Cold Fear

Cold Fear is a survival horror third-person shooter played from either a third-person fixed camera perspective or an over-the-shoulder camera, depending on the player's preferences.

The main enemies in the game are Russian mercenaries and various types of zombie-like creatures known as "Exos" (creatures infected by a parasitic organism known as an "Exocel"). Exos include "Exomutants" (mercenaries infected with Exocels), "Exoshades" (creatures which can see perfectly in the dark), "Exospectres" (which can turn transparent for brief periods of time) and "Exomasses" (a hugely strong but deformed creature created as a result of a failed experiment). Most infected enemies can be knocked down with two or three shots, but unless the brain is destroyed, they will not die, and will eventually attack Hansen again. Players can destroy the brain either by shooting enemy in the head, or knocking them down and stomping on their head.

A Navy SEAL team deploys on a Russian whaler, the Eastern Spirit, in the Bering Strait, but is quickly torn apart by unseen creatures. CIA Special Agent Jason Bennett, remotely supervising the mission, orders any nearby government ships to investigate. S. Army Special Forces turned Coast Guardsman.

Unable to be extracted due to stormy seas, he investigates the ship alone. Exploring the Spirit, Hansen fights panicked Russian mercenaries and encounters countless mutilated corpses, including his superior, Lt. Lansing. He discovers the root of the disaster: parasitic creatures known as "Exocels," which were accidentally discovered on a Russian oil rig, the Star of Sakhalin, owned by Col.

Cold Fear was first announced at E3 in 2004 when the title was included on a list of upcoming games. According to Sony, the game was set to be published by Namco and was originally conceived, before any public announcements, as a 3D action game set in the Time Crisis series of games. On October 6, however, Ubisoft announced they would be publishing the Darkworks developed game in March 2005 for PlayStation 2, Xbox and PC. The game would be Ubisoft's first horror game, and Darkworks' second game, after Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare in 2001. A playable demo version was released in December.

To make the Eastern Spirit roll realistically in the storm, the developers had to write a completely new program. They found that making the ship move was easy, but getting it to respond to storm conditions was much more complex. As such, they created a complete roll editor, called the Darkwave editor, which allowed them to control the pitch (when the ship moves on the horizontal axis) and the roll (when it moves on the vertical axis) separately. The combination of moving the ship on both axes allowed the developers to create realistic ship movements.

Cold Fear received "mixed or average reviews" on all three platforms; the PlayStation 2 version holds an aggregate score of 68 out of 100 on Metacritic, based on thirty-nine reviews, the Xbox version 71 out of 100, based on forty-one reviews, and the PC version 66 out of 100, based on thirteen reviews.

Eurogamer's Kristan Reed was unimpressed with the game, calling it "a bit half-baked". He praised the opening of the game, arguing that, like Hansen himself, the player feels a strong sense of disorientation as they get used to being on the ship in the middle of a storm. However, he felt the strong opening soon gives way to clichés. He was highly critical of the absence of a map, arguing that because the environments all look similar, getting lost is a regular occurrence.