Cold Fear is a game I like revisiting from time to time. It is an ugly duckling alright and although the game has great ambitions and plenty potential to be something amazing, the experience of actually playing it can be frustrating. And with each next playthrough I found more and more things to get frustrated by as the game starts playing worse on modern hardware and as my patience for outdated concepts gets smaller. I still enjoyed revisiting it this time a lot, but a lot of people will quite likely not find it fun the way I do.
This was the second project from Darkworks – a French development company who previously created an also flawed but no less cool Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare. The concepts for Cold Fear (a lot of which are unlockable inside the game itself, sadly with little to no commentary) were really ambitious and the idea of having a survival action (as Capcom would dub this action heavy survival horror offshoot the same year as this game with RE4) game at sea sounded great. To this day, there haven’t been many examples of fun horror themed titles with such a setting and what makes Cold Fear especially unique is the attempt to make the sea a danger itself. Since the events of the game happen during the storm, the ship the main character finds himself in is constantly rocking and at some points this affects traversal with the main character, enemies and some physics objects sliding across the deck when the ship tilts. And to combat that, the game has a dedicated button to grab onto the railing to stop yourself from sliding.
The game didn’t nail the camera and aiming – Resident Evil 4, that came out just a few months earlier, became the new standard for the camera in all third person shooters, while Cold Fear was playing with 2 separate camera views instead, not really making any of them feel great. By default, a lot of exploration happens in the cinematic camera angles view – the survival horror classic, – and the angles are often pretty bad. You can aim in that view as well, but that’s hardly ever helpful. Or you can switch to the over the shoulder view, just like RE4, and mover around like that. Your movement options are limited like that, but the game often times feels best in that mode.
That said, in general, all of the basics of Cold Fear are actually quite solid. There’s a gimmick to the enemies in that you have to destroy their head to kill them, which can be done as a critical shot (that has a high chance) at any point or after they’ve been downed and don’t move. Later on a disgusting little slightly morphing spider things become an additional problem and visually they might’ve been the inspiration for the similarly looking swarming enemies from Dead Space. The way these guys move and stretch still looks really good, I have to say. Guns and aiming usually feels good and there’s lots of fun exploration and variety to what happens.
The game does find many a way to sabotage itself constantly, sadly. For one – despite having the classic metroidvania-ish levels you can, theoretically, explore as you wish, it occasionally locks doors for the story just to force you down a specific path. There is no real “inventory” due to which key items are kept in a separate menu and are used automatically, ammo has a limit of how much you can carry and you cannot pick up ammo for guns you didn’t find, and health packs heal on the spot and you can’t carry extras with you. Save games happen as a prompt as you exit rooms after specific plot events and there’s no way to save manually or have more checkpoints then these. Which leads to some of these between save sections being relatively manageable and short and some taking a huge amount of time during which you can suddenly die and have to restart everything from 15 minutes ago.
Speaking of dying – the balance in the game is almost non-existent. The final boss is straight up garbage, I will tell outright, though if you’ve gotten to it you might as well close the game – there’s nothing past that that’s interesting. But even normal common enemies are all over the place. The usual “zombies”, for example, can suddenly rush at you and in that state it’s almost impossible not to get hit multiple times. And even if you kill them, they often have an entire attack combo play out after they’re already dead, meaning that they still can damage you. The tiny stretchy guys are usually not a problem, but if they do get close to you, they burn your health in seconds. And there are several enemy types that just have way too much health for absolutely no reason whatsoever.
The story is trash, just so you’re mentally prepared. There’s a potential here for a cool storyline, but it’s incredibly stupid in practice and some plot points get introduced and resolved in seconds, serving no real purpose. That said, the presentation of the title still looks quite good at times. The textures are very low res and on modern hardware and with (or even without) additional mods, like the one I’ve used to play in widescreen, the game is full of visual bugs. Shadows and animations can glitch out, things that were originally cut off by 4:3 aspect ratio are still often not rendered or render incorrectly. It doesn’t detract from the experience much, but can be slightly bothersome in a few spots. The mouse sensitivity is trash and controls in general are not great. But at least the soundtrack from Tom Salta is still really fun and memorable. The random addition of a Marilyn Manson song in the end credits is odd, though. Especially since it doesn’t fit the length of the credits so they awkwardly play it twice.
It turned out to be the last released project for Darkworks as well. Almost immediately afterwards the studio started creating a game that would eventually be released as I am Alive. However, after multiple changes, redesigns and moved release schedules, the studio was removed from the project and had no involvement with the game as it would be released in 2012 (to mixed reception). They started attracting new publishers for the project codenamed Black Death which had some interesting concepts and received a playable prototype release back in 2011, but it didn’t help and the studio closed later same year.
I find it hard to recommend Cold Fear to people who are not well experienced with flawed games and have interest in survival action/survival horror titles (and can enjoy stuff like, say, The Thing videogame). As it’s just full of really bad or outdated decisions. But at the same time, it’s one of those projects that just begs for a revisit – either as a completely new game that uses similar ideas or as a remake. It can inspire and feel fresh. But it’s also a rather frustrating experience. I loved replaying it yet again, but have to admit to myself that it was far less enjoyable than it used to be.