Everybody compares this to Resident Evil 4 but there's a far better - and more fascinating, in terms of considering the dev process/timelines involved - comparison: Resident Evil 3.5, the original version of Resident Evil 4 that they scrapped before pivoting towards the what they eventually released as the classic everyone remembers in 2005. Even a cursory look at when the final RE4 and Cold Fear were announced/shown will tell you that any influence from the former on the latter, if indeed there was any at all, had to be minimal at most.
This game and RE3.5 on the other hand do have one, compellingly specific key thing in common. In the final RE4 the camera was always behind Leon's back, for both normal movement and aiming. This of course eschewed the series conventions of fixed camera angles. In RE3.5 they had the fixed camera angles (with some shifting) but would switch to the over the shoulder view as you aimed your gun. Cold Fear doesn't have strictly fixed camera angles at all times but it has a lot of them and implements this exact same camera dynamic in many cirucmstances. Watch this gameplay for a bit and then go back to the RE3.5 footage linked above.
They're really close! Whether this is the Cold Fear team seeing that early RE3.5 footage (the gameplay linked was first shown at E3 2003) and taking influence or just two companies converging on the same idea I've obviously no clue. Darkworks' previous game, Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare, was already a fixed camera survival horror so it's a not a huge leap to make. Regardless, it's a curious little detail of gaming history that things played out this way. The ideas of one project that never saw fruition in their original context instead coming to the fore in a game from a different company, only for that game to be consigned to the bargain bin of history as a 'clone' of that original project's final outcome.
This game and RE3.5 on the other hand do have one, compellingly specific key thing in common. In the final RE4 the camera was always behind Leon's back, for both normal movement and aiming. This of course eschewed the series conventions of fixed camera angles. In RE3.5 they had the fixed camera angles (with some shifting) but would switch to the over the shoulder view as you aimed your gun. Cold Fear doesn't have strictly fixed camera angles at all times but it has a lot of them and implements this exact same camera dynamic in many cirucmstances. Watch this gameplay for a bit and then go back to the RE3.5 footage linked above.
They're really close! Whether this is the Cold Fear team seeing that early RE3.5 footage (the gameplay linked was first shown at E3 2003) and taking influence or just two companies converging on the same idea I've obviously no clue. Darkworks' previous game, Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare, was already a fixed camera survival horror so it's a not a huge leap to make. Regardless, it's a curious little detail of gaming history that things played out this way. The ideas of one project that never saw fruition in their original context instead coming to the fore in a game from a different company, only for that game to be consigned to the bargain bin of history as a 'clone' of that original project's final outcome.