"Cold War: A conflict over ideological differences carried on by methods short of sustained overt military action and usually without breaking off diplomatic relations."

Cold War. The term holds a certain resonance for each of us. For those that lived through its inception, the Cold War began the day Hitler and his Reich fell and the Soviet Red Army began to take control of Eastern Europe. For those that were born into it, the Cold War represents the looming danger of Nuclear Warfare, the potential for all life on the earth to be extinguished with the flip of a switch. For those whose only memory of the Cold War is in the text of a history book and images of the Berlin wall being torn down, it is a threat from antiquity, a looming menace of inspired fear.

But the images of missile silos, code keys and a red phone in the Oval Office is an affectation of our imagination. Oh these things certainly did exist, but we, the ignorant masses, needed desperately to put a face on this conflict. We needed bold imagery and the hulking threat of massively destructive machinery to stoke the embers of fear smoldering within us. And so was born the fantasies of the age. Tom Clancy, Robert Ludlum and many more have tapped into that construction, into that fear, to bring us brilliant tales of dire peril creeping from the shadows of this unseen war.

Who knows how many times the fate of humanity has truly stood on the brink of annihilation only to be turned back in the final seconds of the doomsday clock’s countdown. But what most people never see, or think to look at, though it is about as subtle as a Paris Hilton video, are the artists who create this landscape. The true Cold War soldier who risked all to bring this imagery into every home in the world.

I'm speaking, of course, of the incredible bravery and sacrifices of the Journalists and Photographers who were targets at home and abroad. When being a member of the press conveyed a certain amount of dignity, assurance and above all, integrity. You see, while Cold War foes jabbed at each other with needles from the shadows, another war was raging. A Hot War. The war for your mind.

And that is where Cold War begins.

Players take control of Matt Carter, a freelance journalist who is expecting the breeze through another routine assignment in Moscow. But within hours of your arrival, the “routine assignment” sees you embroiled in a massive geo-political conspiracy, beaten to within an inch of your life, knocked unconscious and thrown into a dark hole deep in the bowels of the notorious KGB prison, the Lubyanka.

With only your wits as weapons you must escape the infamous penitentiary of death, locate the conspirators, deduce the entirety of their nefarious plan to seize control of the U.S.S.R. and it’s deadly arsenal, expose the plot and save your life (and just a couple of others too). And hey, if you manage to grab the Pulitzer along the way…

It’s really a pretty nice concept. The fact that you are not some pumped-up, super agent, harbinger of death is exceedingly appealing to me. Matt Carter is a veteran of the world but not a warrior. He may have been through his share of bar brawls in Shanghai, but it is extraordinarily refreshing to play a character who feels real. This not a Sam Fisher, nor Solid Snake, nor even Rambo. Think of Carver as more of a modern day Indiana Jones with a dash of MacGuyver mixed in.

Cold War strongly emphasizes the fact that Matt Carver is not a soldier. He knows how to use a semi-automatic handgun, but is by no means an expert marksman. Compound this with an aversion to taking the life of another, which only makes sense since he is a journalist, and you begin to see how the action is set up. With limited combat skills and no desire to use lethal force, our protagonist must rely on the one muscle so often overlooked in video games, the mind. With careful planning, a smart use of basic stealth techniques and clever ingenuity, our hero can pick his way through the labyrinth of professional soldiers with sap attacks, and hand made gadgets like ether grenades and rubber bullets.

This is not a true action title. Nor is it any kind of shooter. Cold War has elements from a number of popular action and adventure titles but while it looks and feels like Splinter Cell it plays more like Thief.

Obviously many elements of Cold War were unpolished and unfinished with this build of preview code, but in general everything ran very smoothly. The graphics are good, but not outstanding, with excellent frame rates and no jittering during texture changes. The audio is definitely mediocre and uninspired. The voice over tracks make it painfully clear that Cold War was developed in Eastern Europe. Not that the voice quality is poor, far from it. But the voice actors really struggle though their delivery of the English dialog and the on screen text suffers through similar language issues.