Tag: Cold Fear

Completed Cold Fear.
One of the worst design decissions is the C4 episode, where after clearing two rooms, you need to fight an invisible enemy in a room full of explosive barrels. One wrong bullet, and you need to repeat the entire episode again. And if you thought of running away: there are laser mines, which you can avoid, but the enemy can’t.
There is exactly one boss, and it’s a strange one. While Anna plants bombs, you need to distract her mutated father. If he catches her, it’s game over. He can also knock you off the platform, game over. Or, if you get knocked down, he can stomp you. Game over. If you manage to survive, the second phase is waiting for him to grab you to perform a QTE counter three times.

I was expecting some kind of plot twist regarding CIA agent that guides you, but no, nothing. You blow the platform and that’s it.

There are two main problems with Cold Fear.
First is unintuitive navigation. While Resident Evil is a maze you need to learn, Cold Fear is maze you need to unlearn, because it would constantly block paths behind you, forcing you to find new paths. You can mock Resident Evil for its thematic locks and keys, but remembering which door can now be opened in Cold Fear is far more difficult task.
The second problem is… lack of inspiration. Your weapons are: pistol, AK, shotgun, and a speargun that shoots capsules that distract enemies. The enemies are: zombie with cleaver, mercenary with pistol/AK and spider-like parasite. There isn’t much to go on.
At some point you decide to crash the whaler back into the platform it sailed from. You loose all your weapons and get infected by the parasite, but both resolved in a matter of 10 minutes, I’m not even sure why they bothered.
On the platform, we finally get our first boss fight. And it’s just shooting a russian dude until he dies. Hansen also removes his eye from the corpse for retinal scanner. Those Coastal Guards are sure hardcore.
You find more weapons on the rig: MP5 (why, if we have AK?), M79 grenade launcher, flamethrower (useless, unfortunately). And more enemies: hunter-like enemies that take far too many shotgun blasts to die, and frog-like invisible enemies.
Hansen infected again, in a span of an hour. And Anna is first rescued, then purposefully infected by her now mutated father, which of course reminds of Birkin from Resident Evil 2.

I didn’t know what I expected from this game. Resident Evil 3? Resident Evil 4? Honestly, it’s quite distinct from both. Yes, over the shoulder aiming and laser pointer is very much Resident Evil 4. But there’s much less focus on ammo management. There’s actually an upper limit of how much ammo you can carry for your pistol.
Technologically, it’s very impressive what they tried to achieve here. Dinamic shadows, water phisics, the way your character adjusts his balance according to ship’s sway, raindrops on camera, splashes of water that act as hazard. Speaking of hazards, on the main deck there’s a cargo that swings like a pendulum, and if you get in its way: you’ll get bonked.
Save system is a mix of checkpoints and saves. At key points you are asked if you want to save or not. The only reason you wouldn’t, though, if you are very low on health, I guess. Enemies drop both health and ammo, so for a survival horror, it’s quite aggressive. Sometimes I would finish off a zombie and loot it in the middle of a fight.
Speaking of zombies, they only die permanently after a headshot. And even after a headshot they can edject the parasite, which ironically does even more damage than a zombie with a cleaver. Landing headshots on a swaying ship using a gamepad is not easy. Maybe I should have picked PC version after all.
Storywise, its”The Thing ” all over again. Cartel reopens old russian oil rig, with the help of some exSoviet military and researches. But instead of oil they discover those exocel parasites, that infect dogs, humans and even orcas. Of course they start experimenting on the parasites in order to produce bioweapons. And here we are.