Cold Winter review

I don’t know about you, but I’m finding it harder and harder to distinguish between first-person shooters as every year goes by. There are exceptions – the sheer magnificence of Half-Life 2, the exuberant stylisation of a Time Splitters: Future Perfect, the hard-edged stalking of Riddick or the gorgeous island scenery of Far Cry – but between the clichéd sci-fi and crowded WWII military camps it’s getting harder and harder to tell these games apart. Even on the PlayStation 2, which has fewer grade-A shooters than the Xbox or PC, there’s a feeling that your game really needs something special these days to make it worth playing.

Cold Winter is a bold stab in the right direction, its central good idea – and not the only one by any means – being a change of subject matter. Now, FPS games have taken on espionage before, most notably with the classic GoldenEye and EA’s rather less classic Bond blockbusters, but Cold Winter takes a very different tack. In cinematic terms, it’s closer to the world of the recent Bourne movies than any Bond, and it’s probably got more in common with the hard-edged British military thriller than anything else. Like the far more gung-ho Splinter Cell series, Cold Winter doesn’t want to give you a world of fast cars, exotic locations and cool gadgets. Instead, it wants to put you in the nitty-gritty of real-world black ops and dirty politics.

And it really, really means it. From its opening, with your agent hero disavowed and left to rot in a Chinese prison, Cold Winter goes out of its way to convince you it’s a grown-up game. The violence, courtesy of a rag-doll body physics system and some blood-splattered damage effects, is going to come as a shock to anyone more used to TimeSplitters or Medal of Honor, there are some mildly unpleasant scenes of torture, and there’s an awful lot of f’ing and b’linding. In fact, the game goes a little bit OTT in this respect; we all know that military hardnuts and terrorist killers are prone to being potty-mouthed, but does every second line of speech need a f**k and a sprinkling of s**ts to pass muster?

Still, this approach gives Cold Winter its own distinctive feel, but the developers at Swordfish Studios go beyond that with some other realistic touches. After Half-Life 2, nobody is likely to be dazzled by the fact that you can pick up and throw crates or topple tables and duck behind them, but Cold Winter’s physics engine is still quite impressive for a console game. Restricting the player to two weapons at a time also keeps things away from the realms of Rambo heroics, and while the decision to give the player an infinite health pack, usable at any time, seems strange at first, it actually works better than you might expect. It won’t save your bacon when you blunder into action without thinking – healing takes a little quiet time to work – but it will keep you from constant returns to the last checkpoint. As these are evenly spread throughout the levels, I’d say that Cold Winter hits the balance between challenge and frustration dead on.

What’s more, Cold Winter shows more than a glimmer of intelligence at work in other areas. Some of this is of the artificial variety, with a surprising proportion of your enemies prepared to take cover or scramble to outflank you rather than just run wildly into your stream of gunfire. Smart thinking also comes through (though not always) in the level design, with a scattering of superbly scripted action moments for each mission, and some interesting objectives to be completed.