At times it's an enjoyable action game, but in the end you just have to realize that this journey's not worth it.
In Cold Fear you play as Tom Hansen, a US Coast Guard sent to investigate a drifting Russian whaler in the middle of the Bering Sea. Soon things get out of hand and you’re fighting for your survival against inhuman enemies. Story starts of real strong, but somewhere in the middle portion it falls short and is in the end a really lame and predictable cheap B-movie plot. End sequence is just unfulfilling and will leave you sorely disappointment without any sense of reward what so ever.
Graphics in Cold Fear are not good, but the surroundings modeling a raging storm is really breathtaking when you first see it. Unfortunately most of the game is spent in an oil rig and not out in the open sea. This causes you to crawl through many industrial inspired metal-like corridors. Sound effects and music are absolutely the best thing that Cold Fear has to offer. Everything sounds correct and it feels like you’re in a rusty abandoned Russian whaler in the middle of a huge storm. Voice acting is great and musical score helps to bring an atmosphere of anxiety and claustrophobia.
The only new innovate in Cold Fear is the setting in a Russian whaler in the first portion of the game. Cold Fear uses the same kind of controlling mechanism as Resident Evil 4, although now you can move and shoot at the same time. Also the developers have learned something from Doom 3, because your light module is attached straight to your gun. Killing enemies is made a lot easier, if you just have patience to look around and use your environment. Shoot fusion box and drop an electric cable in the water; shoot a gas pipe to burn your opposition alive and so on.
Unfortunately the game uses fixed camera angels and there is no map what so ever. These two things combined makes it difficult to know where exactly you’re going, so be prepared to wonder around aimlessly. All of this is made even worse, because Cold Fear uses checkpoints to save your progress and there is no way to know in advance where the next checkpoint might be. This means that the biggest stress and challenge is to make it to the next checkpoint. When I play a game I want to have fun and I want the game itself to be the challenge: not its save system. Action sequences are sometimes enjoyable, but in order to kill an enemy you always have to get a head shot. This takes all the fun out of the shooting action and in return delivers frustration.
At times Cold Fear is an enjoyable action horror game, but most of the time and especially in the end of the game you just have to realize that this journey as a US Coast Guard was not worth having.