And when you finally see that the fruit of their sleepless labours is a certifiable piece of cack, you tend to feel sorry for them, finding it hard to rip said baby up limb by limb. Which is why it might surprise you to learn that I was looking forward to laying into Soldier Of Fortune 2 with all my might. You know, the sort of people South Park's Jimbo and Ned caricaturise so brilliantly.
It was enjoyable in a deeply dumb and visceral way, but there was something unmistakably wrong and xenophobic about it. Maybe it was the fact that you were penalised for shooting American civilians but not Arabic ones. Most of the fun came from the pure carnage rather than the poor level design or the rather rotten Al. It wisely avoids Islamic terrorists and lets you loose on Russians, Colombians, Chinese and even Yanks.
The sick scoring system has gone. Your closest associate is a woman. And, the real clincher, killing any civilian of whatever nationality means you automatically lose the game.
Things start off rather badly though, with a first level that is as predictable as it is forgettable, set many years before the main story Mullins is clean-shaven but still looks like he shoots dogs and beats up women for fun , dull brown environments and enemies as thick as bricks.
The Colombians not only work in teams even shouting to each other , they duck behind tall grass, they hop over walls, they round you up and shower you with grenades. And then you come across a group of marines who join you on your mission and display some great Al of their own. One of them is sent to scout ahead and waves for the rest to follow if the coast is clear, and the commanding officer tells you off if you wander too far from the team.
They react to situations as well as the enemy, hiding behind trees and running back when a grenade is sent their way. The next mission presents another surprise: stealth. And these are even more annoying than the ones in Medal Of Honor, where you had to stop the enemy from reaching the alarms. Here, the enemy need only catch sight of you and the bells start ringing followed by plenty of manpower, as if they were all connected telepathically. I should mention at this juncture that, played on one of the higher levels, Double Helix is a real hard nut.
I still have save games from Half-Life where you come up against soldiers or black ops that I can play over and over again without getting bored.
You have to question how much fun it is to see someone's face explode, their leg blown across the room, their windpipe gushing blood, time and time again. But if the violence bothers you that much, you can always turn it off. There are other problems that stop it from being the game it could have been - small bugs, ridiculously heavy fogging in some areas - but on the whole it oozes quality. The graphics are tremendously detailed though enemies do have a generic look and the levels exploit the Quake III engine to the full.
And, above all, the enemies are a joy to fight against, which is exactly what we want from our shooters. If all you want is a quick blast without all of the hassle of playing through the actual game, you can set up a randomly generated map in just the type of environment you want, with just the sort of weapons you want. A multiplayer test demo has already proved popular online and there are several mods on the way.
The original Soldier Of Fortune may have appalled and disgusted due to its graphic portrayal of bodily mutilation, but that was back in a more innocent age. Since the events of September 11, the goalposts have moved, perhaps irreversibly, and releasing a game involving terrorism is virtually asking for outraged headlines, particularly when the plot involves the threat of biological warfare.
Clearly something of a political hot potato, development on Soldier Of Fortune 2 is nevertheless carrying on regardless, and at this stage it is unlikely to be changed into a game in which bouquets of flowers are handed out to the nasty men. It would be irresponsible of us to ignore the issue though, and during a demonstration of the game we spoke at length to Raven Software's project administrator, Kenn Hoekstra.
He claimed: "There's been a lot of sensitivity to the issue and a lot of people trying to make judgments about what the American public can handle and what they can't. I think what it comes down to, if you want to talk about freedom of choice, is that people can choose to entertain themselves however they want. They can watch what they want to watch, do what they want to do, and we're not going to try to make that judgment for people.
This game has been in development for two years and we're sticking to our development philosophy and our design and just trying to make the best game we can. That game will again feature real-life Vietnam veteran John Mullins, who has recently spent some time at the Raven office in his capacity as mercenary consultant.
The story begins with a prelude mission that takes place 15 years ago. Players may also customize most of their weapons with special firearm modifications. The Gold Edition of the game adds an extra gametype: Demolition, bringing the number of gametypes in the game to six.
Soldier of Fortune was praised as being a solid and entertaining shooter, with one of the game's greatest praises being its graphic depiction of gore and violence, which both proponents and detractors consider to be more realistic than most first-person shooter games. As a result of its apparent premature release, parts of the game seem unbalanced or unpolished, presumably due to a lack of extensive playtesting.
The stealth mode was criticized as overly simplistic since alerting sentries triggers alarms which can not be turned off for the duration of the mission. This nullified further attempts at proceeding through clandestine means, making sneaking and suppressed weapons useless, and forcing the player to resort to a straightforward attack in order to complete the level. However, assaulting was very difficult in certain situations as engaging in firefights could be deadly.
The only practical way to overcome this was to reload the level or start from scratch. Upon release the game was filled with many crippling bugs such as problems with performance and a tendency to lock up easily, which was fixed in the Gold edition. The Gold edition also boasted new content such as more maps and new weapons to use.
This additional content was also included in the Xbox port. The Xbox version was heavily criticized since it did not improve on any of the PC version's flaws despite an additional year of development time, so it did not keep pace with the advancements in competing first person shooter games.
It also had graphics far below what was expected for the Xbox, with bland textures and a low polygon count that led Hector Guzman of GameSpy to describe it as a 'PC to Dreamcast to Xbox port'. Version: v 1. If you come across it, the password is: online-fix. Related By Tags Games: Flotilla. Far Cry 3 - Blood Dragon. Dead Hospital. Hostile Waters: Antaeus Rising. John Mullins is back as the guy that gets sent in when the regular covert ops guys can't handle it, and of course you've got full control of him and his impressive arsenal of fire power and nifty gadgets.
Like the original Soldier of Fortune , this is a first person shooter with a dose of tactical strategy built in, but in the end it's a shooter through and through, and a good one at that. Your mission is to travel the world meeting interesting and unusual people and dispatching them.
From neo-Nazi wannabes to South American drug lords to Middle Eastern terrorist kingpins, it's the modern day menagerie of 'safe'? That, in and of itself, would make this pretty much like any other non-WW2 shooter, however, in the process, Soldier of Fortune 2 delivers some pretty amazing environments and a really nice balance of modern weaponry and gadgets, plus a number of mission objectives that require stealth rather than brute force you can crawl and lie prone, have a 'toolkit'?
All in all, a very worthwhile new title from Activision, which seems to be on quite a roll lately.
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