Cold Fear is a good game that could have been better with a little better and more creative work.
Graphically Cold Fear looks pretty good. The only exception being that some of the animations look bad from like to time, particularly stomping the head of the dead body. Other animations look great like shooting the head of a body. The character models vary. Your character looks good, the zombie like people you fight don’t always look so good and since they didn’t make much of a variety of them to fight they could have made the one or two variations of them with a few more polygons. The environments look great, particularly the out door in the middle of an arctic storm with waves and rain smashing down everywhere. Don’t get me wrong it’s not a new graphical plateau there’s just a lot going on and it looks good enough that your not disgusted or amazed by what you see it’s just average Render Ware graphics put to good use.
The game’s sound may be it’s strongest attribute. There isn’t much voice acting but what’s there is serviceable. The guns, enemies, and environments sound good and realistic. The best part is the game’s music, real nice variety and quality. There is high paced action music for the action parked high-octane parts of the game and there is so methodical spooky music for the less adrenalin pumping portions.
The game is roughly eight hours if your lucky but I think it can be done a bit quicker. There really is absolutely no reason for a replay because you get nothing for it or to inspire it. The only bonus come from beating the game once and you get screen shots of the conception drawings for the whole game which is insanely and uninteresting and unappealing. Maybe if you could unlock the music it would be worth a replay. The game also suffers from a way to predictable and very unoriginal story. Which seems to be a blatant rip off the 1980s movie The Thing, which already has a game out for it so it doesn’t really need another one. Also the story goes to very long lengths to make the human like enemies not zombies but their Alien versions that act the same way and have the same goals: Brains! It’s basically The Thing meets Resident Evil in the water during an artic storm instead of the artic on land you fight on in The Thing. It also feature the same plot for the Aliens as The Thing, minors drill deep into the ice and Aliens come out and sneak into people’s bodies and they slowly become infected. There are a few decent moments of scary portions and well-directed scenes but for the most part it’s not too scary and the monsters are just to generic to be fear inducing or interesting. A game better left for horror junkies look for something decent to hold you over till the next top notch horror series releases a new title. As for those looking to play a horror game here or there, definitely stick to the well-known series in the genre.