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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The Cold Shoulder?, 27 Jun 2005
I'll admit, this game was more of an impulse buy than anything else and as pleased as I was to have brought it Cold Winter annoyed me from the word "go".Having put the disc in my PS2 I was alarmed to discover that I had insufficient memory card space, despite the box claiming that the game required just over 2MB it actually requires 2,610KB (2.6MB) plus another 95KB if you want to go online - so that's 3.1MB ladies and gents, or just under half a memory cards worth of space!!! And what does the game use this space for... well, as far as I could work out, nothing special, it only saves the weapons and level you're on! Although it doesn't even do that very well... Through out the game "checkpoint saved" appears on the screen, so naturally you assume that the game is very kindly saving as you go along... Oh no, you actually have to save the game yourself every time you finish a level which while not much of a hardship in itself, does frustrate when you play through the first time thinking your progress is being saved only to load the game back up to find that it was all lies! So having finally cleared out my memory card to actually play this game I got stuck in, the story is - to be fair - one of the better told plots for a game and does actually hold your attention, mainly thanks to the surprisingly good voice acting rather than the actual story itself. The missions all seem to fit the story nicely with the believable plot dragging you through the levels and helping to conceal the run of the mill level design in places (the plot really does flesh this game out). This games downfall comes (like so many FPS) in the form of interiors - I don't know what it is but Cold Winter excels outside however, once inside a building all concept of design seems to disappear to leave stark corridors and boring textures. This game does have some good points; the "rag doll" physics of the enemies the nicely designed later levels and the fantastic explosions... Shooting a barrel for the first time in this game made me hunt down another and do it again just to make sure that the first time I did it my eyes weren't deceiving me - that's how realistic the explosions in this game are. The weapons too are nice although not all that varied and while there are one or two stand out weapons a lot of the guns etc. are rather "standard" FPS fare. Cold Winter did surpass my expectations although it struggled (thanks to the memory usage mainly!) and for a relatively decent game it suffers from an inexcusably poor first few levels, they really are the most bland, poorly textured environments you're ever likely to be in. Although in the middle of a fire-fight with a few nicely placed shots at a barrel resulting in a hefty explosion scattering enemies and debris everywhere Cold Winter shines.
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