. This is aggravated by the PS2's analogue thumbsticks distinct lack of sensitivity

Thankfully, you can grab onto nearby railings in order to steady your aim. Grabbing the railing will stop your gun from wavering, but it will also stop you from moving, leaving you a sitting duck.

Marksmanship is important. Being a survival horror game, supplies are limited, so making every shot count is important. This is compounded by the fact that, unless you blow the enemy's head clean off, they’re just gonna get back up again, causing you to waste even more ammo, and possibly health. There are armouries littered throughout the game, so you won't be down to just using a combat knife if things get tight.

The rocking of the ship is also likely to cause some players a degree of motion sickness. The continual rolling, which affects not only aiming but movement, is atmospheric, but will perhaps be too atmospheric for some. The mission design is rather simple. Being a quasi-military game, you are given objectives that must be fulfilled to progress. At the end of specific objectives, you can save your game. The mission design is often a case of make ... (continued next page)