As Agent Sterling you are sent to China to spy on the Chinese where you are discovered and captured. You are disavowed by the British Government who have you him to die in prison-and that is what is going to happen as the Chinese have sentenced you to death on the first day of the Chinese New Year. Fortunately, you've got many friends and one of them, who manages a private security agency out of Hong Kong, arranges your escape by sending in someone with who you've worked with in the past-a woman by the name of Kim. After outfitting you with a med-kit, new clothes and weapons, she leaves it to you to escape from the prison in one piece.

From there, you join up with a group that can use your "specialized talents" and uncover an in-depth plot and an intricate story that is promised to have detailed character development and motivated by the deepest of human motives including greed, loss, fear, regret and friendship. In fact, this story is what the developer hopes will help set Cold Winter above the level of "just another first person shooter". So often, the plot has served as a simple background and acts as an excuse to run around and shoot things. Cold Winter is trying to erase that stigma and present an immersive gameplay experience.

The environments of Cold Winter are also very immersive. Painstaking detail has been taken with every scene to make this title as realistic as possible. From the dank Korean jail you start out in, to the more spacious environments that are conducive to the seedy underground of illicit weapons, each locale creates a mood that attempts to present the realism that the developers are striving for.

A secret agent must always be on their toes and, like MacGuyver, can often use their surroundings to their advantage. Cold Winter allows a very impressive utilization of objects in the environments for which to hide behind and use for cover. If there's a desk in the room, flip it over and shoot your targets from behind it. Roll the cart along, while being shielded from gun-fire and slowly move closer to your target for an easier shot. However, the interaction with the environment doesn't end here. There is a multitude of items that, while seemingly innocuous on their own, when combined can provide useful and often explosive results. A half empty bottle of alcohol and a rag can be employed as a rather deadly Molotov cocktail. Add a timer to the mix, and you have a time-delayed explosive. An adhesive material and you can affix this time-delayed bomb to virtually any surface before making your getaway.

This immersive single-player game would be enough for most developers, but not for Swordfish Studios. In addition to this gripping story, they have also added a very flexible and enjoyable multiplayer experience, playable as a four-person split screen or up to eight players online via a broadband connection. Full voice chat is also supported, allowing you to chat (or taunt, as the case may be) with your friends.

The multiplayer options are extremely flexible; you can recreate your favorite method from other games or create your own, unique experience. Included are what has become standard fare for FPS multiplayer including standards such as death-match, domination and a rather morbid version of capture the flag which entails you carrying a severed head around. The customization, however, allows you to tweak and modify all of these settings to create what promises to be the most flexible multiplayer experience.

Cold Winter looks like it could well be THE FPS game to have for the PlayStation2. With the immersive single-player experience and the amazingly flexible multi-player system, this one is definitely one to watch out for when it hits store shelves this April.