Cold Fear was the 2nd of the PS2 horror games that I played during October 2024 and, in a similar vein to Extermination, this feels more like an action game with a vague horror coating. Is the game particularly scary? I wouldn’t say so, though sensibilities and sensitivities on horror will vary from person to person. All I am saying is, if I am not wandering around an abandoned school, being harassed by malevolent spirits of dead children, I am probably going to be relatively unphased. So, what do we have for the setting of Cold Fear? A Russian Whaling ship in the middle of a choppy ocean? It hits some of the key concepts of horror setting, with the closed, isolated environment so that is a promising start. In hindsight, I can’t quite remember why our hero, Tom Hansen, is there, because for whatever reason we are there, it gets all a little superseded by reacting to things just going on. As soon as we start, we come across what is probably the biggest issue I have with the game, good to get the gripes out early, I suppose.
You start on the rear deck, with a relatively open area to explore. You don’t have a map or find one to help you notice there is a small set of steps you need to go down to progress. To get to these steps you need to totally ignore the rear deck space, with the swinging boxes and small cabin which look really appealing to explore. Sometimes the game doesn’t give you the best directions, and you’ll have a couple of moments where you are not sure where the game expects you to go. Graciously, these moments were few and far between, as far as my memory serves. Talking about navigating, because we are on a Russian whaling ship, as we walk around, you’ll see lots of Russian signage which if you aim at it, you’ll be treated to a translation of it, because Tom can read Russian, that’s handy!
Once we are orientated and on the right track, it isn’t long before we get our first look at combat. Credit to this game, your starting enemies are scared Russian whalers, crazy stuff is going on around them and they are going to shoot first and ask questions later. Interestingly, you are told via in-game documents, that you need to consider ammo conservation, use headshots or environmental elements to take out enemies and save ammo. This brings me to two points, point one, the game has ammo stations in a couple of key locations. Going to one of these restores ammo for ALL your weapons and as far as I could tell, these ammo stations don’t run out of harpoons, flamethrower fuel or grenades. Damn, that’s a luxury, the boxes of first aid kits runs out after so many uses! But we’ll touch on weapons later. We have point two on ammo conservation, as mentioned you are encouraged to go for headshots, which isn’t too difficult to do thanks to the laser sight on your pistol. So, you take your headshot, and you just watch the whaler’s heads pop in a small explosion of gore. It is honestly quite impressive! Even set piece dead bodies around the place aren’t immune to your desire for bloodlust, though double tapping random bodies on the floor isn’t a bad thing. The first time I did this, I was taken aback, I wasn’t expecting it to be so graphic and satisfying. You’ll probably be doing this a lot as well as body shots will take several bullets to take someone down and your actual maximum pool of ammo is on the low side. I think the pistol has a total ammo capacity of 49 bullets. 7 in the clip and 42 in reserve.
So, it isn’t too long till you encounter your first infected enemies because of course this is a story about some infectious agent that has started to run amok in a closed environment. The classics are always the best. Enemies in the first portion of the game come in two flavours, Russian whalers with guns and infected enemies with melee weapons. So, something that I want to give this game credit for, you are not coming in in the aftermath of the infection, you seemingly arrived during a mid-section of it. There are several set piece encounters where non-infected are battling infected, allowing you jump into the mix and cause problems. I quite like this; we are so accustomed to arriving after all the valiant last stands have been done. There is a third flavour of enemy you encounter during this section of the game, a little parasite thing which will totally mess you up if you get close, and an early encounter with these things is in a tight environment, giving them ample chance to start showing you why you need to deal with them quickly. They can also go into dead bodies and turn them into the standard infected grunt enemies. So, yeah, my advice, just make sure every dead body you see has its head removed, for safety reasons of course.
Something I do need to bring up very quickly, is the way this game handles saving. I don’t think I have ever played a game like this, that bills itself as a survival horror, that handles saves in the way a shooter might handle checkpoints in a longer stage. Essentially, you get the opportunity to save at set points in the game, after story beats or after certain objectives have been reached. The game is effectively a stage-based game instead of being a continuous adventure. There is no clever holding onto items to save a game to use them strategically when coming into tougher sections of the game, there is no going back to a save location after handling a particularly difficult section and saving your progress, ready for the next difficult slog. Truth be told, the save points aren’t terribly spread out, some sections are longer than others but usually the encounter difficulties are relatively evenly spread in my opinion.
The game is effectively split into two acts, the first being the whaling ship and after you have spent a bit of time running around you will make your way over to an offshore oil rig, which we learn is the source of the infectious agent. Though, it should be noted there are still a few more pockets of non-infected enemies bunkered down in a few areas, again, nice touch. It’s in this part of the game that the roster of enemies increases, though only a little bit. There are three more enemy types that get introduced, so all in all, there are about 6 enemy types, which feels a little low and the more monstrous enemies aren’t used a huge amount. Perhaps I see this as a gripe because there is always potential in games like this to have a lot of fun with enemy designs. Though, the token dog-like enemy being seldom used is probably a good thing as they can be really frustrating to fight, requiring quite a bit of ammo to put down.
Graciously, the game does give you a fair few weapons, a pistol, 2 machine guns, a shotgun, a grenade launcher, harpoon gun and flamethrower. Though, I must admit, the heavier weaponry main function is to deal with the monstrous enemies. The shotgun is especially useful against the previously mentioned dog-like enemies due to the fact it can knock them down, forcing them into a recovery animation. The gunplay in this game is fine, there isn’t much to say about it. Except maybe for the harpoon gun. The harpoon gun is a very strange weapon, it only has a max ammo capacity of 4, and when fired it caused all infected enemies to react in different ways. Some enemies will go towards it, as it gives off pheromones that attract them, one of them becomes incredibly aggressive to it. It’s less of a device for immediate self-defence and more a utility weapon, very useful against the monstrous enemies. But when you find yourself fully armed, we notice a small problem, that previously mentioned concern about ammo conservation seems to be less of a concern. There is always a concern when making games that you don’t accidentally create conditions where players can unwittingly soft lock themselves. In survival horror games this, I feel is a more prevalent issue. Providing enough ammo for the players to deal with all the obstacles in the game, plus additional to account for wasted ammo/missed shots is one way to deal with this problem. Resident Evil 4, which initially came out 2 months before Cold Fear, did something interesting, enemies can drop ammo and the chances they drop ammo is based on how much ammo you have on you. In short, the less ammo you have in your inventory, the higher chance ammo is dropped for certain weapons to a certain point. It is always interesting to see how survival games go about tackling this issue. I don’t think there are any right or wrong answers.
Ultimately Cold Fear is quite a fun game, it does feel more action orientated than horror focussed. The setting and ambiance is solid and honestly this might be more to do with the renderers available with PS2 emulation, it looks damn amazing. Unfortunately, if you are here for a story, it is light on that. This feels like this should be part of something bigger, almost as if it was a rejected plot for bigger franchise that the development studio took a punt on because, for the time the setting was unique and could provide a fun experience. It was probably, sadly, overshadowed by the fact that it came out within a couple of months of Resident Evil 4, which would be touted as genre defining and has the fortune of being developed by a major studio. This game probably flew under a lot of radars, and it is quite unfortunate, as this is an enjoyable experience, even if playing on Hard mode means you haemorrhage health at any given opportunity. There is an extreme difficulty, but the game itself sadly doesn’t have the greatest replay value in my opinion. Once you experience it once, the only thing to find on subsequent playthroughs is to make sure you collect all the journals and datafile stuff, but there is no reward for doing so. Even with Retroachievements I am finding myself hard pushed to come back to this game to pick up a couple of odds and ends, which may require 3 or 4 playthroughs in total. Honestly, if you have a good 6+ hours that you want to kill, there are much worse ways and less explosively gory ways you can do it.
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