Cold Winter Updated Hands-On: More Single-Player and Multiplayer

Game Developers Conference, San Francisco--We recently had a chance to revisit the upcoming PS2 shooter Cold Winter from developer Swordfish Studios and publisher VU Games. The game will attempt to bring all the trappings of a full-featured PC shooter to the PlayStation 2, and it seems to be on the right track. In the single-player game, you play as a secret agent who must fight his way across the globe in pursuit of his mission, carrying up to 30 different weapons, plus grenades, which can send enemies and environmental objects flying, thanks to the game's use of the Karma physics engine. In multiplayer, you'll play as a guy who's looking to use the game's weapons and grenades to send other guys flying in modes like deathmatch and team deathmatch, last man standing, domination, and head match--a mode in which you attempt to carry around some poor slob's head for the longest time.

Dismemberment and modeled physics characterize Cold Winter's multiplayer and single-player modes. All multiplayer modes let you play games with up to four players on a split-screen with a multitap or with up to eight players over a PS2 broadband connection. The control scheme is reminiscent of other console shooters. You use the left analog stick to move and the right to aim, and you fire with the R1 button and throw grenades with the R2 button. L1 causes you to jump, L2 causes you to duck, and you can also use R3 to zoom in along your weapon's iron sights and use triangle to melee. Like with most recent console shooters, you can carry only two weapons at a time.

We played a bit of split-screen multiplayer on one of the game's 12 multiplayer maps with bots and found that the game seemed to work quite well. It ran at a steady frame rate despite explosions and heat effects, and we were able to use some physical objects to our advantage by blocking out doorways with boxes and taking cover behind them. The single-player portion of the game we saw--a level called Oatarra Compound--started off outside of what appeared to be a guarded estate in the Middle East. In the early part of the level, we were able to commandeer a nearby stack of tractor tires by knocking it over on its side and rolling it forward, essentially creating a moving riot shield to protect us from incoming fire on the rooftops.

Cold Winter seems to have come along extremely well and should hopefully end up being a highly polished game when it's released later this year.