Soldier of Fortune Review

Little note here. I haven't done reviews on this blog much, but I may change that up a bit and I'm bringing out a new review format which is nothing like I've done before. The new format revolves around talking about my experiences with the game, explaining its basics, and adding up the two as to how much fun I had. I wont be talking much about analytical stuff I don't care about anymore unless the game gives me a good or bad reason to care about it. In the end I'm going to give the game a card that reveals 1-4 pros and 1-4 cons and a general score that can go from high to low as follows: Legendary, Awesome, Ok, and Heresy. They sort of speak for themselves honestly. I'm considering adding one or two more, but for now those 4 get across any major point I can think of at the moment. Sadly they may appear glitched off a bit at their size since I cannot get it down to a blog friendly size and keep its integrity, and can't figure out a work around... however it will still be very clear and visible, just a little odd looking. Anyways in this new format I cut out the junk that doesn't matter and get more to my honest and heart felt enjoyment or hate in a game. For example who cares if a game has 8/10 graphics... what even is that? What is an 8 in graphics? It tells you nothing but instead trains you to assume number spots, something that has gone a bit stray and wacky on mainstream review formats. If it looks great, or bad I'll mention it. If its not mentioned, its probably not worth mentioning and will be put aside for what got my attention and what I think should be addressed. I'm hoping this style works and delivers a better review experience for each submitted review, and I honestly think it'll detail the game better for gamers rather than the weird way its done more formally. Now with that being said, on with the review!

Some people just want to watch the world burn

Soldier of Fortune is an old PC FPS game released by Raven Software back in 2000. I don't like going with the typical retorts the internet has for FPS games, but honestly... this game can be best summed up as absolute mindless dumb violent shooting gallery. Odd coming from the guys that were behind bringing you the stupidly over-complicated mapping to the hexen series. However I'm not here to wave that around as an insult, as it turns out to be a pretty fun game at the end of the day.... its just a simple trigger happy dumb sort of fun.

You charge in going level to level blasting enemies to very gorey bits with no other excuse or story than "You're an elite mercenary chasing that chews up terrorists and stops nukes on a daily job". Once I had blasted through the opening level with a shotgun and ripped enough limbs off to replace a forest fire's worth of damage I was then rewarded with a mission update and one of my first cut-scenes. The terrorist leader stood on top of a train and rode off with my character following the pattern on a separate train.... and yeah at that point I knew the type of game I would be playing. 

SoF in a nutshell.... or shotgun shell?

You have a basic inventory system that holds items like grenades, C4, nightvision, healthpacks, and flashbang grenades as well as a vague weapon limit. Don't worry you can still hold far more than 2 weapons, its just that there is a limit and it feels like it comes down to how many big weapons you can carry at once, however you'll be carrying the majority or at least half of the total weapons the game has. However if you have something like... two pistols, both SMGs, a sniper rifle, a flamethrower, and the knife you'll have to put down one or two weapons before you can pick up a rocket launcher or shotgun. Speaking of this system, before each major level or chapter swap you'll be given a menu to equip stuff. This is less free than your total carry limit, but you'll be filling in the blanks quickly as you go along. Once you're in that level, you just go where there's enemies and blast them to pieces and occasionally flip a switch and watch what happens. To keep you from going but so numb there are usually friendly characters or civilians of some kind in these levels, and you'll get a game over if you kill too many or shoot an important NPC. This is what you'll be doing through missions ranging from New York, Iraq, Germany, Africa, Japan, and other locations. Usually the chapters or levels come in sets of 3, with a rare appearance of an agent HQ but it honestly doesn't add anything to the story and seems more like just a tiny scripted break in between the action back when these scripted sequences were still a bit new and being played with.

Now one thing that becomes really obvious is the aesthetic in shooting. The guns not only have power, good visuals, and serve their purpose, but they all impact your enemy in super violent ways that honestly have even left me feeling a little shocked even after my years and years of FPS and violent gaming. I played Turok 2 when I was about 6, which is a game with a weapon made for the pure purpose of drilling through the brain and blowing off limbs in meaty chunks, yet SoF is one of the first shooters (if not the only) that actually had me react in discomfort with its violence..... think about that a bit. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not prepared to call myself offended by this. Quite the opposite. I've always believed that great gunplay aesthetics are vital to helping a shooter be great, and part of that involves drawing out blood and violence to a gorey extent. Its kind of like how you want a car to sound loud and good in racing games, or a card game to have good art. This game capitalizes on the violence, possibly going overboard and has "gore zones" all over its enemy models so you can rip them apart in pieces and leave stumps and blood everywhere. That is also coupled with animation of course. They twitch and roll around with arteries hanging out (sometimes still pulsing), they grab their limbs and scream in agony, they splatter their insides on walls, and when they lose limbs they don't come clean like most rebelliously gorey games.... they instead actually leave behind ripples and torn flesh that hang onto whatever was left while dripping blood. Its no accident that they worked on all these gibs and gore either, they open the game with a scene of terrorists blowing off the front half of someone's face (yes I mean that literally, again the gibs aren't cut clean).  Further scripted events play out that just make it a recurring theme that constantly reminds you this game is super violent. Scripted sequences of people in explosions, walk into trains, enemies that mindlessly kill innocents in situations that just don't even bother to make sense, and then there is an entirely unnecessary part of a level where you walk through a big cow meat processing place full of just endless gore. In this scene you watch a person who somehow got on a conveyor belt wind up in the grinder with a horribly wet ripping sound specific to that sort of death, enemies that are just more trigger happy on their cows than they are towards you, and you end the level up under the grinder and dumping area of it all where it looks like a sewer of pure blood and some bones. Its like some hidden sick vegetarian propaganda was thrown onto a piece of a level (fools! I like chicken more than beef, so they didn't change my ways at all!).

You get the point by now. I'm not hating the game for it, but it sure has a thing for violence. I personally am fine with anything up to Killzone 2, Turok, Alpha Prime, or FarCry 1's level of gore, but seeing it go above and beyond isn't so bad. If you can't handle it too well, just don't think about bothering with this game. Despite the blocky models, dated visuals, poor face work, and general mindless silly tone of the game, it all holds up as one of the most shockingly violent games I have played to this day. 

Remember kids... Have fun with it!

Still the game gives details in other nice little areas to. Again gun animations are good, most textured buttons and tech can be broken to an impressive amount for a 2000 game, and other nice little touches like an idle flamethrower animation where your own character singes their hand for a second. With all being said here, there are still problems here. Animations for individual guns play as they swap around, like tossing the shotgun with a slight style before gripping it, but it seems like this bit interferes with the actual weapon swapping itself. I've been scrolling looking for a specific gun as I'm zipping down the corridor racking up the body count only to have a weapon I want pulled up slug through its animation, lock up a second as I'm trying to fire it, and then it switches another gun or even one after that. The switching is a little too sensitive and a little too slow to respond well enough to keep up with the fast paced action. Carefully scrolling through each weapon is a bit of a drag as well due to this. Now you might just be able to dismiss this with hotkeys, but honestly with a new inventory to select from and gun swapping going on its not exactly a game where you'll be memorizing and using full hotkeys efficiently. This could have been an easy fix and they could have left in the animations by simply adding in a little HUD bar that pops up and highlights through your weapon list like Team Fortress 2, Quake wars, Unreal Tournament, and quite a few other shooters did. While I'm still on about animations, I've also got to say that the game is quite unstable in FPS. I'll admit my laptop isn't the best, but being capable of running far superior and more recent games closer to max (including those games running on quake 3, the successor to this engine), and then jumping onto this blocky muddy mess of a game and seeing it lag itself into almost unplayable moments when things get hectic just doesn't add up. At first I noticed it happened when there was a lot of fog (odd considering that should help considering low draw distance)  or a lot of corpses in a short area. However it also started happening later in the game in a closed up garage with just 2 civilians, so in the end I don't know what the heck is going on here but an ok looking 2000 game should not be acting like this.

The final major problem I have with this game is some poor level design moments. You'll be blasting away mindlessly killing soldier #923 and suddenly you recognize a hallway and some dead bodies. So you clearly missed you exit. It might be a simple door way.... or it could be on some obscure window ledge with no indication that you have to walk it around a good chunk of the building until you come across a window of a room that was locked from the outside. Or you might have to push a special button on a giant machine that didn't look interactive, or was only sensitive to a tiny bit of it's area. OR you had to blow up that generic looking explosive barrel long after conflict stopped and you thought that would be pointless. You get the point, there's quite a good list of moments when I just hit a halt in gameplay because of some really dumb progression bit that didn't make sense. Now I'm all in favor of doing different little tasks that get you to think, and I love a bit of solid FPS platforming in between the mayhem, but this game still remains as a mindless shooter because honestly none of the extra stuff they throw at you makes any sense and it'll often stump you for a good second until you've tried about everything and just start doing dumb stuff out of boredom to beg that it works a way out. To explain that window situation into detail, I had been fighting in a japanese corporate building and was wiping out offices. One of two tiny boxed up lone rooms had guys in them I killed, one guy stylishly came by on a window cleaning platform and I just wiped him out and moved on. You move ahead 3 rooms shooting up plenty of enemies and then unlock a door leading you to the beginning of the floor where you had already been. I went around for about 15-20 minutes checking everything, breaking things, mashing the use button on locked doors, pushing tech, wacking corpses, "using" paintings to find a hidden switch, anything that would get an elevator code I needed to proceed. Well it turns out that I had to walk out on that platform, go against the window sill, go right by instinct (nothing else kept me from going left which would have been painfully more time consuming), I turned a few lumpy bits on the building corner and right as I was questioning virtual suicide from going the wrong way I came across a clear window with some hostages being held up. I smashed through the windows, gunned down the terrorists action movie style, and they told me the code and lead me out the same "locked" door that I had passed and tried to open from the other side well over 7 freakin' times. There was nothing remotely good about that level design, everything lead me away from where I was supposed to go, the path was presented as an enemy gimmick, there was excessive use of rooms that lead me in a circle, and to add salt to the wound it was all behind an obvious door in the first place that was just artificially locked to prevent me from continuing the games typical pacing and gameplay.

If this was only one moment in the game that pulled a stunt like that, I could forgive it. But no. I had to push a button on a machine to watch a grab claw animation that did nothing.... well apparently I had to push it again redundantly in order to trigger a door which just didn't make much sense (and again, for some reason they have the option to leave the right path by backtracking through a door that was previously locked that could have avoided the machine altogether). In another level I felt like I was glitching my way around invisible walls to progress across some roofs and find my way back on track. Then there was a moment where a tank was beside a very obvious red explosive barrel surrounded by TNT crates. Of course the thing that occurs to a clever player's senses will be that it looks like a giant weak-spot, just set off the big explosions with 1 well placed bullet. I wasted a bunch of ammo and health standing out and taking shots while the bullets didn't trigger the barrel like they usually would. Apparently you had to just go straight for the tank with 4 rockets, and the tank explosion triggers the explosives what have been previously shootable for the past dozen levels of the whole game, and once those TNT crates are gone there is an opening out of the area. So they basically used the strongest enemy in the game to hide the exit through a wall of explosives.... I cannot begin to describe how stupid and counter-intuitive that is in game design, especially when the rest of that game's design is mindless action and over the top explosions.

Hint: best gun

Now these flaws don't overshadow the fun factor or point of the game entirely. They are annoying bits that get in the way, but overall the game doesn't stop being one of the best dumb shooters I've played in a long time. Its fast, tests the reflexes, it has extreme gore giving a powerful sense to the weapons, it tallies up points for everything you do, and its pretty simple and easy while staying fast and over the top to keep you from caring too much. With that being said there are custom difficulty options, and a limited save tally you can change, but in the end the game is a bit on the easy side making it down to scoring and just the raw fun of a well made interactive shooting gallery. You'll be going from level to level essentially just shooting everything "bad" (which gets above 1000 kills according to my stats) and going from A to B with a couple annoying stoppers along the way. Its as linear as shooter get while still keeping gameplay at the center focus and dropping off bits of an excuse to kill with a nuke themed terrorist story. Honestly its kind of like how I imagine a mod would be for Modern Warfare's campaign if it was done in this day. I suppose if I'm disappointed, its not really in its gameplay as much as what it could have done extra. The real-ish weapons, and straight music are working against the game's over the top cut-scenes, gameplay, and gore to create a rather uninspired after taste left in the game while something like Duke Nukem bathes in the action hero sillyness too much to forget or pass up as easily. However again I'm judging the game on what is there, and it holds up as a solid off the wall shooter experience.

Verdict:

Soldier of Fortune is a lot of fun for what it is and I felt like giving it an awesome verdict at first thought. However in the end I realized it really doesn't do much other then provide insane fun through a linear path of nearly nonstop gunplay within a gory shooting gallery under a more old school style. Its a very simple game in the end, and even manages to make some really annoying mistakes while being such. There isn't any real sense of a "quiet time" nor enough interactivity to put it on par with the greater old shooters, but it isn't exactly doing anything too bad. It hits some hard bumps in level design, but still provides a fun insane and action packed experience with some of the strongest gore I've ever seen in a shooter. However it doesn't go beyond, and doesn't even challenge you while its doing its thing. So in the end, my viewpoint is that it just sits at "Ok". It is an ok and solid game, but I wouldn't recommend it strongly except for maybe a mindless game to work on off to the side, and I especially would not recommend it to those with a bit of a sensitive side towards digital violence. Still its a fun game, and kind of unique in its simplicity and action experience... so it wouldn't hurt to check it out and I may revisit it again one day myself. For now though, I feel satisfied with it and am willing to move back onto better old school shooters.