Soldier of Fortune: Payback

"Soldier of Misfortune"

Be thankful you don't live in the world portrayed in Soldier of Fortune: Payback. Everyone in it, bar the protagonist, seems to be as fragile as a toilet paper raincoat and packed with enough blood to fill a swimming pool. A swimming pool especially built for giants. A nosebleed would look like something from Kill Bill. If Dracula was written in such a world, it'd probably end with the morbidly obese Count being extricated from his bedroom on a winch while the neighbours stood around gawping.

In other words, this game revels in gore. It's the sole selling point of a title that takes the name of the popular Soldier of Fortune franchise and runs with it. Forget the plot, so thin it's practically monomolecular – the true objective is the gleeful annihilation of your enemies. If a second goes by without you turning a raving guerrilla into something that Hannibal Lecter would like to add a few side dishes to, you're doing something wrong. Basically, you play the role of a gruff mercenary (is there any other kind?) who's betrayed by his comrade while trying to protect a diplomat from assassination. You are then sent around the world trying to destroy a secret army of terrorists whose members, rather short-sightedly, all have an identifying tattoo. As you can see, this is not a game where the plot gets in the way of the shooting. Sometimes it's satisfying to just switch on an utterly mindless shooter and destroy things for a few hours, but what is especially mystifying is that this game manages to make its refreshingly old-school premise such a chore to play.

The graphics are definitely a mixed bag. Environments are generally bland and desolate (textures are especially dull), though a few areas, such as the jungle stages, stand out with their vibrant colours and lighting. Similarly, character models generally look fine at a moderate distance, but get up close and you'll see that their textures are blurred and fuzzy. Weapon models are generally of a decent standard and, of course, the bloodletting looks suitably gruesome, with dismembered lumps of terrorist bouncing off every surface.

The quality of the sound is similarly varied. The music is forgettable but inoffensive, and suits the game well enough (on the rare occasions you can actually hear it), while ambient sound helps add some character to the various stages. The enemies certainly scream with appropriate gusto when blown apart, but the voice acting is, perhaps unsurprisingly, terrible. Leaving aside the muffled war cries of your foes, who mostly seem to have come from Generic Foreign Bad Guy Casting Inc., the main character, a grunt with the personality of a bench who sounds like he's gargling sandpaper, is so cheesy that you might find your TV gives off a smell of Edam every time he speaks. The weapon sound effects, however, do deserve some praise, because rather than sounding realistic they give off hugely exaggerated roars and booms in keeping with the cartoon violence. The shotgun, in particular, sounds more like it should be on top of a tank.

The real problems arise when the corny introduction ends and you start to play the game itself. It's dull, repetitive and completely lacking in imagination. It essentially consists of charging through the world blazing away at idiots with your ridiculously overpowered weapons. Try playing it with the gore turned off and its shallowness and lack of imagination rapidly become apparent. The very first two enemy soldiers you encounter vault a barrier with flawless synchronisation and then simply stand there firing like a couple of robotic gun turrets. If you die, there's nothing to worry about as long as you have memorised where the enemies come from, and fighting them hardly requires adaptability on your part. You may as well be shooting at targets on sticks. This is because each enemy seems to have been assigned a particular method of attack that he will stick to no matter what.

Some will charge in to attempt melee attacks, even if you're at the other end of a street and pointing a machine gun at their face – you have to admire their guts (something you could literally do, given how easy it is to blow these idiots apart before they get within striking distance). Other cretins, either deluded or extraordinarily confident, like to stand their ground, completely exposed, and blaze away. They won't make the slightest effort to seek cover or even to run for it when a grenade bounces off their faces. But the silliest opponents are undoubtedly the bosses.

Every now and then you'll encounter one of them, basically a generic enemy with ludicrously ramped-up health who runs around like a headless chicken strapped to a firework with his trigger finger getting a non-stop workout. This leads to some unintentionally comical set pieces as they run backwards, firing wildly, while you pursue them around a small area, pouring lead into their faces until some important bit of them drops off and you can go on your way. The so-called AI is more on a par with shooters that were appearing 20 years ago.

Despite their stupidity in other areas, enemies are able to take you out with astounding accuracy at great distances. Needless to say, employing tactics learned from other games, such as taking cover, will utterly confound them. The game attempts to compensate for this with such cheap tactics as enemies spawning round blind corners or popping up behind you, or expecting you to cross wide-open areas while troops shoot at you from some distant vantage point. If the large groups of crack-shot enemies take you down, you respawn at one of the annoyingly infrequent checkpoints and have to go through the same shooting gallery all over again. This means that, even though most areas can be swiftly cleared or simply dashed through (it's always a bad sign when an FPS makes you want to run through areas rather than bother fighting), there are occasional frustrating points that will hold you up time and time again.

There are many weapons on offer, but they're so similar that when picking them before missions you may as well shut your eyes and point to the ones you want. A sub-machine gun takes off heads on the other side of the map as effectively as a shotgun at close range. Just as well, considering the remarkable accuracy of even the lowliest fanatic in this game!

All in all, this game cannot be recommended, even as a rental. Assuming you can be bothered to work through the 8 hours or so it takes to reach the end, you're unlikely to want to endure it again, unless you're desperate for achievements. It's boring, repetitive, and when it bothers to be challenging, it's tough for all the wrong reasons. It somehow manages to take unpretentious, no-holds-barred destruction and turn it into a tedious, derivative trudge through a bland world peopled with morons. For the first hour or so, blasting villains into chunks is fairly entertaining, but it soon becomes apparent that the game isn't going to get any deeper or any more interesting. With a wealth of high-quality shooters already available on the Xbox 360, this one need never leave the shop shelf.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 01/30/08

Game Release: Soldier of Fortune: Payback (EU, 12/07/07)