Cold War is a great surprise. With mixed Steam reviews I expected a lot worse. It is essentially like the early Splinter Cell games, but with wider maps and many more gadgets to use at your disposal. I read many complaints about this game that it features a lot of backtracking. It is true, however the game keeps introducing new mechanics/scenarios or make a twist on the objectives that even though you are navigating through the same areas over and over again, they still made it feel quite different each time to not feel too repetitive. In my book, it was a decent use of backtracking, I've seen it done way more lazily in many games.

There are 25 different gadgets/weapons/ammunition types, but to be honest, I've used only 8 through the entire game, and even of those that I've used half I did only once, twice or trice. The main problem is that many of the gadgets serve little use like mines as even if you attack the sound ringer to them the distance by which the enemy can hear them is the same as the distance by which they can spot you... Which makes a paradox, that often if you want to get close enough to plant a ringing mine which will attract the enemy to go towards, you'll have to get spotted which kills the purpose of planting a stealthy mine anyway... The easy fix for this was to increase the ringing sound distance so that enemies who are far away would get attracted to it. Sure, it would make the game super easy, but otherwise there is almost no point in using such gadgets as it is much easier to just sneak towards the enemies and knock them down unseen or use different types of gadgets instead. Even with these problems I found the stealth to be fun and pretty well utilised in the game nevertheless. Enemy A.I. is not very smart or anything special, but it was never broken unlike how it is in many other stealth games... Lastly, I found the story and writing to be great here, it certainly was better than in most stealth games I've ever played.


7/10