Cold Winter

The good: overall very interesting plot
The bad: floaty character controls; imprecise aiming
A secret society called the 'Wings of the World' plans to save the earth by, uhm, unleashing a barrage of nuclear missilies upon it. Apparently, the group believes that the world cannot take another World War, so in order for men to fear the concept of war and nuclear power, they'll have to get a bitter taste of it.

Insert Andrew Sterling, a disavowed MI6 agent hoping to make a quick buck by becoming a mercenary. You start the game in a Chinese prison, but you soon escape through the help of another female agent. We soon learn that the two go way back and the back story keeps the story fresh and interesting. Pretty soon you'll be travelling the world killing bad guys with the usual assortment of guns and grenades. You can only carry two guns at a time but switching between the two weapons takes too long and will often penalize you in the heat of battle.

A neat idea is the ability to create items and weapons by combining different materials scattered throughout the levels. By combining a wire cutter and a wire, for example, you'll be able to craft a lockpick. There are about a dozen combinations which I think is too few. It would have been better if players were allowed to use their imagination in combining items instead of being limited to pre-set mixes. Idea for the sequel, I suppose.

Battles are fun but has a lot of nasty problems. For one, enemies rarely patrol out in the open, giving you few chances to strategize. Instead, enemies come out in droves in set sections of the levels. Another problem are the explosive weapons like grenades and fire bombs. Grenades have such a limited killing radius that its not worth it to use them at all while the other bombs takes too long to explode that enemies have ample time to get out of the area. And they do, since the AI is quite crafty (nice). The biggest flaw, however, is the character control. Not the button layout itself but how the charecter seems to be skidding in ice all the time. It makes maneuvering quite tricky since the character won't stop immediately when you want him to. Also, the game's aiming is just as tricky and with no sensitivity adjustment.

The game still isn't bad even with all these problems. The story is really engaging despite its anti-climactic ending. But, the game itself is just frightfully average. (3/5)