I felt that it was still pretty effective when it went down. The gameplay on offer here is very shallow, but it is also a great deal of fun. Missions are split into levels and most of the time you have an objective, but just getting to the end of each mission is really what it is all about.
Soldier of Fortune has many different weapons for you to use, but my personal favorite is the sniper rifle. The reason for this is that you can hit an enemy in a certain spot and they will behave accordingly. You can blow off an arm and watch it fall, you can shoot a dude in the head and watch the brains splatter. Back in , this was pretty shocking stuff and it is still pretty effective to this day. While it is not the kind of game you would play through over and over again, the campaign is fun and it is short enough so that you do not get bored.
It does have a few multiplayer modes as well, but I am not sure how it will go if you try and get a game going these days. I have said a few times now that Soldier of Fortune was released in Well, it looks like a game that was released in These days, it is not exactly the most appealing looking game. The levels are quite varied, but they lack finer details that make you feel like you are in a real living and breathing world. It gets the job done, but I have a feeling some people might look at the dated visuals and not be able to get past them.
I know that when you go back and play some older first-person shooters, they can often not hold up very well. I would not say that Soldier of Fortune is an amazing game, but it does hold up better than some other FPS games I have played from this era. I do want to point out that if you are playing this game you have to play it on PC. Imagine you could somehow physically grab hold of all the pleasantness in the world, all the chuckles and smiles and summer afternoon picnics, and then crumple and scrunch them into a compact metaphysical ball with your hard little fist.
And then imagine yourself standing on a mountain, hurling said ball as far away as possible - clear over the horizon, so it disappears forever. What are you left with? A frightening environment filled with pain and anger and weeping and violence and, of course, lashings and lashings of hot, creamy death.
Welcome to the cheery kingdom of Soldier Of Fortune, a first-person shooter based on a sleazy, right-wing gun-love magazine. It's likely to whip every angry sociopath in the world into a state of extreme sexual arousal, and frankly this disturbs us. Well, mainly because we think the sort of people who read Soldier Of Fortune magazine are hateful, jar-headed scumbags. But also because we're dying for a go. Soldier Of Fortune was bound to happen.
It's the next logical step from the nation that brought the world the Deer Hunter although it looks miles better than the notorious Bambi-slaying sim ever did : an action game designed to appeal to gung-ho US trailer trash and paranoid survivalists. You know the sort: all camouflage clothing, pick-ups and fag-bashing. They'll play the game in their makeshift bunkers, surrounded by hunting trophies and rifle racks, taking time out every 20 minutes to salute the flag and spit on a Saddam voodoo doll.
That's the down side. The up side is First of all, with any luck, it'll prove cathartic enough to prevent frustrated gun-hoarding lunatics from going gun-bonkers in the workplace. The other up side is that it - rather annoyingly - it looks like being a damn good game in its own right.
There's no justice. Well, almost. Something we've been banging on about for a while now is the need for games set in believable, contemporary environments. This is precisely what Soldier Of Fortune delivers, and also what gives it its power to disturb.
It's a million miles away from the bland Tolkien fantasy worlds of Raven's previous offerings: you're left in no doubt that this is planet Earth, Buster, and if you don't like it Part strategic manoeuvring, part barrel-smoking kill-a-thon, Soldier Of Fortune casts you as a highly trained international mercenary, killing for money with all the relish of a sadistic maniac.
Inevitably, it all ends in tears and bursting ribcages. The missions are almost uncomfortably contemporary: plenty of tinkering with pesky Eastern terrorists and wannabe nuke dealers, as you'd expect for a game whose origins lie in a xenophobic rag like SOF - but there's more surprising stuff, too, like a paranoiac-pleasing assassination run on a corrupt minister holed up in a makeshift fortress.
All your Rambo fantasies rolled into one - well, apart from the sexual ones. Running on an almost rewritten version of the Quake 2 engine, the game lays on the realism with a great big virtual trowel. First of all, the guns are reproduced in loving detail - SOF is at least partially aimed at weapons trainspotters after all.
You'll need to deal with limited ammo every shot counts, trigger-boy , frustratingly authentic reload rates and, for once, proper recoil no physics-defying, Quake-a-licious, rocket launcher nonchalance here, wethinks. To keep potential mass murderers happy, Soldier Of Fortune's toy cupboard practically overflows with different flavours of death: machine guns, sniper rifles, grenades These days, no game can be reported upon without at least one reference to a ridiculous acronym dreamt up by the developers to describe an otherwise dull feature of the coding, and hot diggety dawg, if Soldier Of Fortune doesn't make heavy usage of a bit of technological fizziness known as GHOUL.
Not only does everything show full respect for the laws of physics - even the boxes shatter in a realistic fashion - there's also admirable attention to detail. We're promised the ability to shoot the gun from an opponent's hand, but if you think it's more fun shooting off the hand itself, prepare to bellow with unwholesome delight because the loveable GHOUL system also caters for stomach churningly lifelike gore.
If you winced at the merciless crowbar-clubbing action on display in Kingpin, maybe you should consider playing SOF with your eyes shut. Each character model is split into umpteen 'reaction zones', allowing goggle-eyed psychos to blow individual limbs off their enemies until their trousers stir with delight.
You can shoot a man in the bollocks and laugh as he convulses in agony or burst his head like a watermelon and gasp as chunks of brain fly past your shoulder. Or do both, one after the other, should you be thus inclined. We rather expect the BBFC to take a somewhat dim view of this, although perhaps, in these apparently more lenient rimes, they'll pass it uncut and content themselves with rolling their eyes heavenward while sighing in a world-weary fashion.
So what else is there? Well, aside from the usual believe-it-when-we-see-it promises about awe-inspiring artificial intelligence and multiplayer support, Raven are making much of the way the game's storyline unfolds -like a thriller, apparently - and also, intriguingly, of the occasional role-playing element at work beneath all that stubble and kevlar.
Apparently, there's some degree of NPC interaction beyond picking whose head to blow off next: you'll be conversing with, and making judgements upon, a wide variety of different characters throughout the game.
All in all, it looks like being a definite contender - albeit a wilfully controversial one. Keep yer peepers primed for a full review in due course.
And please don't subscribe to the Soldier Of Fortune magazine in the meantime. That would be wrong. Licensed from the US gun fetish mag of the same name, Soldier Of Fortune attempts to weave traditional mission-based gameplay into a contemporary setting. Taking you halfway across the world, it casts you as a 'consultant' hired by the US Government to track down four stolen nukes. With 26 levels to tote over 10 guns around, it's basically you against terrorists and a few dogs - which will please Steve Hill , armed with guns that look real, that controversially expose real-looking innards on successful operation of the trigger.
It's not short on multiplayer options either, with arcade, team and realistic deathmatching, capture-the-flag and more besides. And we all know how well that turned out. Things are looking good for Soldier Of Fortune. It isn't easy being this hypocritical, you know. On the one hand, we believe Soldier Of Fortune to be vile anarcho-porn of the highest and most hideous order -a shamefully slick helping of fascist super-violence designed to satisfy the xenophobic bloodlust of dunderheads, bigots, macho dickballs, and the many thousands of dangerous gun-toting, Armageddon-quickening paranoiacs currently squatting inside self-built bunkers-cum-armouries in two-horse US towns with names like Jarhead, Ohio, feverishly stroking their shotguns while they pore over their bomb plans.
And on the other hand? We like it a lot actually. If you're lazy, truly lazy, then here's a capsule, sum-it-all-up-in-a-sentence review: "Soldier Of Fortune is an ultra-gruesome, real-world take on the Quake genre that's nowhere near as good as Half-Life, and is demonstrably sick and wrong, yet exerts an unusual addictive pull all of its own.
Now you lazybones can tootle off to the end and gawp at the score, while the rest of us have a laugh at some of the game's content. In SoF, you play a character called John Mullins. His name's John, but everyone calls him 'Jam'. It's all "don't go in there, Jam", and "watch your back, Jam". Jam is a Vietnam vet, a firearms expert, an experienced mercenary, and easily the most laughable prick ever to have stepped foot inside a computer game since the eponymous star of the execrable Leisure Suit Larry games reared his wormy little head before a disinterested world.
Jarn 'Soldier of Fortune' Mullins is an absolute dingleberry. A tool of the highest order. He looks just like celebrity chef and Sunday morning Godslot presenter Kevin Woodford, so it's hard to take him seriously and even harder to resist the urge to somehow twist the gun round and watch him blow his own head off.
He's also totally lacking a sense of humour. This man takes himself more seriously than Goebbels, as do his mates at 'The Shop' the shadowy organisation of mercenaries for which he 'works'. In fact, every single person in the game stomps around pulling expressions of utter, steely-eyed seriousness, delivering duff lines with such grim self-importance, you keep hoping - praying- that one of them'll blow off in their combats or something, just to break the ice a bit and make them smile.
If you had to sit next to one of them at a dinner party, you'd probably end up taking your own life with a cheese knife before the main course hit the table. He's easily the most ludicrously over-the-top villain you'll have seen in your life -- even if you've spent your entire life watching Sky Movies. Fortunately for Jarn, who's clearly unhinged himself, tracking down Dekker and, er, his stolen nuclear warheads involves visiting a host of glamorous around-the-world locations and shooting a frankly jaw-dropping number of people.
It's like watching an edition of Holiday hosted by those Columbine High School maniacs. At which point, it's worth pointing out just how gruesomely violent SoFis. You can, quite feasibly, shoot the gun from a man's hand, then take his leg clean off while he begs for mercy - and then blow his head to jelly as he slumps, screaming, to the floor.
And once he's down, you can stab him in the face, you can circle around picking off the remaining limbs with a shotgun, or you can pump round upon round of machine-gun fire into his lifeless body and watch it jerk about. This is not a nice game. Playing this game must be bad for you.
It feels bad for you. There are. There are machine guns and rocket launchers. There's an excellent sniper rifle and a downright hideous flamethrower. There is screaming and bloodshed. At the end of each mission, you're given a tally listing the number of head shots, neck shots, groin shots You'll want a bath afterwards.
And then you'll go back to finish off the next level. It's undeniably fun to play. The levels aren't particularly taxing, but they are on the whole imaginatively designed. The real-world setting adds to the thrill, as does - and we're almost ashamed to admit this - the outrageous level of violence. The graphics are exemplary throughout, as is the use of sound the music's a bit sucky, but it is 'dynamic' - ie it reacts to the action. The weird and slightly frightening thing is, if SoF was set in the spaceports of Mars, or the fictional netherland of Etemia, or wherever, it's doubtful whether it would have held our attention for so long.
Fact is, the nigh-on pornographic buzz of spraying a modern-day office with gunfire, taking limbs off be-suited, screaming enemies left, right, and centre, while a standard neon strip-light buzzes overhead, keeps you glued. That may be wrong, but it's the honest truth. The ultra-violence is eye-poppingly hideous - but it's also whisper it quietly perversely satisfying, in a please-God-don't-let-this-corrupt-me kinda way.
But it would mean nothing were the game itself not so damn playable. Soldier Of Fortune is a balls-out, whisky-swilling, flag-waving, carbine-smoking, xenophobic, fascistic, cathartic arcade game that you'll end up playing more than you should. It probably deserves to be banned - but while it's here, let's enjoy it quietly. Oh, and we'd recommend taking short breaks to read some Enid Blyton or a Mr Men book or something. Returning the game because it's too sick?
That's got to be a first for one of our readers. All in all, the general consensus is that most of you find the extremely explicit violence fascinating, while being aware that it is wrong. Want to take part in a quick experiment? All you have to do is read the following words and monitor your reactions carefully. This time, the target is nuclear.
A terrorist group has stolen four nuclear warheads, and worse, they're virtually unopposed thanks to their numbers and firepower. As the only man capable of stopping them and recovering the stolen warheads, you're called in, bringing your unique and deadly skills to the mix.
Armed with a frightening array of weaponry, you're the only thing standing in the way of someone's bad day, nuclear style. This style of game, a first-person shooter, is a venerable classic, arming you with insane amounts of firepower and pitting you against all number of enemies. With a few innovative features, Soldier of Fortune was one of the first games to handle a multitude of damage effects, spreading injury across twenty-six zones on the human body.
This meant more gruesome deaths that were more in keeping with the damage pumped out by real world weaponry. With a more realistic plotline than many of the sci-fi games of this genre, Soldier of Fortune was an anti-terrorist fan's dream. It was relatively believable for the first few missions of the game as you used real-world-style weapons to take on terrorists who threatened nuclear attack. Still, even on the PC version, this title suffered from some problems.
It stood out as innovative for its realistic scenarios, but still suffered from combat that was more suited to an action movie. Even at the normal difficulty level your character was extremely tough, sometimes to the point of absurdity.
Later on the enemies themselves became truly nightmarish, with terrorists in Iraq packing body armor that made them nigh invulnerable to some of your smaller weapons. Even with these problems, the PC version was a decent play, and still definitely worth getting from a bargain bin. The question that begs answering -- will this really be a good port title on the PS2? You've played them before, so you probably already know what to expect. It's you, a handful of weapons, and a bit of explosives against the world, or at least some of the more vicious terrorists in it.
The first part of SoF Gold that you'll meet is the interface. Not quite a replica of the PC version, this features a dumbed-down set of screens that I found to be a real eyesore. I'm not one to critique a game strongly for a poor-looking interface, but this one looks absolutely horrible -- so much so, in fact, that I couldn't stay quiet about it. The way they've laid out the control modification screen makes one think they designed it for some insane eccentric aircraft engineer, who thinks about things in a sort of "A and then C, but not before X" kind of way.
The menu fonts look terrible, and the whole thing looks worse than old PSX games I used to play -- like Armorines. Once you manage to set up the controls, which is in and of itself no easy task, you can actually start playing the game. Brought in to assist on the gang takeover of a subway station, you're launched right into the action bearing a shotgun, pistol, knife and assortment of C4 and flash grenades.
Later on you can get an SMG, sniper rifle, flamethrower or even the traditional rocket launcher. A couple of the weapons leave you wondering where that real-world weapon concept went, but it's forgivable with the large variety of normal firepower.
You'll want to use the analog thumbsticks to move and look, as you need to keep the other buttons free for firing, jumping, ducking and using various tools throughout your mission. The control in this title suffers a lot from the poor-quality port job performed by Pipedream.
Many scenes have a significant framerate problem when a lot of action is on the screen, throwing off your gameplay. Oftentimes you'll run across a sticky point, as the game doesn't seem to comprehend its own collision detection, making it a pain to crawl into some pipes and down some holes. This puppy is a nightmare for anything that involves loading info from the CD; saving to the memory card, while fairly easy, is a serious time-cruncher that takes way too long.
Red Faction did a good job of being easy to save, and its files took up one-eighth of your memory card! On the plus side, for the first few missions the game has some pretty good action.
Sure, you might need to down a chopper or two to get to the nuclear weapons, but at least it isn't as frustrating as some titles in this regard, at least to begin with. It'll take you at least ten hours or so to beat, provided you can sit through that much game. Still, if you're a diehard about console-based FPS games, this might and that's an iffy "might" at that be the game for you.
When you pick up the box, you'll immediately notice the main selling point of the Gold version -- more multiplayer maps. SoF Gold supports multiplayer with the PS2 multitap, allowing you to play a four-person split-screen game with your friends. On a large TV, like all split-screen games, you'll probably get a fair play out of this, and the extra maps come in handy when trying to keep your friends from being bored by the same old multiplayer game.
I've got to admit, though, it really seems like this was the only significant change made for the 'Gold' edition status of this game. This is the poor, stunted younger brother of SoF for the PC, and it shows.
Textures are a bit too bright, have jagged edges, and show a color depth that reminds me of the days of Duke Nukem. For the most part all the character models have been preserved, but with the lighting and clipping problems present in this version they don't look at all worth watching.
If any of you remember the train ride from the first mission, you'll almost always be able to see a clipping error as the enemies are shot, hang in mid-air as the train they were standing on continues on its way, and then finally fall to the ground after they've finished their death animation. Also, given that SoF was designed to use somewhat realistic-looking textures and color schemes, which are somewhat drab to begin with, you'd think that Pipedream could've handled the lighting better to cover up the problems with these kinds of graphics on a TV.
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