Cold War Review | I spy with my x-ray eye

As I have stated in my faq page, besides indies I review retro-games "that nostalgia forgot", that is retro-games with few reviews still online and not much covering from retro-gamers in general.

I like doing it because it give me a unique experience and it also shines a light on a game that may have been ignored at release, but has aged well over the years.

Sometimes I find fun experiences, other times I play still disputable titles, in few cases I even played games that still have a following from a dedicated fan base, but didn't really enjoy due to some controversial design decisions.

Cold War belongs in the category of games that didn't have a following back then and it sure can't get one today.

Aesthetics

Sneaking inside a russian office

The graphics used are what you can expect for a title that aims for a realistic style in 2005. The effort to make the in-game world resemble our own may have had sense back in the day, but it made everything age really poorly. Browns and grays are the colors you can expect the most and it gives everything a really dull tone. A sore note is for the cut-scenes, besides the in-engine ones, you mainly see standstills with a very saturated and cell-shaded look. I think the developers were going for a thriller graphic novel style, but it just ended up looking off and ugly.

The user interface is minimal, too minimal as a matter of fact, it's so small that I died very easily due to low health and I didn't heal properly because the health bar(the green one in the corner) doesn't really flash or says anything when you are hurt. It also doesn't show how much noise you make, only how visible you are, a noise indicator would have been really useful.

I also didn't like the animations, they looked clunky and weightless, they switched the animations poses in a mechanical way, plus the main character hunches a lot when walking, not a pretty sight to behold. A particular case that stood out to me is when you hit an enemy behind to knock them out. You would think that an action like that would require a decent use of strength, but not for this game, the main character doesn't seem to put effort on the head and the enemy just faints for kindness rather than blunt force.

The voice acting is kinda decent, it definitely was a bit on the monotone side of the spectrum, but it didn't bother me too much, so that's that.

Soundtrack is uninteresting and bland, it's lacking any kind of theme or unique motif.

Basically, the game isn't pretty to see or hear, neither would have been back in the day.

Game Mechanics

Crafting is almost your only way for getting new items

The title is a stealth game with crafting. Like many exponents of the genre, your main way of getting around is by sneaking while not been seen by the enemies. Your tools to accomplish such a task are the one you find around or taken by the knocked out enemies.

The protagonist has three bars: a health one, a sneak one and aim one. The aim bar is reserved to the x-ray camera, which I am going to talk later. The sneak bar tells you how much are you are visible to the enemies, the longer it is, the easier you are to see. A sound bar would have been useful, it's not easy to understand how much your noise makes without resorting to trial and error.

At the start of the adventure you are only able to sneak, hide in some spots, shoot your guns and knock out enemies from behind, later one with crafting you unlock more stuff to us, such as noisemakers, but gain no new abilities, meaning you are going to use the same strategy until the end, even if some craftable objects are a bit interesting.

Speaking of crafting, you are going to need a lot of stuff.

The junk you can find around represents the economy of the game: plastic bottles, rags, batteries, the documents that give you tech points and more. The documents are the only thing worth talking about, they unlock more craftable items, these ones are divided in 3 groups of 4 elements for group. To unlock the next group, you must research 3 objects of the previous one. Look carefully, all this stuff makes the difference between life and death.

In the first part of the game the junk is plentiful and relatively easy to find, but in the second one you are going to receive barely the minimum to survive, which can be frustrating if you are doing a no kill run.

Anyway, unique aspect of the game is an x-ray camera, which is able to see through walls, reveal the skeletons of the npcs and stun them when aimed at their heads, or explode a fire extinguisher and take down multiple targets at once.

This is one of few aspects where the game shines, not only the camera has a clear use throughout the entire game, it is also used in a specific situations in atypical and interesting ways. If there is one aspect I think is salvageable, it's this one. You can't aim forever, it's limited, but it also regenerate after resting for a while, meaning that the aim bar is basically superfluous.

About the quests and the saving system.

The quests are the usual you can imagine for a stealth title: go to a place without being seen, escort someone without them dying, neutralize someone etc. Nothing particularly interesting, but also nothing broken.

You can save anywhere, at any time and load any save you have made. You should save a lot since there isn't any kind of auto-save and it's very easy to die.

Let's talk about the levels

The level design is very frustrating, the lack of alternative routes makes a fight with the enemies almost an obligation. I will talk later on about difficulty and modifiers, all you need to know for now is that there is a mode which makes you lose if you kill anyone, which due to the lack of openness of the levels makes a pacifist runs almost impossible. Also the game has the tendency to recycle a lot of its levels. To be fair it does a decent job to contextualize the why, so it's not a deal-breaker.

Moving on to the enemies design.

There are 3 kinds of enemies you are going to face: civilians, guards and spetsnaz. Civilians are simply going to run away and find themselves a corner to stay safe while warning every one else on their escape. Guards is the most common type of adversary, they can shoot with a pistol and search for you if get spotted, but they have bad vision, as such hiding in a dark corner is going to be enough to avoid them and knock them out when they are turned. Spetsnaz is an advanced category of enemy and it's going to give you a really bad time. They posses a visor which allows them to see in the dark, cannot be knocked out, only duped using an item you have to craft, instead of a pistol they have a powerful rifle and on top of that they posses armor making them hard to kill.

For the first half of the game you face only civilians and guards, which are pretty manageable even in groups, but when the spetsnazs come everything can go south really fast. Don't make the same mistake that I did and activated pacifist mode, either choose another one or just story mode. There is even a section where pacifist is turned off, making this mode a useless hustle.

The enemies are very easy to fool, they can be stopped on their tracks with the right rhythm of movement, but they also have almost perfect aim, which makes shoot outs almost an execution unless you have a cover nearby.

So yeah, the AI is a bit broken and not really stimulating or fun to engage, at least they take cover too while shooting.

Passing on the difficulty selectors and modifiers.

There are three difficulties: easy, medium and hard, plus some modifiers that change an aspect of the game. The 4 modifiers are: story(no modifier), time-trial(you have to beat each level on a time limit), pacifist(can't kill anyone) and no alarms(don't activate any alarm).

 Again, don't make the same mistake I did, don't play on pacifist, there are section in the levels where it's impossible to continue without killing, I got stuck right at the end and was unable to complete the game fully.

Playing the game on medium difficulty on pacifist mode, I almost finished the game in less then 10 hours before giving up, probably would have taken the same time in story mode.

In short, apart from the x-ray camera, I don' think the game offers anything truly interesting, plus the broken AI does not help.

Narrative

I had one since I booted the game...

You are Matt Carter, journalist in search of a Pulitzer-worthy scoop, traveling to soviet Moscow in 1986 after receiving a tip about a secret meeting between the russian president and a couple of CIA figures. Meanwhile, the head of the KGB is conspiring to frame you and the 2 characters that are going to meet with the president in Lenin's mausoleum, so that the president will trust him with everything.

If this intro feels rushed it's because it is, from the starting cutscene you already know who the main villain is and his scheme, which in a story about unveiling hidden conspiracies is not a good start. This feeling of rush is persistent in the whole game and doesn't go away, you can guess most of what is going to happen, making the story feel shallow and predictable.

A better way to convey the feeling of conspiracy would have been to cut two thirds of the starting cutscene and unveil the backstory bit by bit while progressing, that way the feeling of discovery and "it all makes sense!" would have been achieved.

The tone stays on the same page of  "big conspiracy" without ever changing or giving some kind of relief or events to spice things up, making the story feel very unevolved. Considering also the fact that characters are bland and without any kind of unique characteristic or quirk, it just didn't make me care about anything that happened to them.

In conclusion, the game doesn't offer any kind of worth on the narrative side.

Recommendation:

---

 Had received more polish and expanded the story, Cold War could have been a decent video game, but it ends up being a broken title with an interesting idea that I wish someone would pick up and build on.

Available on Steam.

---