Cold Fear manages to cover up its shortcomings quite well despite a seeming lack of inspiration and poor execution.
The story of Cold Fear begins as a United States Coast Guard officer boards an abandoned Russian whaler that's been dead at sea for a significant amount of time. The comrades who board the ship with the USCG officer go missing shortly afterward after a firefight on another part of the ship.
The rest of the story can best be explained as a mix between Resident Evil 4, The Thing, and whatever horror story had a ship in it. For the Resident Evil portion, a large corporation has infected the people residing on the ship with a parasite that takes complete control of their hosts and makes them attack people mindlessly. As far as The Thing goes, these creatures that infect the crew members look a whole lot like the smaller things in the John Carpenter film (sort of a mix between an elastic band and a headcrab). In fact, the story in general suspiciously sounds like a generic horror rip-off.
With the story leaving such a gaping hole in Cold Fear's appeal, the gameplay comes along to heal up the wound with a few innovations. The first interesting element is the use of the ship as a natural enemy. Since Cold Fear takes place during a violent sea storm, the whaling ship gets knocked around so much that the player's concern will be focused more on the waves trying to wash the character overboard than the enemies trying to chop the officer into little tiny bits.
A resistance gauge compliments the stormy ship by allowing the player to avoid being washed overboard by grabbing a ledge or take less damage from enemies when its full. The gauge can decline in one of three ways:
1. Running
2. Quick time events
3. Being hit by a wave
When the resistance gauge reaches zero, the player can be easily washed overboard or killed since attacks will do more damage. Thankfully, the gauge refills if the player walks around a little or stays still for a bit. The amount of opportunities to do so is a luxury, though.
The resistance gauge, as mentioned previously, is also used for quick time events in which you press the B button repeatedly to fill up a seperate bar and then pull the R trigger to blow the offender's head clear off. The lack of variety in button presses does eat at the fun of it over time, but its used so sparsely that it won't be noticed until the last parts of the game.
Unfortunately, not all of the gameplay is spotless. Cold Fear is obviously a rip-off of Resident Evil 4 when it comes to the basic controls and camera angles. The over-the-shoulder shooting perspective and laser sights on almost every gun is exactly like Resident Evil 4 with the exception that aiming seems to be a lot smoother in Cold Fear.
Saving is also a major problem throughout the game. At the start, there's so few opportunities to save that the player might have to start the game all over again after 30 minutes. On top of that, the lack of direction the game gives you and the lack of a map will force the player to wander around the place for anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour until they find a small door they didn't notice before.
The worst offender in Cold Fear is the sound design. Most of the music consists of techno beats that only make the game seem more action-like than a horror game. The sound effects aren't easy on the ears either since the guns sound muffled and the head explosions sound like someone stomped on an orange. Even so, the only remotely good part of the sound design is the voice acting. The voices for the Russians is excellently done but the voices for the English-speaking characters are the stuff of old-school Resident Evil games (although not quite as bad).
With so many good and bad parts to the game, there was only one portion that seemed to be both a pain and joy throughout: the difficulty. Cold Fear has one of the strangest difficulty curves I've ever been a victim of. At one point, you have a motherload of ammo and weapons strapped on you with full health; and the next level you're lying face-down on the ground with a sliver of health and only a pistol with a meager amount of ammunition to pop off the swarms of furious Russian zombies to come. Admittedly, its easy to die in this game if you have brief moments of stupidity (like not looking behind you when you hear a sound), but most of the deaths is actually caused by how easy the officer can fall off into the raging sea. Again, some of the overboard deaths will be on the player's head but some areas are so strangely mapped that it makes it nearly impossible to grab a ledge to pull yourself up on.
Overall, Cold Fear is a mix between innovative gameplay and rip-offs. Its worth a play for the parts where you're outside on the ship's deck, but the rest is bland and has been done before. At the very least, Cold Fear deserves a rent. Still, its not like you'd be missing anything huge if you ignored it.