After so many delays and transformations, it's hard to believe that Capcom's Resident Evil 4 is nearly upon us, but it's by no means the only horror-themed adventure on the horizon. Ubisoft is currently developing a twisted game of its own for the PS2 and Xbox known as Cold Fear, a third person macabre excursion into the dark bowels of a seemingly derelict ocean liner.

Cold Fear takes place during the early nineties right at the conclusion of the Cold War. You play as Tom Hansen, a Coast Guard officer, who along with his team happens upon a mysterious and rather large ship in the Bering Sea. Seemingly abandoned, Hansen and his fellow crew members decide to investigate, but what they discover makes them wish they had never set foot on the strange vessel. The sight of a Russian experiment gone awry, strange creatures known as Exocells have escaped and turned the ship's crew into zombie-like monstrosities. With his friends slaughtered, Hansen must find his way off the ship or risk becoming its latest victim.

While Ubisoft is stressing that its game is different than Resident Evil 4, I'm still having a difficult time agreeing since Cold Fear's over-the-shoulder perspective basically makes it look like RE4 on a boat, which is why I'm so attracted to it. However, the game has several features that set it apart from its competitors, chief among them how you'll interact with the gameplay environment. About half of Cold Fear takes place on the boat (the other half supposedly takes place on an oil platform) and what the developers have done is plop the ship right in the middle of a terrifying storm, so the ocean pitches it all over the place and it's always rocking back and forth. It's an extremely cool feature. In fact, it's so well done that some of you may actually get motion sickness from playing the game!

I had an absolute blast during my twenty minutes of play. It feels very much like RE, but Cold Fear has a look all its own. While on deck, waves crash over the ship and objects swing about. I positioned enemies in the way of large hooks that knocked them over the side, and I (naturally) made use of exploding barrels. Inside the boat I sometimes needed Hansen's flash light, as some rooms were bathed in darkness, and more often than not as soon as I illuminated the place something jumped out at me. The enemies that I saw were humanoid, with red eyes and rotting skin. Some of them wielded guns, making them much harder to deal with, while others quickly walked towards me and scratched and clawed at my face. Then there are the crew members that haven't been fully transformed by the Exocells and just sit on their beds. In all cases, a simple gunshot to the head put them down, in large part because the creatures reside in the craniums of their hosts. The Exocells weren't in the demo I played, but Ubisoft describes them as tiny creatures with long tendrils, so they kind of sound like the face huggers from the Alien films. There will be other monsters in the game, but Ubi's lips are as tightly sealed as the ocean liner's doors.

Along the way you'll come across more than eight weapons, and while I'm sure some are being kept secret, there's the usual lot of a pistol and machine gun. The game's head shots are absolutely disgusting (in a good way), so if you're into extreme gore you'll definitely be pleased at what the devs have put together. Not only do those suckers pop like a ripe tomato, but blood sometimes splatters the screen.

As for the rest of the game's visuals, the character models are highly detailed and the ship itself looks fantastic; very much like the abandoned ghost ships featured in those awful horror flicks. It's the sort of thing no sane person should want to explore, which is why the game is so attractive in the first place.

Since, as I said before, almost half the game takes place on the boat, I'm curious as to what tricks the devs have up their sleeves to make the experience an interesting one, but from its early stages it appears that Cold Fear will require you to solve puzzles. The one that I encountered consisted of an electrical box that I needed to blow up, the reason being because the room was flooded with water, and if the boat rocked one way and the liquid came into contact with a dangling live wire, Hansen was toast.

Even in its early stages Cold Fear is an amazing game that'll very likely turn out to be another hit for Ubisoft, especially since developers from Far Cry as well as Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow are involved in the project. The game releases in March so it's still a ways away, but don't lose sight of it, as I expect it to be a scary action adventure romp that'll make playing it in the dark a very unwise decision.