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If Cold Fear is going to be remembered for anything, it’s the way it does the sea. Anyone could have had the high concept – Cold Fear is basically an ocean-going take on Resident Evil – but few developers would have taken the imaginative leap of making the sea not so much the backdrop, as the biggest monster of them all. As a result, Cold Fear’s opening is simply brilliant. The plot’s jump-off point – you’re a lone survivor of an investigative mission, trapped on a seemingly abandoned Russian whaling vessel – may be as clichéd as they come, but the way the rain lashes the decks while the waves pound the sides sends you reeling, even before the whole environment pitches and yaws in a truly stomach-churning way. It’s a brilliant, visceral moment of gaming, the sort that whets your appetite for things to come.

And the tragedy of Cold Fear is that it never quite meets that early promise. Like Capcom, the developers at Darkworks seem to have understood the central problem of the survival horror game: it was becoming too predictable, too safe, too dull, too pedestrian. In the simplest terms, shuffling zombies and the same old gloomy settings just don’t cut it any more. And Darkworks came up with pretty much the same solution to undead ennui: make your zombies faster, make them smarter, make them pack a harder punch. Like Resident Evil 4’s infected villagers, Cold Fear’s rotting wretches practically sprint towards you and wield a mean slashing weapon, and they won’t play nice until their heads have been blown off.

This, combined with the shipboard setting, is enough to put even the most seasoned survival horror fan of their guard. As the lighting flickers below decks and the scene rolls steadily left then right before you, there’s a little of that excitement you remember from the original Resident Evil or – before that – Alone in the Dark; that sense that you’re on your own, anything can happen, and all bets are off.

If only the game had taken this thinking further. Where Resident Evil 4 strips back its more plodding elements and the lazy gameplay structures that inhibited player enjoyment, Cold Fear still has one foot stuck firmly in the past. It still feels ponderous. Your hero is slow to move and slow to react, and the pace is constantly slowed down by old-school ‘find key to open door’ tedium.

This is a disappointment, but it doesn’t spoil the experience altogether. What does is the combat. Again, the game tries hard to make it work, with the view switchable between the old-school third-person-from-a-wacky-angle perspective, and the new-school behind the shoulder perspective for edging round corners and taking careful aim. The bad news is that the implementation just isn’t as good as Capcom’s. Precise aiming is a nightmare, and while this doesn’t matter with the early contingent of Russian goons, the zombies are a different matter. Take their speed and unpredictable movement, add the weak pistol that you start with, then factor in the movement of the ship, and it’s practically impossible to blast undead heads to kingdom come. The best your reviewer could do was shoot them once to knock them down, then try to shoot their heads off while they’re prone. It works, but it’s a terrible waste of ammo, and this is in fairly short supply.

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