This game has "hit points"! (Soldier of Fortune (PC))

Member Name: The Duke

Product:	Soldier of Fortune (PC)
Date:	16/02/01 (65 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: damage areas, decent FPS

Disadvantages: biased towards an American player, nothing special

Soldier of Fortune is a First Person Shooter (FPS) based on the magazine of the same name. For those of you who are unaware, Soldier of Fortune (SoF) is an American based magazine which deals with guns and survival, amongst other things.

It’s based on a htweaked version of the Quake 2 engine (which is now quite old, and starting to show its’ age) and developed by Raven Software, who previously have been responsible for several Quake add-on mission packs, and subsequently have released Star Trek: Elite Force based on the Quake 3 engine.

As the technology behind the game is quite old, it runs with no problems on my AMD K6-2 500Mhz with GeForce card and 196Mib RAM. Installation, as is the norm these days was painless, and quick. The game runs smoothly on my system at 800 x 600 with the graphical detail level set to maximum.

The level of knowledge of the various Quake engines the Raven have would have you believe that they would be able to perform a fairly extensive amount of tweaking to the graphics engine, producing something a bit special.

Well, in terms of the graphics engine, they have. Don’t get me wrong, it still looks and feels like the Quake 2 engine, even with some nice new textures and good level design, but they’ve introduced damage areas to the models you will be shooting in the game. Head shots can count, sometimes to devastating effect when a man who is running towards you suddenly loses his head in a explosion of red mist. Other damage areas include the legs and arms, the midriff (when shot, a mans’ “guts” will spill out) and the nether regions, which, when shot, causes the man to grasp his family jewels in what I thought was quite a comical manner. It’s also possible to disarm a guy by shooting his weapon out of his hands – he will then stand there cowering in fear until you either leave or shoot him – it’s your choice.

It’s this damage
area thing which is the main selling point of the whole game. After all, it’s not based on any new technology like the Q3 or UT engines, or the AI of the bots in both those games, so it had to do something different to grab the man in the street and persuade him to buy it. It should be noted that the gore levels can be turned off, and password protected if you’re going to be installing it on a machine which younger people have access to, so you can still play the high gore version while “little Johnny” can play the non gore version.

The level design is quite good, with the story taking you all over the world (Germany, New York, Japan, Iraq, Africa - thus making each level look different, and keeping the interest level high) and the sounds the guns make can be quite satisfying on the whole. I found the game to be fairly challenging (played on the two highest levels), but to be honest, it never really grabbed me in the way that similar games such as Duke Nukem, Quake 2 or Half-Life grabbed me. This opinion relates to the single player game only, and not the multiplayer which I've yet to try.

Another point is the strange way some of the weapons work – the sniper rifle, for example, can be used without the 'scope, but is no more powerful than a pea shooter, however, zoom in with the scope, and all of a sudden man are catapulted backwards approximately 10 metres when shot with the same weapon irrespective of where on the body you shoot them.

I think I would have not enjoyed it as much as if I’d paid full price (i.e. £30 ) for it, but as I got it for a bargain £15, then I did not feel cheated. If you enjoy FPS games, then there is no reason why you shouldn’t enjoy this, especially if you can hunt it down for under £20.

Summary: