Cold Zero: The Last Stand

Look, I TOLD you to wear your bullet prooft vest today.

Philosophical types like to say "you never forget a good teacher". If the training section in this game is anything to go by, then the opposite is also true - it is deathly boring, and the irritating tutor does his best to ensure that you never forget him. Welcome to Cold Zero - a game that offers a poor introduction, but contains plenty of cannon fodder just begging to be shot and killed. Repeatedly.

John McAffrey is a member of the LAPD SWAT, and during a hostage situation he manages to shoot the hostage. He is forced to quit, and decides to set-up his own 'investigation' service - though no one is particularly interested in recruiting the services of a hostage killer, and things are going badly. The bank are hounding him to pay back all the loans, and he has as much chance of doing that as someone has of trading in their broken Master System for a PlayStation 2.

In desperation, John accepts a dodgy (but well paid) job and this brings him to the attention of 'Don', a member of the Italian mafia. Luckily for Mr McAffrey, Don merely wants to employ his services as opposed to fitting him out with a pair of concrete boots.

Work for Hire

ARGH! I said to paint the town RED!

And so the game is set - Don says jump, and you say "how high?” What follows is sixteen missions of you getting involved with the underground criminal fraternity, jetting around the world and encountering a brand new drug on the market that just so happens to be called... Cold Zero. Oh, those wacky game designers.

The quickest way to describe this game is a blend of Max Payne and Splinter Cell with a top-down viewpoint and camera system similar to Neverwinter Nights. You move your character by clicking the cursor to the location you want him to go, and off he saunters. Killing is done by moving the cursor over a bad person and then right clicking him. Bang-bang, he is now hopefully dead.

The game blurb boasts of there being over 100 weapons for you to play around with. Whilst there are certainly plenty of guns (pistols, sub machine guns, shotguns and rifles are all available) many of them do not seem to differ very much from each other. They all have their own individual accuracy, range and damage stats but most of the time you would be hard pressed to tell one from another when using them.

Take the Blue Pill, or the Red Pill?

Even the SWAT teams don't like trailer park trash

You can, allegedly, choose to play this game in a stealthy way or a 'guns-a-blazing' style - but to be honest I don't see how you could progress if you chose anything other than the sneaky direction, and this is all down to the frustrating way you control your character. Left click to move and right click to shoot sounds great in principle, but in practice it can be buttock-clenchingly frustrating.

If you are sneaking up behind someone, then it is fine - you move in close, stop and then fire until they are dead. If, however, they are running towards you then a dilemma of epic proportions confronts you. You can choose to move in the opposite direction whilst firing at them, but that means you have to first move the mouse and left click where you want to go and then move the mouse over your target and right click to fire at them. Moving and firing at the same time is virtually impossible.

On top of this, you may have to spin the camera by holding down the middle mouse button and moving the mouse left or right. Also bear in mind that you cannot just give an order to keep attacking either - if you want to fire just one shot, then you right click your target once. If you want repeated shots, then you have to keep clicking or just hold the mouse button down on your target. If you wanted to move after firing, then you would have to stop shooting first and the chances are that you would be half dead by the time you even got to fire again.

Professional Simplicity

One of the more exciting cut scenes on offer

Another confounding factor to go with all this is that your supposedly highly trained character is a useless shot. Far too often, the enemy will be firing round after round into you whilst you will be lucky to even hit them once from point blank range with a shotgun. Many times, you will be unable to actually target them because of an obstacle yet bizarrely they can hit you fine. Mind you, this game also allows the computer-controlled characters to shoot at you round corners, through walls and even through closed doors. It seems that the designers of this game were relying on gamers being happy to quicksave after every single person that they shot.

The objectives in the game are fairly basic, and tend to be of the 'find pink trumpet, go to the ice cream van' type. Sometimes, a new objective will appear mid-mission but only usually to turn off/turn on a power generator for some reason. This 'basic' template was obviously implemented to the enemy AI as well - your foes are like a bunch of robots that have been set the task to patrol a set area over and over again. It can sometimes be unintentionally hilarious, as well. If you wait round a corner for one of them and then shoot them they will obviously drop to the floor. When the next one approaches, they will see the dead body and run to check it out - which allows you to shoot them. You can then almost guarantee that another four guards will all do exactly the same thing.

Painting a Song?

I am looking for the teddy bears picnic, do you know where it is being held...?

I wish that I could say the graphics look good, but they are really quite poor, even with all the options (not that there are many) turned on. It is best described as a hi-res PlayStation game sometimes. The animation of the characters isn't too bad, although going from the crouch position to sprint mode is very badly done - do this whilst on the move, and your character will actually stop, stand up and then run.

The sound is a fair bit better. Most of the music is fine, and gives the levels a very nice atmosphere. Sound effects aren't too bad, with the gun sounds being adequate rather than spectacular. The speech for the in-game characters is pretty woeful, though. Often what they are saying will not match to what their speech bubbles say, and the 'acting' is dreadful. They sound as convincing as a 15 year old trying to talk his way into a nightclub.

Enjoying the Pain

John has never been keen on 'office types'

Despite all these gripes, I have to admit that I did get a fair amount of enjoyment from the game. Perhaps the one nice feature is the simple RPG aspect. When you kill enemies and complete levels you gain experience points, which allow you to rise in experience level. This then earns you skill points, which can be used to improve your character’s skill in various areas or even increase your strength so that you can carry more.

But really, the enjoyment I got was only because I managed to work around the various flaws in the game - mainly by quicksaving and quickloading on a frequent basis. However, this did have the effect of making the game extremely tedious and I was only ever able to bear playing one mission in any particular session.

The Last Stand

Here's JOHNNY!

I would have actually completed the game, if it wasn't for one aspect - on the second to last level it wouldn't let me finish the mission. The objective was a simple 'Leave the Airfield', and the game helpfully showed me the gate that I was supposed to be leaving through. I made my way over to this gate, and was quite chuffed that I had managed to avoid many of the guards. But when I went through the gate, nothing at all happened. It wouldn't let me leave the level. I decided to explore the rest of the airfield and found a map in one of the buildings, which resulted in another objective appearing - telling me find a map for the next mission. I still couldn't leave the level though! I actually ended up killing every single guard and exploring every single building, but to no avail. I either missed something microscopic or it is a horrible bug.

In all honesty, this was a fairly hard game to judge. Whilst at times I was quite enjoying it the annoying and glaring faults really hampered everything I tried to do. The only way that I was able to get anywhere was by liberal use of the quicksave function, which is not exactly the best way to play a game and reeks of bad game design. At full price, I cannot really recommend this game at all. If you are prepared to work hard and grit your teeth then you will get some entertainment from this title - however, with the amount of games available on the shelf you would be better off giving it a miss.