Cold Fear -Xbox- 5.5

November 10, 2024

Cold Fear is an action survival horror title that released in March of 2005, and was overshadowed by the seminal Resident Evil 4 that came out just two months prior. Therefore, Cold Fear did not sell too many copies, and was met with mixed reviews by critics. I decided to play through the campaign this week, beating it on normal mode. Unfortunately, I cannot enthusiastically recommend it for serious fans of survival horror or even those looking for an especially memorable action game.

Cold Fear takes place on a Russian ship that has been infested with a species of parasite known as “exocels”, which have turned the soldiers aboard into zombie-like monsters. You play as Tom Hansen, a member of the US Coast Guard, who is ordered to rescue any survivors. You soon find Anna, the lone survivor whose father discovered and experimented on the exocels. You both must escape from the ship, and later an oil rig in the second half of the game. The cliched plot about Americans and Russians investigating an alien/monster race is predictable, and cribs from countless other action/horror movies&games. We have seen it all before, and nothing surprised me. I did not care about any of the stereotypical characters, and the voice acting was really cheesy, too.

Action horror videogames do not always need great storylines to be fun, so how is the gameplay in Cold Fear? It is somewhat decent, but highly derivative of the Resident Evil series. You can switch from fixed camera angles to a third person perspective that was clearly inspired by the far superior RE4 part way through development. The shooting feels alright, with the usual assortment of weapons you would see in a game like this, but it gets a little old after a while. The one thing that separates Cold Fear from its peers is the environment. The way the ship tilts back and forth with the weather effects is pretty neat, and it is clear that much development time was spent on this.

It must also be noted that the lack of a map hurts the experience, leading to some tedious back-tracking. The ship in the first half of Cold Fear is thankfully not too big, and the mission objectives in your menu give you some much needed sense of direction. But you can still get lost frequently, especially in the second half of the campaign, which takes place on a large oil rig. Making a wrong turn here and there led me to some annoying stretches of aimless wandering from time to time.

I was hoping to like Cold Fear more, but I honestly thought it was fairly average and forgettable. Blasting away enemies provided some amusement, and the oceanic setting with the heavy rain was cool. But everything else was standard issue survival horror, and not done nearly as well as the classics of the genre. It’s not bad, but I can see why it was not very commercially or critically successful. Releasing two months after Resident Evil 4, Cold Fear pales in comparison. I rate it a 5.5 out of ten.