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. Although some historical backdrops are provided, like the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, these are treated only cosmetically.
GHOUL is a hit detection system that takes combat to the next step; a system that enables you to shred off body parts in spectacular fashion, leaving enemies cowering in a jumbled mess while they slowly give away their last dying breath.
Some of the heavier weapons can dismember foes to lifeless pulps in no time, while the low caliber stuff can incapacitate or disarm, if needed. Most if not all of the weapons have real world counterparts, their naming changed to eliminate licensing fees. Everything from handguns to suppressed SMGs to sniper rifles and rocket launchers are available, and you get to choose your gear before each mission.
Weapons slots are limited to a couple of primary weapons, a sidearm and three inventory items. Grenades and flashbangs are available, but throwing them feels pretty clumsy. The guns you carry occupy front row center. The aforementioned PADD, described as a device that measures how much noise you generate, is more of a bust. The trick to keeping noise down, and hence reducing the number of bad guys spawned around you, is to either use silent weapons or fire loud ones in short, precise bursts.
Even the newest computer gamer can adjust and change the options with ease. In regards to gameplay, SOF Platinum is pretty straightforward: just aim, click and kill. As John Mullins, you are given an assortment of weapons to use on the enemy, but after a few gaming sessions I quickly found out that not a lot of skill is required in order to be successful at SOF , if you can kill them before they kill you, then you pretty much win the game.
I was very disappointed with the lack of thinking that was required in this game. One of the things that made Rainbow Six such a huge success was the planning and personnel choices that had to be made in order for the mission to be a success.
In SOF there is absolutely none of that. I found the most challenging part of SOF was figuring out the tunnels and mazes in the different levels in the game.
One thing that the game designers failed at was the storyline, it just never seemed to reach out and grab me. Oh well, maybe the game designers can talk to the fine folks that released Max Payne or Operation Flashpoint. No matter how you like to play online, SOF has a game mode for you. Whether it is death match, capture the flag or control and conquer, there is something for everyone. Playing online is a snap because SOF now uses Gamespy which makes connecting and playing with friends quick and painless.
Oh, boy!!!! Now I get to do the graphics section of the review. First off, I really have to ask the folks over at Raven Software what exactly they were thinking when they decided to have graphics in the game be so disgustingly gory?
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