Soldier of Fortune II: Double Helix

"I can take the difficulty but I can't take the bugs..."

I've not played SOF2 for over a year, and when I think about it now I remember two things above everything else in the game: the difficulty and the bugs.

The chances are you have played Soldier Of Fortune and are looking for more of the same, only souped up, taking all that was good about SOF (a lot of things) and improving on them, while also adding new innovations. Well, tough, because what you're getting instead is a prohibitively difficult, bug-ridden mess of a game which will have you grinding your teeth in fury at the fact that you are so rarely rewarded for playing it the way it was presumably meant to be played.

SOF had you taking John Mullins all over the world in order to battle terrorists, a job which he approached in the manner of a butcher who's got fifteen minutes to prepare three hundred doner kebabs. It was unusual to kill an SOF enemy by any means other than violent amputation, decapitation or all-out gibbing. This was fun; it was also controversial as hell, which made it more fun. The enemies were all very similar to each other and were really mere fodder for Mullins to enjoy using his horrendous weapons on; the weapons themselves were routinely fun to use, each one distinctively useful in certain circumstances; the missions were damn entertaining, almost without exception, the designers obviously realising that the missions would have to be interesting because the combat could soon get repetitive. It's necessary to mention all of this because SOF2 is very definitely a sequel, and so it has to be compared to the game it's trying to better.

So, what of SOF2's gameplay (I'll get to the other stuff later)? The majority of the fun in SOF came from the variety of ways in which you could kill your enemies, so surely SOF2 retained that at least? Nah, not really. Sure, you can still technically maim an enemy soldier with your grease gun, but that's assuming he doesn't immediately spot you from four hundred yards away, through several layers of dense jungle. It assumes that the soldier wasn't looking intently at the precise spot you were trying to sneak through, rather than doing what guards are supposed to do, which is stand around scratching themselves, smoking, gazing off into the middle distance and picking their noses. It assumes your gun will actually hit the guy in the first place. It assumes the soldier can't hear every move you make, no matter how quietly you were apparently moving. Oh, and it also assumes you have enough health and armour left over from the last fight you had with a soldier who was supposed to be an easy kill. And this is only in the FIRST LEVEL.

Combat honestly is this difficult: enemies are insanely alert and accurate, from the first level to the last; and they can do big damage to your health and armour, presuming you've actually found some lying around. No more happy rampages with a shotgun in your hand, like in SOF. Every move you make in this game must be slow and quiet, and when you do open fire it had better be with the right weapon. You had also better have cover nearby, plenty of armour, and the patience to 'quickload' when you inevitably die. No-one will get through this game in one afternoon, which was easy with SOF. You must go slow and treat every fight like it's your last, even if you're only facing off against one enemy at a time, which you rarely are.

This slow and careful approach doesn't make SOF2 a bad game. There are people (like me) who enjoy challenges like the ones this game constantly throws up. It is entertaining and fulfilling to work your way carefully through SOF2's many missions, because you get the feeling that this is what being a hired gun like John Mullins must be like. SOF was great fun but by no means realistic. I doubt the real Mullins ever charged through subways, blasting goons' legs off with shotguns; but he may well have tiptoed through jungles, trying to sneak up on enemies before they could ring alarms. In this respect SOF2 is not SOF's sequel, but is instead a different approach to this type of game. This is fine by me.

But now I have to come to what definitely is not fine with me, and that includes all the other things which make this game far tougher than it should be. Assuming you enjoy playing games which aren't buggy, you are going to have problems with SOF2.

Picture the scene: you are sneaking through dense undergrowth, there is an enemy in your sights in the distance, he hasn't spotted you yet, he is looking in another direction, you crawl forwards and hide behind a tree, you lean to your left and take careful aim with your sniper rifle, you fire off a classic headshot. Nothing happens. You fire again. Nothing happens a further time. Not only is the enemy not dead, he is not even hit. This is because your bullet has hit the tree you're hiding behind, even though you are leaning out from behind it. While the tree was unaccountably getting in the way of your shots, various other soldiers have heard you and are sneaking through the jungle towards you. You hear rustling and then a couple of 'tink-tink' sounds, then you die, having been blown up by a grenade. This happens so often in the jungle areas of the game it's not true. Don't hide behind trees.

Another thing: every enemy in this game knows you're there even before you do. They know where you are, they know where you'll be in ten seconds, they know your dog's name and they know what make of pants you're wearing. You might as well have telegrammed them to tell them you were coming. In order to get through even the smallest, simplest levels, you'll have to play and fail them several times, then reload and start again, knowing where every enemy is. Only then will you get through alive.

Given that you're playing a game where certain levels can take over an hour to complete, I take it you're going to want to save at some point. Well, don't bother, because it can actually make things far worse. GameFAQs doesn't have the bandwidth to allow me to mention every save-related bug in this game, so I'll try to list some of my favourites with brevity.

- You're escaping from the jungle, shooting a machine-gun from out of a helicopter while it tries (inexplicably) to fly along above a very dangerous river. You get killed halfway through and reload from a save you made about two minutes in. Rather than pick up its flight path from where it left off, the game resumes from the beginning of the chopper's flight path, albeit from the same spot you saved at. So you are now flying through the ground, through bridges, through big hills. Your enemies are in the same places as before but they can't hit you because you are miles away. This bug allows you to complete that particular level easily, but it's amazing it was left in at all.

- You have to clear out an enemy encampment, including exploring various huts. You die before killing off all the soldiers outside, so you reload from a savegame and try again. You succeed, but the game fails to realise it now has to unlock the huts to allow you to progress. You can't get into any of the huts and so you are now stuck in the level and have to reload from the very beginning.

- You have to attack across a shallow river with a bunch of allies backing you up. There is a boat downriver and it has two enemies shooting at you from its deck. You die and reload, but the boat has now translocated up to your spawnpoint and is sitting on your head (seriously). You are unable to move, and you can't reload from the start of the level because you're AT the start already. You are stuck.

- You have to destroy a gas tank in order to knock down a fence and jump over it. You destroy the tank, the fence comes down, you quicksave, you jump over, you get killed by a helicopter. You reload. The gas tank is destroyed but the fence is still up. You can't get over the fence. You are stuck.

- You call in an airstrike to destroy a bridge, the bridge falls, you quicksave, you accidentally get killed. You reload and the bridge is back, though you saved after it had been destroyed last time. You can't call in another airstrike because the game knows you saved after you called it in last time, but you can't get your allies to follow you because the bridge is back, and they'll only follow you after the bridge is gone. Your allies refuse to move until the bridge is gone, which you have no means of effecting. You are stuck.

I can't go on with this. You get the point - there are enormous bugs in this game, too many to count. And I'm talking about AFTER it's been patched. Unbelievable.

You'd also better find a walkthrough, because the game makes certain leaps in logic and leaves you well behind. How are you supposed to figure out that you have to unhook two train carriages before you can continue with a mission? Certain doors need keycards, but how are you meant to know which need cards and which ones are just locked? Why does the game tell you to keep a low profile in the train station if you want to avoid detection, when it already knows the guards are going to automatically attack you, whether you 'behave suspiciously' or not? There is one area where you have to shoot at enemies from the back of a truck while you wait for a friend to start the engine. If you don't figure out that you're supposed to shoot at a certain gas tank until it explodes the level will NEVER continue - it will just send more and more enemies until you die. Yet it gives you no clues about what your objective is. There are quite a lot of such head-scratching incidents in the game, and trial and error is involved where it shouldn't be.

There are also plenty of other niggling aspects of the gameplay which start to really annoy. There are a great many different guns and yet they all behave pretty much the same way (most guns do, but maybe they shouldn't in a computer game). You'll find one you like and stick with it - there's no point in outfitting yourself with a gigantic arsenal if the grease gun can do everything. The grenade-launcher guns are very useful in a game where enemies like to huddle together and hide behind cover (in this the AI is very clever at times), but as long as you have grenades and one long-range rifle you're pretty much set. The game hands you an uber-gun later on and yet never gives you a single decent opportunity for you to use it. It highlights enemies in infra-red when you use the scope, and this could have been fantastically useful; but don't forget that every single enemy soldier can see you from forty miles away. Why bother crouching behind a bush and zooming in with your infra-red if the person you're zooming in on is already firing at you? It's incredibly frustrating and the gun is worthless as a result. It also has a confusing set of sub-controls which allow you to plot range, distance, grenade trajectory - all useless when your enemies are riddling you with bullets before you've even crouched. By the time you successfully calculate the correct arc at which to lob a grenade you're already dead thirty times over.

All the fun of deciding how to kill your enemies - what limb to remove first, etc. - is gone because it's far too hard to even kill them at all before they kill you.

I'm in danger of serious trolling here, so I'll try to calm this review down. I don't want to talk about graphics because it will just upset me. In order to make the game more gritty and realistic (it's a GAME - why do this?) the developers sacrificed fun and framerate. If you get the game's graphics to load at all then they will look badly-rendered, with half-arsed texturing, impossibly bad clipping in certain areas, lots of unnecessary piffle obscuring your view... Sound is significantly better, which is just as well if the only advantage you can gain over your enemies is hearing them approach one nanosecond before they toss their grenades. The sound helps the huge tension of the game a lot - you will spend a great deal of time just crouching and listening, craning your neck just in case that whisper really was a hostile sneaking up on you from behind that truck.

Mission design, in spite of its many, many flaws and bugs, is very involving, and every one feels like a new challenge. There are too many level-cripplingly large coding errors to count, but if you actually manage to make it all the way through even one of the game's levels without getting stuck somehow you will find that you did really enjoy it for the clenchingly tense experience it was. Mission design is where SOF2 really shines above SOF, and the designers deserved much better from their colleagues in the graphics and coding departments.

Anyway, play the game all the way through, then get a hypnotist to help you blot out all the manifold horrors the programmers left in. If the hypnotist is good at his job, you will be left with the feeling that you really enjoyed this tough but fulfilling game. If he's crap you will remember SOF2 as a somewhat entertaining game mired in a cloying mess of bugs, errors and hideous mistakes. It should have been so much better, but what it is is an unforgiveable thing to unleash on the unsuspecting gaming public.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 08/09/07