Cold Winter - exclusive playtest

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[b]Cold Winter - exclusive playtest[/b]

Ah, we were this close to becoming a secret agent. Honestly, we\'d circled an ad in the employment section of the paper but unfortunately there was a missprint in the phone number, and to our immense disappointment the number printed was actually for the Post Office in Bermagui (incidentally if you do ever call the Bermagui Post Office; ask for Dawn - she\'s lovely and very understanding). So instead we applied for \'game writer guy\' at this very site, and the rest is history - although we still maintain an air of chauvinistic arrogance when speaking to the girl at reception and introduce ourselves surname first, then first name, then surname again when we meet people; just to appear at least a little bit dangerous and sexy.

So it\'s just as well we have videogames to act out our childhood fantasies for us (well, except for the ones about Heather Locklear). We\'ve blazed away numerous times in the role of 007, donned a mullet and pondered the purpose of CODEC conversations as Solid Snake several times over and performed countless shadowy split-jumps with old Sam Fisher, so it would appear that our appetite for espionage has been well and truly catered for. However, Vivendi\'s PS2 exclusive online action extravaganza Cold Winter is a spy game with a difference ... oh, and a lot of blood.

[b]Running hot and Cold[/b]

Somewhat like the beginning of the most recent Bond film, Die Another Day, Cold Winter opens with the game\'s protagonist MI6 agent Andrew Sterling being captured by the Chinese (it was the North Koreans in the Bond film) and submitted to particularly violent torture - all rather graphically realised by the CGI intro (they even brutally snap one of his fingers as he slumps bleeding in a chair - ouch!). Sterling\'s escape is infinitely more plausible than Bond\'s (from memory Bond was later incarcerated by the British before intentionally stopping his heart in order to then restart it and shock one of the medical staff with a pair of defibrillators - yeah, right!), as he is busted out by a former military contact and then, disavowed by the British Government, is put to work for a private security agency.

Before we continue we must first stress that Cold Winter is most definitely a game for adults only; the expletives are uttered more frequently than in an interview with Elton John, and the gore is extreme to say the least. It\'s not uncommon for enemies to bleed in FPS games, however it is rare (and PC series Soldier of Fortune comes to mind as another exception) that you can actually shoot off limbs and various other body parts, thanks to the implementation of the Karma physics engine. Shotgun an enemy in the face and you\'re treated to a shower of blood and cranium fragments on nearby walls. Then rather than vaporise into thin air, enemy corpses linger and draw flies, allowing more sadistic players to further mutilate them ie. machine gunning off hands and blowing off legs with grenades (the developers claim that each enemy has 14 \'dismemberment zones\'). Certainly not for the faint hearted (more for the cold hearted), but definitely a feature that adds to realism and tangibility of the world of Cold Winter.

The Karma physics engine extends to inanimate objects which can all be shot into pieces - from obligatory crates to explosive gas cylinders to tables and chairs and wooden doors. However you don\'t just have to shoot things to appreciate the physics, you can also pick up objects to throw at enemies in order to temporarily stun them, or even turn over tables in order to create a makeshift cover during a gunfight.

It\'s also impossible not to appreciate the gorgeous lighting effects used in Cold Winter, ranging from basic lens flares to impressive flame effects and billowing fog; there\'s certainly never a shortage of eye candy on screen.

[b]Hazy shade of Winter
[/b]
Another cool feature of Cold Winter is the item combination system. You still pick up the usual ammo, bulletproof vests and medpacks, but other seemingly useless items that you find can be combined together to create new weapons and tools. Find a bottle, a fuel can and a strip of cloth? You\'ve got yourself a Molotov Cocktail. Get your hands on some wire cutters and some metal wire and you can engineer a lock pick to break into otherwise unlockable doors. This RPG-ish element is a nice cerebral departure from the all-out action, which at one point during our hands-on with the game placed us in an intense one-on-one battle with an attack helicopter. Thank goodness for mounted Browning machine guns.

Also displacing the violence nicely are some strategic tasks; soon after downing the aforementioned enemy chopper we found ourselves frantically scrambling through the streets around our Middle Eastern hideout in order to plant surveillance cameras to keep an eye out for enclosing enemies. Cold Winter most certainly can\'t be faulted for a lack of gameplay variety.

Enemy AI is what you\'d expect in an FPS of this calibre; they duck and look for cover, and shout things at you in foreign languages, and overall provide a relentlessly imposing threat. The weapons each have a nicely tactile feel; the machine guns are suitably twitchy and the shotguns are pure, violent bliss. There\'s an arsenal of roughly thirty weapons to get your hands on throughout the game, including suppressed pistols, uzis, assault rifles, rocket launchers, knives, tasers and prototype assault rifles such as the HK G11. In fact we can\'t really think of any instruments of death that aren\'t in the game (except for perhaps a piano accordian *shudder*).
[b]
Winter of our discontent[/b]

If we did have to find flaws in Cold Winter, we\'d have to say that at times the player movement feels a little sluggish, and there\'s a noticeable lack of look sensitivity adjustment in the control options menu that will hopefully make its way into the final build of the game. But small gripes aside, PS2 owners should by all means welcome this Cold Winter early when it arrives in May, thanks to the absolutely superb physics, heart-stopping action, smooth and detailed graphics (thanks to the respected Renderware engine) and surprisingly strategic gameplay.

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