Cold Fear™ Reviews

its alright

I did not have fun with this game almost at all. To be quite frank, it's probably the worst experience I have ever had with a video game. And it is therefore very hard for me to recommend, there are a few caveats with this however. Because it does genuinely have some redeeming qualities. Which i will get into. It's a Resident Evil clone, that's not exactly hard to see. The enemies are literally a zombie virus. And they are called exocels. The main gameplay loop is literally identical to Resident Evil. You have guns to shoot the enemies. You find ammo laying around and have to manage your ammo so that you don't run out, by being precise or by using another weapon. If you like Resident Evil and games like it i could give this game a recommendation but then and only then would I recommend this game. I would score the game like this. Story & Characters - 0/10 This is probably the blandest story I have ever had the displeasure of experiencing. It was a hard choice if I wanted to give it a 5/10 for how painfully generic and cliched it is, or a 0/10 for how much I hated it. I opted for a 0/10. It is genuinely the most uninteresting story I have ever seen. And i watched the Siberia movie that Keanu Reeves played in. Even that was a 1/10 for me. Cold Fear however, manages to be the only story I have ever experienced that I have given a 0/10. Why is this? Well let me start. The characters are nonsensically bland, and have no depth or development at all. Not just that, but scenes of the characters even existing almost doesn't exist, i would guess about a few minutes of screentime for the characters that are not the protagonist, and the protagonist manages to be even less interesting than all of the other ones. The main antagonist only appears for a brief scene and then the final boss fight, and he is neither interesting nor is the fight any fun. Anna is the only character you are supposed to have some attachment to. But she neither has any depth nor is interesting. Gameplay, Controls & Mechanics - 2.5/10 Being a Ps2 era game, there is bound to be some jank, the game is actually 20 years old in just a few weeks as I'm writing this review. Though yes the controls are pretty bad I actually tend to be fine with this. It did not drag down the experience that bad since I tolerate jank and bad controls. But with all of the other flaws i've given it a pretty low score. The way the camera works is that it is not a free cam but rather locked in like many other games of this era. At the time it was probably not that bad, but it annoyed me thoroughly many times. For example, there was a scene where you run away from a wall of flowing water. The thing about this is that the camera changes three times in this scene. And the W key is the same way, so forward, regardless of camera. So in the two places of the scene you are looking towards the water. I walked towards it and died. I only died this way two times but I hated it. The combat is a little bit janky as well. Certain enemies are very annoying to deal with because of the way the camera acts. I played on Easy so it wasn't hard, but it still managed to be very annoying. Horror - 5.5/10 The game had genuine scenes of horror that scared me. Which is hard to do mind you. Not tooting my own horn just saying it. But I did genuinely get a bit scared sometimes. And there were a bunch of nicely crafted horror scenes and setpieces. Such as enemies spawning behind cover, a scene in the early game with a crawling exocel and the underwater segment. This, and the next point was the two only redeeming parts of the experience however, and they were far and few between. Progression - 8/10 This is the strongest part of the game for me. Just like in Resident Evil and similar games you progressively unlock more powerful weapons. I thoroughly enjoy progression curves like this. I was genuinely interested in what weapons I would find throughout the game. And I was always happy to get an upgrade. When I got the shotgun I let out an audible sigh of relief. And when I got the flamethrower I was more than happy that I could finally burn the enemies to a crisp in my frustration for the rest of the game. Personal Enjoyment - 0.5/10 I absolutely hated this game. All together the playthrough took me 6.1 Hours but that was over the course of a month. From Jan 20 - Feb 25. And that was because I absolutely dreaded playing it. I managed to finish though. Overall - 2.5/10 Personal bias aside, it probably is not that terrible. But it's bad, really bad in my opinion. As I said, if you do not like Resident Evil, then avoid this game. It's not a good introduction to Resident Evil either, because you could just do that with a Resident Evil game. I do not recommend this game at all! 👎

Probably the only game I know that was designed to make you seasick and absolutely succeeds at it.