Pros: makes no apologies in depicting the consequences of violence.
Cons: If you are a person who's lost a limb, you won't think SoF is intelligent
The Bottom Line: SoF:P continues in the series' footsteps to provide bloody mutilation and violence that is now in High Definition thanks to next generation consoles.
bigtruckseries's Full Review: Soldier of Fortune: PayBack for Xbox 360
Blood and Gore
Drug Reference
Intense Violence
Sexual Themes
Strong Language
No - this isn’t the latest Quentin Tarrantino film.
Its SOLDIER OF FORTUNE: PAYBACK the latest entry into the SoF series where you star as a Mercenary in exotic locations… anxious to use the latest weaponry to fill morgues and graveyards with unsavory foreigners.
Wherein the original Soldier of Fortune, produced in 1999, dropped us into a battle against White Supremacists intent on launching a Neutron bomb at NYC; Soldier of Fortune 2 which was produced after 9/11, focused on taking us into battle with the newly labeled “terrorists”. Now, Payback carries on the intents of SoF2 with higher resolutions and greater memory channels afforded by the next generation home systems.
Unfortunately as solid as this game is, the problem that many will have when they witness its gameplay, is its nihilistic treatment of human suffering (which also happens to be its trademark). It isn’t funny watching people get their arms and legs blown off…its horrifying. To call this gameplay ”fun” makes light of the real life people who lose their limbs and must still cope in society with prosthetics (if they can afford them) and diminished functionality. To call this gameplay ”addictive” should really be a warning that a gamer who enjoys this much violence might be a sick individual.
To date, nearly 3800 Americans have died in Iraq but, of equal importance, the veterans who we are not used to seeing in the media number over 18,000 (mentally ill, amputeed, or seriously wounded – all out of combat)
Now- what we have is a game where you get to experiment with digital guns by turning digital enemies into limbless corpses.
RISKING LIFE AND LIMBS
Soldier of Fortune games don’t offer anything monumental to the quickly saturating FPS genre.
Halo offered an immersive sci-fi environment.
Battlefield 2 offered massive team combat using modern weapons.
Call of Duty 4 offered a Battlefield 2 style war zone with enhanced graphics, sound and gameplay modifications.
CRYSIS offers top of the line - state of the art graphics which actually play a huge role in gameplay itself.
All Soldier of Fortune: Payback brings to the table is amputations.
Bloody, graphic amputations in High Definition.
THE GAMEPLAY is as simplistic as you’d expect from the basic FPS game. You move into an area and shoot everyone pointing guns at you. Once the dust settles and everyone who was pointing a gun at you is lying on the floor –in pieces - you move onwards to the next area where more people are pointing guns at you.
Wash, rinse and then repeat.
The only thing that separates SoF from the rest of the FPS crowd is the fact that this game’s developers place the majority of the focus into making enemies that take damage like real flesh & blood humans would. SoF:P’s gory heritage from its predecessors allows it to be one of the few games in the FPS genre to take the infliction of pain and the gore of killing to levels not imagined since Mortal Kombat .
While the other games I have mentioned treat gunshots as ways to quickly dispatch the enemy SoF treats gunshots as ways to viciously and violently dismember, mutilate and torture the enemy. In the other games, a gunshot is just a hit with digital blood but, in SoF, a gunshot must blow the target’s brains out all over the ground and leave tattoo scarring on the entry wound.
THE ENEMY A.I. is hurt by the fact that they cannot mutilate you the way you can do unto them. I think it would be more fair and more realistic if your character took body specific - location based damage but SoF is still your run of the mill FPS where you get a health/armor combination. The A.I. never seems to act intelligently. Sometimes enemy's will run in circles while you are blasting at them because they lose their path tracking and don't know which way to turn. As always, the only intelligent enmies you'll find in most games can be found online.
Unlike the more varied Enemy Intelligence patterns I've spotted in Rainbow 6:Vegas and Call of Duty 4
the enmies in SOF:P fall into two categories: runners and standups. The runners will run right towards you (and sometimes past you) allowing you to put the game's physics engine to work when you blow them to bits. Standups will just stand still and shoot at you.
Sometimes it is quite hard to find enemies who are camping and you have to search feverishly with the reticle (waiting for it to turn red) to find them. The game's annoying habit of spawning enemies behind you in places you've already bypassed can be quite bothersome but, for the most part, the enemies up until the final two levels aren't too much of a challenge.
THE LOOK OF GORE, THE SOUND OF SUFFERING
Soldier of Fortune benefits greatly from the increased RAM memory, CPU power and GPU offerings of the Xbox360. The lighting effects, smoke effects and enemy detailing are fairly equal to what you may have experienced in Battlefield2, CoD4 or Time Shift. Most of the areas you fight in fall into either the “war-torn middle eastern town” theme, or the “high tech enemy base theme”.
Jungle locations remind us of the lush settings in games like Far Cry and the careful attention to detail of Arab soldiers and their surroundings looks uncannily similar to recent CNN footage. It is only some of the skin effects which don’t hold up – reminding me of the “plasticy” look a lot of Xbox360 game models tend to have.
Sound FX are excellent as usual. Gunfire, enemy screams of pain, explosions and the enemy conversations are all top notch. SoF developers always make it a point to use voice actors speaking the language of the people you’ll be killing, so if you happen to speak these languages, you’ll understand them just fine – if you do not, it will only add to the level of immersion.
The original SoF was developed by Raven Software and has now been handed over to Activision and Caulderon. SoF:P uses an enhanced Ghoul rendering system, a proprietary engine - called CloakNT- and the Havok physics we’ve come to love in games like Halo 3 and CoD4. Havok physics sends bodies flying through the air from explosions and causes pieces of debris to bounce around realistically. Since Activision is behind both SoF and CoD4, you’ll right away see plenty of commonalities between the games.
The game suffers from plenty of faults though.
Many times you'll experience bad clipping of the Z-buffer and graphical glitches. Even worse, enemy bodies do not exhibit the same levels of gore they did on the original SOF. To add insult to injury, their bodies simply dissapear from sight after they've been dead 30 seconds or so.
There is a lack of adequate checkpoints for autosaving and you'd have to go through alot of hassle if you get killed without reaching them. Even worse is that the game has some of the most annoyingly long load times I've ever seen on the 360.
If that isn't enough, unique to the SOF series, Payback brings in boss battles where you are given a primary target and the game then throws wave after wave of minor enemies at you to distract you. This wouldn't be so bad if not for the fact that the bosses are ridiculously over balanced. I tried killing one of them with a M243 machine gun at less than 5 feet and it took me well over 100 rounds. Mind you, this same gun will punch holes in tanks.
Soldier of Fortune series games unfortunately fall into the trap of being “technology demonstrators” – that is: it is basically a First person shooter that is made and remade with newer, more advanced technology with the same basic design mechanics and gameplay. It also has been released at a bad time, when several A+ titles on the 360 and PS3 have also been released. Most gamers will ignore this game for a while since Assassin’s Creed and CoD4 have stolen its thunder.
The original SoF captivated me the moment I opened fire on my first enemy target. I shot him in the head and was surprised when I put a hole in his face and the back of his head had a messy exit wound and was gushing blood - while his body slumped to the ground like a wet bag of ground beef. The next encounter – with a shotgun in my hands – caused my target’s intestines to fall out of his body cavity while he moaned and groaned in pain. I fired one more spray of buckshot at his face and his head was blown completely off. Shooting enemies in the hands, knees or other joints with a shotgun or high caliber pistol insured that that entire joint was coming off at the seams.
In Soldier of Fortune 2, the gore level was changed a bit so that now, intestines didn’t fall out, but instead, shooting enemies in the face caused their skulls to hollow out and pieces of brain and assorted meat to litter the ground. SoF2 retained most of the gore from SoF1 but now, you had to do slightly more damage to take body parts off.
SoF:Payback stays true to its roots.
Shooting an enemy in the back (or the head) drops them to the ground lifeless( as if their “power button” has suddenly been cut off).
Shooting them and wounding them causes them to display pain animations – if you shoot them in a non-vital location with a small caliber pistol, they will grab the affected area and moan in pain. If you blow their legs off, they fall to the ground screaming in horror and some of them may try to crawl – while you stare at the bone stump piercing through their now absent joint.
SoF:P has a slew of different weapons to use – well over 25 different guns. You may even customize them with scopes, silencers, and grenade launchers.
The graphics engine makes their features (iron sights, switches, etc) look very good. The muzzle flashes and ejected shells look great and the weapons feel appropriately powerful and violent but they lack the visual feel of "heft" that the weapons of the original PC game displayed. If you choose a pistol, you do the least damage to an enemy because of the smaller caliber bullet. If you however use a shotgun or machine gun, shooting at enemies tears them apart as if they’d been tossed into a digital wood chipper.
Some of the guns are so powerful that they actually throw the enemy sideways.
FPS games generally make it a rule that a headshot is the most powerful and safest way to dispatch an enemy but, if you are feeling exceptionally mean, you might shoot them in the neck, at which point they will grab their throat and begin choking on their own blood.
…or maybe shoot them in the groin to watch them grab their crotch and fall to the ground. Remember the movie Robocop?
DISMEMBERING PEOPLE ON XBOX LIVE
Unlike the PS3 online version of the game, Xbox Live’s fully fleshed out Achievements gamer-points give you lots to strive for. The standard FPS game modes are all here, such as: deathmatch, Team deathmatch, etc…but what hurts this game is that there are currently only a handful of maps (5) until Xbox live offers it downloadable content.
As if the ultra-violent dismemberment wasn’t enough, the designers have come up with “bleedout” which causes a mortally wounded enemy who isn’t killed outright to “bleedout” in 8 seconds. This adds a little depth to multiplay because now, if you damage an enemy without killing them, they may fall to the ground and still be dangerous for their remaining 8 seconds. Lets say you take a guy’s leg off…he doesn’t die until you deliver the coup de gras’. If you wanna’ torture him, blow off all his limbs and let him sit there and think about how he screwed up until he finally passes.
Multiplay could have been better but, unfortunately the internet code is laggy and not as smooth as several recent FPS shooters released on the system.
IN NEED OF PROSTHESIS ?
Soldier of Fortune games justify their existence by giving the gamer a chance to use ultra violent killing tactics against enemies who display reactions to those tactics. That is the long and short of it. The gameplay is highly derivative and should not be purchased or played by children or anyone who is not mentally mature enough to understand the consequences of violence.
As dual and quad core CPU’s are churned out by Intel and AMD, video game consoles gain more display ability. Terrain and landscapes in games such as CoD4 and Battlefield2 could easily be mistaken as “real” and soon, the enemies we kill in games will be photorealistic. Eventually killing virtually will look like true-life crime scene or autopsy photos since these powerful processors will be able to completely model internal organs and skin in 3D. This is a scary situation for parents who wish to keep their kids away from violent material because it is becoming more accessible and more prevalent. Mortal Kombat was given plenty of media hooplah due to its display of blood and dismemberment but that violence was relatively cartoonish compared to what today’s games are capable of.
The problem I have reviewing Soldier of Fortune is that I can’t simply review it as an FPS game – rather, I must review it as a gory gore rendering video game engine coupled to an average FPS game.
Without the blood and gore, this game would just be another Battlefield 2 or CoD clone.
If you added the gore technology to Battlefield 2 or CoD4, then those games would basically become Soldier of Fortune. The violence is highly kinetic and dynamic but newer games such as CRYSIS and even Call of Duty 4 offer a lot more diversity. Bleedout is a nice touch though and when technology permits, enemy’s will gain more mortality effects when injured. Give it 3 or 4 years.
Of course, when you think about it…if you are going to make a game about gunplay
or violent fighting, you should be prepared to witness the consequences of those actions which is something that most games and movies completely ignore. It is easy to show someone in an action flick being shot, but what you rarely (if ever) see are all the criminals who live to suffer from their wounds…or require amputations and surgery because a wound is now infected.
The consequence of violent warfare is what Soldier of Fortune is showing us, and for many players and parents, that much detail may be too much.
For real life soldiers, insurgents and other types of combatants…gore and amputated limbs are a reality.
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