Cold Winter

Written by John Scalzo  on July 27, 2005

Review: There was talk of a James Bond game being titled Cold once...

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You are former MI6 agent Andrew Sterling. You have been captured by Communist China and are being tortured at one of their prisons for political prisoners. You have been beaten. You have been starved. Your fingers have been broken in an attempt to extract information. Your country has disavowed all knowledge of your existence.

Welcome to the world of Cold Winter. Mixing one part James Bond with two other parts of James Bond, Cold Winter brings you into that world of espionage, spies, counterspies and terrorists that gamers seem to love. With all this James Bond talk it's little surprise that Cold Winter seems to take after GoldenEye in every chance it gets. For those of you in a hurry, I'm going to cut right to the important part: We've seen almost everything in Cold Winter before. It doesn't do anything groundbreaking, but it does everything good. I miss games like that.

In the beginning, Andrew is broken out of his prison cell by his old friend Kim. Together they escape and meet up with Andrew's old partner Danny. This sets up the rest of the game's storyline and missions as Andrew and Kim get caught up in the spy game. Like I said, everyone familiar with the GoldenEye mission structure should be familiar with how Cold Winter works. Simple stuff like finding keys, moving to a certain point in a facility, meeting with a contact, planting bombs or cameras and of course, eliminating the competition.

All of this comes together with a very smooth control scheme that never makes you feel like you're out of control. The tight controls are easily combined with all of the run and gun necessary to get the mission done. This level of control is one of the things that Cold Winter tries to do new things with. Pressing X will grab almost any item, be it a table, a box, a wire fence, a latch to close blast shutters, anything. After you've grabbed the item a menu comes up (that is controlled by the D-Pad) that gives you options for the item. Wanna use the table as cover? You can. Wanna push that dumpster at your machine gun-toting adversaries? Sure, why not? It works very well and adds a bit of strategy to the fights.

Other strategic elements come into play elsewhere. Health is distributed through a syringe of adrenalin you carry with you at all times. Knowing when to use it and how to take cover to use it in the middle of a firefight is a big part of this strategy. Like the other GoldenEye, Rogue Agent, Cold Winter makes great use out of grenades. Watching the explosions and smoke bombs envelop the screen is quite a sight.

After all of the guards in an area are dead, it's time for more of the game's strategy. Standing over a guard and holding down X will search his pockets for items. You might find a strip of cloth or a metal shard, but if you took that guard out with a clean headshot he'll drop undamaged body armor. Perfect for a spy on the go such as yourself. Even aiming for the chest will yield damaged body armor and slapping together the leftovers will at least raise your body armor meter a little bit. If that's not your thing, do like Arnie in T2 and aim for the knees. They'll buckle under the guard's weight and it's all smooth sailing from there. On top of that, every box you run across is searchable, and the most important ones are even marked "AMMO".

However, for all this newness, Cold Winter falls back on one favorite FPS trap: the exploding barrel. And in the world of Cold Winter they all come complete with a big "Danger! Flammable!" sign emblazoned on the side. As I was playing through it I couldn't decide whether it was a nostalgic throwback and or if it was an old remnant of the Doom days. We'll say it's both only because shooting an exploding barrel and watching a guard fly to his death (while on fire!) can never really get old.

Cold Winter takes it's espionage storyline very seriously with some great cutscenes that propel the story forward. It's not going to win an Oscar, but the movie scenes are very cinematic and the voice acting is incredible. Even the voice acting in game from Andy and Kim provides a nice bit of chatter. Again, the storyline doesn't really do anything special, but the presentation is top notch.

Cold Winter trips most spectacularly with it's graphics. They're not bad, they're just not up to par for the rest of the game. Pretty average FPS environments and the guards have a habit of blending in with their surroundings until you're right on top of them. They get the job done, but every once and a while you think to yourself that this game could have looked really great on the Xbox or the Cube.