SAGATYD: Start A Game And Then You Die

Author's Rating:

Pros: Good graphics, interesting idea.

Cons: Too difficult by far, bad camera angles

The Bottom Line: 
With a little bit more tweaking and polishing, this game could have been a classic, but in its present state it’s just another average game.

Author's Review
"In Cold Blood" is an interesting combination of two genres. Take the stealth elements from Metal Gear Solid and the item based puzzles from the Broken Sword or Monkey Island series, and you’ll have a rough idea of what to expect from the game. You play the game as secret agent John Cord, who has been captured by the enemy and is forced to tell them about all the jolly adventures he’s had. Basically you’re reliving his memories, so if you happen to be shot to death then it will all just be attributed to a memory lapse in the mind of Mr. Cord.

When taking part in a game where weapons are involved, I naturally understand that I stand the risk of being killed by them. But very few people will be able to put up with the weapon involvement in this game; being killed in excess of twenty times on the first level is NOT my idea of fun. Pretty soon I started seeing death omens behind every corner, meaning I was saving my game every two minutes. This lead to some stilted play, and it did ruin the experience of it all. It’s a game with the potential to be enthralling; if you can get into it then it’ll completely absorb your concentration... but bringing up a menu every time my character blinked destroyed any immersive capabilities it might have had.

As written above, "In Cold Blood" does place a heavy emphasis on stealth. Being seen by a guard will often alert five others to your location, so you’re going to have to be quiet! Sneaking up behind a guard and placing a quick karate chop on the back of his neck is the optimum way of avoiding a firefight, but camera problems can mess up this whole procedure, along with some other aspects of the game. The cameras are all in set positions (Resident Evil is another example of this), and because of this John can be just a speck on the horizon at times, and making a little dot behave sneakily is not an easy thing to do!
Your gun is actually quite a useless thing for the majority of the game: you can’t use it for fear of drawing attention to yourself, the aiming on it is terrible, and firing repeated shots is equally difficult. The gun and camera work could very well be attributed to half your deaths!

The other aspect of the gameplay is one of puzzles, finding certain items and getting them to interact with each other is as important as being stealthy. To find everything you’re going to have to do a bit of exploration. But searching dead guards, or looking for anything else that might be useful can be tricky when there are people patrolling for you! However, things have been made a little simpler with an uncanny technique, if John walks past something of interest he will turn his head to look at it! If one ignored the fact that missing something in the first level could hurt you three hours later, then this element of In Cold Blood could almost have been a winner!
John has only one other little thing up his sleeve - actually it’s strapped to his arm! A "REMORA wrist-watch" is what they call it, and it’s a nifty little tool that you can use for hacking into computers, communicating with other characters and searching through an information database. Using it is perhaps the most interesting part of the game, as you’ll need it to be stealthy AND solve puzzles!

The visuals of "In Cold Blood" are fairly good for a Playstation game, with some gorgeous lighting effects being the highlight of it all. They do have a bad habit of looking a tad grainy though, and moving into a new area can bring a little bit of slowdown, but they still look nice!
The characters are modelled well, and their animations are good enough. However they can sometimes blend into the backgrounds, causing you to lose sight of them.

Music will only rear its head at a dramatic moment, and although it is a great effect, more music would be preferable.

"In Cold Blood" is certainly a different game from most of them out there at the moment, and it certainly was an interesting concept, no doubt about that. It was just let down completely by some poor execution in the gameplay area, and the many, many deaths that you’re likely to suffer. With a little bit more tweaking and polishing, this game could have been a classic, but in its present state it’s just another average game.