I don’t write much about survival horror games. It’s not a genre I love with any sort of passion, but it is definitely one I find intriguing, especially when it comes to developers finding new ways to make things creepy and unsettling to players.
My experiences with survival horror begin with the most famous survival horror franchise of them all, Resident Evil. But not the original titles on PS1 – though I remember being at a friend’s house when I was younger where he played Resident Evil 2 trying to unlock The Tofu Survivor. No, I’m talking about the early 2000s doldrums period of the franchise, when the series was struggling where exactly the series should go from those PS1 games. Games like the 2002 Resident Evil remake, Resident Evil 0, Code Veronica X, that kind of stuff. Before Resident Evil 4 came out and suddenly changed everything.
With Resident Evil taking the fairly niche survival horror genre into the mainstream, various developers from around the world would release their own spins on the genre. Some, like Konami’s Silent Hill franchise, leaned a lot more into the psychological Japanese horror. Others would opt to take a few pages from Capcom’s playbook and make their own spin on it. Today, we’re talking about a bunch of folks based in France taking that playbook and running with it. That game was Cold Fear.
Released in late 2005 for the PC, PlayStation 2 and Microsoft Xbox, Cold Fear was basically a more “western” take on the survival horror genre popularized by Resident Evil. This was developed by Darkworks, a French game development studio best known for Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare, the fourth installment of the progenitor to the survival horror genre.
Before playing Cold Fear on the recommendation of a few friends, all I knew about this game was Mega64 doing a few promotional videos for the game, featuring Rocco Botte portraying a games journalist asking developer Gunther Galipot – fake dubbed in a bad French accent by Botte – about the message of the game, while the rest of the Mega64 crew film themselves doing jumpscares at random folks in a Costco. In hindsight, It’s kinda surreal how much Mega64 made videos that made fun of the games they were hired to promote. Wonder if they ever got in trouble over that.
Spoilers for Cold Fear within.
So the story goes like this: You play as Tom Hansen, a member of the United States Coast Guard. You and a squad of soldiers are sent onto a Russian fishing boat going wildly off-course during a massive storm to investigate what’s going on. Suddenly, the rest of your squad gets killed off by weird parasitic monsters. Armed with only a 1911 pistol, Hansen must figure out what’s going on and stop this whole mess.
At one point, Hansen discovers a Russian scientist who’s severely wounded and eventually infected by the monsters, and tells Hansen to find his daughter Anna, who knows what really happened to the people on this ship, which leads to Hansen and Anna going to a derelict oil rig that’s the home base for more dangerous infected.
Much like its contemporaries, there’s a lot of reading material that explains what’s going on – another common survival horror trope – and it’s decently written here, even if it’s a bit derivative. Cold Fear isn’t doing anything particularly unique to this genre story-wise, and that’s perfectly fine here.
Hansen is given a pretty massive arsenal to deal with throughout. While he initially only has his 1911 sidearm, he does pick up an AK, a shotgun, a flamethrower, and a grenade launcher, and you’re gonna need those for fighting a lot of the infected. There’s also a special speargun, which can confuse monsters and attack their friends, but it never really worked out for me for the several times I tried using it as intended. Most of the time I just dumped rounds into them until they died like all the other guns.
While this game came out after Resident Evil 4 and its over-the-shoulder camera system that would be endlessly copied after, Cold Fear primarily sticks to the tried-and-true methods of prior survival horror titles: The fixed camera system used in Alone in the Dark in the smaller more claustrophobic areas, and a controllable third person camera akin to most 2000s-era action game in wide open areas. Cold Fear does have something equivalent to RE4’s aiming system here, but it’s not exactly smooth as it was in that game. There is one big upside that Cold Fear has over Resident Evil 4, though: you canmove and shoot at the same time, something Resident Evil would never really tackle until later installments.
The aiming is perfectly fine for what it is, but having to switch between those fixed cameras to the over-the-shoulder aiming system can can take a bit of getting used to, and for me was a bit disorienting in spots. Mastering the combat system is essential, as a good chunk of the smaller enemies are absolute pains in the neck to deal with. Often they’ll be around in the wild, but in other cases they’ll come out of the body of an enemy infected you just eliminated. This means once an enemy has been shot and taken down to the ground, you gotta wait a second to see if a smaller monster emerges.
These little bastards will jump up onto ceilings and slowly suck out the life of Hansen unless they’re shot down. This kinda ruins the pacing in some areas, especially in some later combat-heavy sections where you’re swamped by several enemies emerging from the floor. In a sense, it kinda reminds me of the “crimson head” mechanic from the 2002 Resident Evil remake, where if you didn’t burn a zombie or blow its head off, they’d come back faster and deadlier. It’s that kind of annoying.
I also suffered a frequent bug where I’d tap the fire button once, and immediately start dumping an entire magazine of AK ammo into a low-tier enemy when I just wanted to do a short burst of fire. There was also moments where if I dared to ALT-TAB out of the game, the game would glitch out and show dark wavy graphics, forcing me to have to restart the game from a previous save to fix it. Granted, these are likely issues with the game running on modern computers and probably does not happen on, oh say, the PS2 version, so I’ll give them a pass on that.
One of my biggest frustrations I have with this game is its saving system. Saving can only happen at predetermined story beats within the game, and not at any available time. There’s a part later in the game where Hansen has to navigate a bridge where laser tripwires were set up, and tripping any one of the lasers will blow the oil rig to smithereens, thus I had to go back to my last save and redo the last 20 minutes of progress. I tend to prefer save-wherever systems in games and I really wish Cold Fear had that as an option.
But my biggest issue involves the final boss. Hansen has to distract this giant monster with guns so Anna can plant a few bombs to blow up the whole base. If the boss grabs Anna, she dies and you fail the mission. Shooting the boss will cause it to charge at Hansen and of you’re not prepared to dodge, you’ll take a bunch of damage. Naturally, the final boss has two phases, and failing or dying at any point sends you right back to the beginning of the fight.
When I got to this point, I was at about half health and low on ammo on some of my major weapons. While there’s ammo pickups in the major boss arena, there’s no health pickups. Since this is a mix of a proper boss fight and a “protect the VIP” mission, it meant I had to not only keep track of my health and ammo, but I had to make sure the boss wouldn’t grab Anna at any point. It took me an hour of swearing and anger, partly because of how clunky the aiming system can feel in a fight that’s very combat-focused. It’s the worst thing about this game. Final bosses in survival horror games being absolute pains-in-the-ass isn’t a new thing, but that final boss in Cold Fear was a new level of bullshit.
In spite of my frustrations and how derivative it felt at times, Cold Fear was a delight to play. It’s a B-tier Resident Evil clone. Granted, there’s likely other inspirations Darkworks used – like Alone in the Dark, of course – but you can’t deny there’s a bit of that Resident Evil DNA in parts. Though, I don’t think they set out to deliberately make a RE clone, it just came out that way.
Sadly, Cold Fear would end up being Darkworks’ final released game as a developer, with their next game, I Am Alive, being in development hell for several years before being taken over by Ubisoft and restarted in-house. I talked about I Am Alive in a previous post, which you can read here. (As far as I can tell, only a handful of things from Darkworks’ iteration of the game stayed in the final product, thus I don’t really count I Am Alive as their final game despite them being credited there.)
As for Ubisoft, they definitely got out of dodge with this genre, as they sold the rights to a few of their older games, including Cold Fear and I Am Alive, to Atari earlier this year. Judging how they’re basically poised to be “the guys who pump out new Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry games” and nothing else, I think this is likely a better outcome.
I like Cold Fear. You rarely see big AAA publishers release survival horror games these days. Besides Capcom and Konami, the only other option is games by smaller indie development teams, which can be kind of a crapshoot. You either get something really good like Amnesia: The Dark Descent, or you end up with dozens of knockoffs of PT made in Unity with stock assets. It does seem with games like the newer Resident Evil titles as well as a solid remake of Silent Hill 2 that we might be getting a survival horror renaissance, which would be pretty darn good, honestly.
You can pick up Cold Fear on most modern digital platforms like Steam for cheap. Though, with Atari owning this franchise now, I wouldn’t be surprised if a Nightdive Studios remaster is in the works, like they did with The Thing, a 2002 video game sequel to the John Carpenter film of the same name.Would be nice to see them try to update the game with a more modern camera mechanic or a save anywhere system. Then again, the original game works fine without any major hiccups or tweaks, and it’s still good to play today despite the flaws I mentioned, so I’d say it’s still worth playing the original over waiting for a remaster.
As I finish writing this, I realize I need to branch beyond Resident Evil and dabble in other survival horror games. I hear that there Silent Hill franchise is kinda neat, and they just released a game in that series,Silent Hill f,that seems to be pretty good from the general consensus. Probably would be better than playing some mediocre budget FPS games from City Interactive built with the same engine from F.E.A.R., like I have been doing…
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