The Bottom Line: Soldier of Fortune II: Double Helix suffers from being a sub-par first-person shooter but beyond that being a sloppy port of a year-old PC version
NMD85's Full Review: Soldier of Fortune II for Xbox
In the video game industry, there are always those games that claim to fame without even having to go into depth about them. Most of those games lie in the violence department, and being notorious for the amount of gratuity a company will go to to get such raves. Well Soldier of Fortune has long been that series that went further than most shooters being that when you shoot a man - you see limbs and pieces of their brains splatter around the environments. Becoming well known for over-the-top violence, the Soldier of Fortune games have grossed a ridiculous following of those who simply love blowing pieces of their foes off - which is realistic but mainly gratuitous beyond simple blood in most first-person shooters. Activision and Gratuitous Games (how sweet and fitting huh?) toted this title over to the XBox in a pretty shabby fashion from it's year-old PC cousin - and the outcome is truly a misfortune.
I'm not a fan of Soldier of Fortune games - I think they're pretty overrated. I like my shooters to play well - not to accentuate on how much blood and limbs can be spilled (although that's certainly a perk - not that I'm a sadist - I just like to see bad guys get what they deserve) but how well a game plays based on how much care the development staff put into it. Shooters like GoldenEye, Half-Life and TimeSplitters are fine examples of shooters that have had a very good development staff that focused on making the game a fine playing experience without solely having to focus on how realistic things were. In many ways, Soldier of Fortune II: Double Helix reminds me of playing a shooter on the Nintendo 64 - it's slow, clunky, and the technology is a crying shame that hardly upstages The World Is Not Enough on the old 64-bit machine. I suppose this works well for a console shooter - it feels dated, plays dated, and is generally a game I'd compare to any N64 shooter with it's unacceptably bad yesteryear technology. On the other hand we have Gratuitous Games, having only played one game they've developed - they are generally a company who lacks talent - especially in porting games (you can follow me back to Cruis'n Exotica on the N64). I abhorred the PC version of Double Helix, and being that this slipshod port is worse - you can expect how this review might turn out.
Starting off, when you first sight Double Helix in your eyes, you'll immediately notice that this game was effortlessly ported to the XBox in a very shabby fashion. The graphics seriously look something out of the Nintendo 64 age of shooting games that go back as far as three-years ago. Having first seen this game in action, I'd say it matches wits with The World Is Not Enough on the N64. There's an apparent difference though - EA's Bond game looked better than this game does. Not because of the technology, but mainly because the game is loaded with fog, a unstable and chuggy framerate, and tons of shoddy texture work. Even when firing the guns, you can tell that the animation is heavily marred with lazy animations that aren't anything of a smooth hint whatsoever. This aspect makes the game look very N64-like, and that's not acceptable in this day and age of games that have shown us a powerhouse of strength. I'd say the only the graphical perks here is the character animations, which could too be outmatched on the N64 with the low-polygonal appearance. I'd say the only few graphical flares I was impressed by on a minimal level was the glass effects, in that the glass can be broken in different places and still stay in tact and the draw animations (when the player pulls out his gun) which were something beyond a mediocre standard. Everything else is embarrassingly bad.
The audio in this game is just about as abysmal as the overall package. The sounds are muffled, the voice-acting is poorly amplified to the point where it's nearly impossible to hear unless you crank the voice-over volume beyond everything else, and the sound effects in general are pretty no-frills. Even the game's audio seems to be there but is very ambient, so much that you may not even notice a soundtrack there. I must say, from the voice acting that I did notice (after planting my ears up to my speakers), the accents of the foreign actors aren't too cheap and the voice work is generally decent. It's a shame though, the whole audio package is an aurally disappointing package that suffers from a lack of clarity - like it was recorded off a Nintendo 64 cartridge.
Getting to the gameplay, the solo player mode allows you to traverse through a bunch of missions that allow the player to sample such weaponry as of submachine guns, assault rifles, shotguns, and explosives galore - there is being the selling point of Double Helix. With such weapons, you'll be able to shoot off pieces of your enemies and watch blood spill in inane amounts of blood a la Turok-style. In many ways, this game parallels to a Turok game in that it seems to focus on blood and gore other than being a game in itself - the different here is that the Turok games have actually had a decent amount of success (aside from the latest Turok: Evolution which wasn't too bad, but missed the mark) and have been fun to play. Double Helix is not very fun to play, especially since it plays worse than most shooters of the last generation (namely on the Nintendo 64). What makes Double Helix a somewhat engaging quest is that there are many objective-based missions to endure, and there is lots of gunplay. Sadly, games deserving of more levels of gunplay (namely TimeSplitters 2 - a prime example of a game that needed more solo player perks) aren't there and instead you get games like these that are too much of a painful experience to play through. And then much like games like Postal - another gratuitously violent series on the PC, you have the games that still focus on the less important, mindless aspects that really just dumb-down a game's seriousness and respect by gamers. Double Helix is like that, which is why it deserves less respect. Generally, the game is not much fun - especially since the controls are stiff and clunky. Movement is also disrupted by a sluggish control scheme that can be loosened in sensitivity, but is generally still slow and sloppy. Double Helix must be mouse-and-keyboard only - or else you have this recurring console-shooter problem.
Like the PC version, you have an internet option via XBox Live - but there's nothing entirely special about it unless you happen to like Double Helix and the multiplayer aspects of the game. There are many missions to play through in the solo-player game, but is not very inviting do to the ho-hum gameplay. After a half-hour of playing through the game, I realized my brain was turning to mush just randomly and repetitively destroying things in a pretty not-very-fun fashion. All in all, what we have here is a pretty poor shooter with some detrimentally bad dated specs which take the game down to a sub-generational level. Beyond that and discussing this XBox port, the game is nothing but a sloppy iteration of a already pretty poor playing shooter. Those looking for an XBox Live supported shooting game may want to look elsewhere - Double Helix is nothing of an excuse to go online and waste your time (or money) playing a basically lousy game and a sloppy port.
FINAL DECISION
(on a basis of Epinions' stars ratings)
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