Soldier of Fortune II: Double Helix - Gold Edition

Soldier of Fortune 2, along with games like Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Medal of Honor set the benchmark for the semi-realistic class of shooter in the early 2000's before CoD 4 replaced it as the dominant formula. It also spawned a handful of clones like Shadow Ops: Red Mercury. While I still liked the first game, it was little more than a Quake/Doom style shooter set in modern day. You run around without a care in the world blowing off people's limbs with shotguns and blowing them up with nades. When you're doing that with 95% hitscan enemies rather than projectile ones, there's a lot of things you need to account for to let the player play the game that way. What Raven did was reduced the accuracy & damage of the enemies to such a degree that it almost feels like you're shooting cardboard cutouts at times. The vast majority of enemies on normal difficulty don't pose any credible threat to you. As a result, the game doesn't really succeed at making you feel like a badass since running into a room and gibbing everybody isn't an accomplishment, it's just operating a machine. Soldier of Fortune 2 on the other hand was a very challenging game. The gore was your reward for winning firefights, making you feel badass in the process. The game adopts a form of realism similar to the "action-movie realism" of mods like Action Quake 2 & The Specialists. There's even a hospital level that feels quite Hard Boiled inspired. Weapons had a lot of spread & recoil but there's no aim penalty for moving and turning. Movement was fast & strafing was as fast as going forward. The thing it does so well is that you can play each battle both like a Ghost Recon game & a run n gun. Importantly enemy accuracy is reduced while you're moving so once you ID your targets, you can run up to them & gun them down & there's nothing more satisfying than sneaking up to a room GR-style, figuring out where the enemies are, then running in with your dual uzis & literally ripping everyone a part.

A very good story about biological warfare. A more serious touch and atmosphere all around in the game, than the first one. And a phrase that I still remember from the time I played it, which Mullins whispered to himself in a devastating way, after something terrible had happened…

Every time I open this game, a little command prompt pops up, the screen gets blurry and super bright, and then the game just crashes. I then have to restart my computer to get rid of the blurry + bright effect. So in the end, the game just causes me to waste five minutes of my life.

Don't buy Soldier of Fortune 2 if you are a half decent player. I bought this game couple days ago, and have been accused of cheating every single day of playing. ROX members will harass you and threaten to ban you, they say you ruin their fun. I really expected a nice community of SoF2 enthousiast welcoming me with open arms, unfortunately there's a lotta toxic players that can't accept the fact that there's players better then them. Better to keep Soldier of Fortune as a memory for how cool it was.

I wish I could give this game negative stars. I've been gaming for 30+ years and never played anything that could be in the same order of magnitude as bad as this.