The Haunted Hoard: Cold Fear (Xbox)
Released seven years before Resident Evil: Revelations took survival horror to the high seas but only two months after Resident Evil 4 introduced the idea of its monstrous human enemies being the result of a parasite instead of a zombie plague, Cold Fear finds itself in an odd spot with the series that clearly inspired it. On the one hand it was tackling a setting rarely touched on with video game horror by taking place on a ship and oil platform, but its attempt to be more realistic about why these humans have turned into mindless monsters lead to it feeling all too similar to a game that released right around the same time as it. Whether you look at it as ahead of its time or just a bit too late with its take on horror, Darkworks’s attempt to do something new in the genre at least had plenty of creative ideas behind it… most of which were unfortunately left on the cutting room floor.
Cold Fear begins with Tom Hansen of the Coast Guard boarding a Russian whaling ship known as the Eastern Spirit after a team of Navy SEALs deployed to seize it are taken out by some unknown force. While circumstance will later lead him to disembark the ship and explore a large oil platform instead, some of the game’s best moments are found aboard this small vessel, mainly because one of Darkworks’s more interesting ideas did make it into the end product. The Eastern Spirit finds itself in incredibly stormy waters at night, the small ship easily tossed about by the choppy sea. If you’re on deck when the boat is being thrown about, Hansen can lose his footing and be sent sliding around the top of the ship, complicating moments where he needs to have precise aim to handle the strange enemies he finds on board. Water will smash against certain sides of the ship and drag anyone who is hit by it down into the ocean, and the constant movement of the boat will also cause objects that aren’t bolted down to move about, things like crates suspended by ropes moving like wrecking balls to nail anyone unable to get out of their path.
The interesting physics at play give the battles on deck a unique and dangerous feel where you need to fight both nature and the unnatural at once. However, as great as this feature is, it is certainly underutilized, even the early parts of the game quickly asking you to go into the ship to explore its interior. You’ll go back on deck now and again, but once you’ve left the ship you’ll never get a taste of this special design again, most of the game becoming about navigating hallways and rooms without a map. You’ll always have some clue where you need to go but not always how to get there, and since you can only determine what a room is by aiming your gun at the right spot to translate the Russian on signs, navigating can be cumbersome and aimless. The game does try to give some areas unique designs so you can build a mental map, the ship having areas like a kitchen and armory while the oil platform has large spaces like the warehouse and related locations clustered together like the science labs. There will also often be some more apparent progression, flooded areas on the ship an obvious place to explore after you clear out the water and certain keys and items being clearly associated with an area you had already come across earlier. It doesn’t make up for the long treks to find which door will take you where you want to go, but you will eventually find your way at least.
The enemies in Cold Fear are a mix of not-quite-zombies and creatures who have been completely mutated due to their exposure to the game’s main antagonistic force: the Exocels. This small, almost spider-like creatures will crawl into the bodies of humans, living or dead, and begin to take hold of them from within, controlling them so they can kill other creatures to make new hosts. Most of the game’s plot centers around the Exocel outbreak and people related to it, many of the documents and conversations detailing how these creatures work and how the people who discovered them tried to harness them. While most Exocels will puppet humans and have them open fire on you with whatever weapons they used to have, some have been mutated further into more dangerous creatures. Some will climb across the ceiling and leap out to get you, others creatures turn invisible, and the hulking Exomasses are perhaps the most boss-like of the creatures save for the game’s one true boss fight near the end. They all require different approaches to conquer, and some receive assistance from the environment like blending in with walls covered with Exocel flesh or having lasers and explosives near by to harm you if you get sloppy in your movement or shooting.
Most Exocel enemies also have the tiny parasite pop out after death and search for a new host, and while they’re easy to kill, they can latch onto you or escape by crawling on the ceiling to make them a bit more challenging to put down effectively. What’s more, leaving human bodies on the ground can be risky because they might be reanimated later, Cold Fear asking you to be thorough in decapitating any dead people you find in a task that’s easy to execute but gives that constant feeling of a threat that must be constantly managed. Unfortunately, a lot of interesting monster designs never made it out of the planning stages, making the concept art you can view in game bittersweet as it shows that Cold Fear could have really made the Exocel threat something to remember rather than a fairly straightforward parasitic foe.
It is a bit of a shame that so many of the Exocel types are handled so easily though. The typical soldiers go down to one headshot or a few body shots, and anything tougher is usually handled by the equipment you get as the game progresses. When you start off with just a pistol you do need to try and aim properly to conserve ammo, and even though the automatic weapon comes fairly soon as well, it can quickly find itself aching for some ammunition if you don’t manage it right. However, the game keeps dishing out new weapons, so when you start handling things like a shotgun, flamethrower, and grenade launcher, you’ve got the heavy duty tools you need to make easy work of anything you fight and enough ammo types where running low with one just means easily dispatching Exocels with a different option for a while. The game has the good sense to crowd many rooms with foes to make up for the individual fragility of your foes, and the layout of rooms can often help crowd you into places where you are at risk of taking some damage despite your power advantage. Still, while save points are spaced out to keep some sense of danger, most moments that end up being threatening are ones with instant death hazards like the swaying ship or laser tripwires instead of the player worrying about the monsters they’re facing. Healing is at least limited by being used immediately on pick-up instead of the player having quick access to it during the fights where things do get tight, so there are some moments where Cold Fear can still put together a challenging battle.
THE VERDICT: Your time on the shifting stormy deck of the Eastern Spirit may be short-lived, but it does help to give Cold Fear an effective and unique opening area to make up for its more forgettable moments later on. For the most part, this survival horror game is easy to get turned around in and the Exocel menace doesn’t feel as dangerous as they should be, but much like your time on the unsteady ship deck, it can come together in a few interesting ways. Cold Fear doesn’t have enough highlight moments to make its 7-8 hour experience feel fully fleshed out, but the glimmers of inspiration make it a passable adventure for someone looking for survival horror in a unique setting.
And so, I give Cold Fear for Xbox…
An OKAY rating. Give Tom Hansen a map and make the Exocels a bit more durable and dangerous and you’d be well on your way to keeping Cold Fear more consistently engaging. Seeing the concept art galleries shows that Cold Fear was once going to be something much grander in scope with more twists on the Exocel enemies, but what we did get in the end still has some merit to it. It does feel a bit plain because of the power of the weapons or the need to figure out where you’re meant to be going, but there are memorable areas and fights that do combine dangerous elements properly or test your aim well. Survival and horror are both present and buoy a game that almost feels a bit too much like its retreading the basic ideas of early Resident Evil games again, but there isn’t much compelling to latch onto beyond the much lauded ship rolling. You’re getting a pretty typical horror game that plays well enough and has enough to its brand of monster to keep facing off with them mildly interesting, but it feels like the game we got is a compromise between design ambition and the realities of what the team could pull off. Darkworks still had the chops to bring it together into something decent and presentable, but its hooks are too few and far between to make Ubisoft’s first published horror game more memorable.
Cold Fear’s spot in the history of survival horror is perhaps its most interesting trait. It released three years before Dead Space would use a similar idea of parasites reanimating the dead, but Cold Fear is also clearly borrowing heavily from Resident Evil and other survival horror games when it comes to the gameplay. Unlike some of its predecessors it is free of tank controls and allows for free aim to make targeting easy, but Cold Fear still settles into an unremarkable spot in the genre’s evolution because its more intriguing ideas show up far less than its moments of generic monster shooting gameplay.