Soldier of Fortune II: Double Helix - Gold Edition

The fact that I can seriously use the sentence from this review's title for Soldier of Fortune 2 after having lots of fun with Soldier of Fortune 1 tells me something with this game has went horribly wrong. It's suffering with just too many highly questionable design choices to be fun. 1. Colombia levels have too much thick foliage, making it difficult to spot enemies. They, however, do not suffer with this problem and will gladly mow you down while you can't even see them. 2. Too many grenade-throwing enemies, with explosive grenades giving very little time to react if they land near you. 3. Enemies find it far too easy to quickly mow you down, even on lower difficulty levels. 4. Limited amount of saves per level, making the previous three complaints even worse. And for some reason, they decided to sacrifice the cheesier atmosphere from the first game and make this one more "realistic". Not only do I not understand why they did this, me preferring the first one's B movie atmosphere, but even this is inconsistent. It's serious most of the times, but then you get the helicopter level where one of the NPCs starts playing Ride of the Valkyrie, something I'd not expect in a "serious" story at all. I have a feeling this was basically a foreshadowing of how bad SoF 3 turned out to be.

Indeed , where to begin. The game itself is a classic title that had it's day in the sun. Mp game play was phenomenal. It still has servers hosted for it even after the master server shutdown. Buying it now, isnt worth it. You can play the single player game and enjoy it so long as you understand that , the game itself is 20 years old. It isn't meant to stand the test of time and run on newer hardware. It wasn't built that way. Many of the older games weren't. I put thousands of Multiplayer hours into this game, running with the best of the best of our time. This game was a cut above most fps in that era. want an FPS single player classic? Buy it. Don't expect much out of it otherwise.

I played this way back when it first released many many times. One of my favorite FPS games. Still have the original CD's but installing them is a pain on newer systems. Picked up all the SOF games when they hit GOG. You still have to apply some modern fixes if you play on Windows 10 or 11. Never had Win8/8.1 so i couldnt tell you there, but Windows 7 even needed a tweak here and there. Gameplay is pretty good and still holds up with a few issues that are a result of great coding on poor hardware that newer systems take advantage of. Raven's Engine coding seemed to be held back by the performance of older PC's. It is free of those limitation and shows a more challenging experience in both good & bad ways. Feels more claustrophic than the original SOF, using new models & textures on old designs. One of the few games that took advantage of "leaning" mechanics quite well for its time. Gun play is a 7/10 because the Ghoul Engine 2.0 masks or rather distracts some of the issues like Hit Registration. For example the mounted M60 Machine Gun used to just spray in a large cone, now it fires in a tighter circle almost all bullets on top of one another. On older PC's the hit registration was fairly poor and the recoil of guns was all over the place for anything automatic. The coding for Recoil and Hit Registration on newer PC's is actually better. Enemy pathing is a bit broke, not just being scripted, but in combat they tend to be overly accurate with on newer PC's. Often times breaking the limits of targeting, shooting and walls. Ive had an HE grenade kill me through a wall. As always Google "PCGamingWiki Soldier of Fortune II Double Helix" to see what they have for Modern System fixes to make sure you get the best optimum game play. One fix that is not mentioned in the PCGW SOF2 page is an audio skipping/stuttering issue that can be remedied with the same audio patching "Indirectsound" and "dsoal" that SOF1 uses. Drop both in the same folder as SOF2.exe.

Whereas SOF1 was still very much run'n'gun type of shooter at heart, SOF 2 changes the game and takes big leap towards more realistic gameplay. It's not basically power fantasy, where you just kill enemies, anymore. The game rewards much slower, more careful approach (leaning from behind corners isn't just for decoration here). And just forget about shooting full auto to targets more than 15 m from you, you'll just loose your ammo. Even Ghoul damage system is now more realistic, not so over the top for some weapons. It's definitely more difficult than SF1, but enjoyable. Just Columbia levels can be more bothersome as sometimes there's really no good cover to fire from behind and while you might not readily spot enemies in the dense jungle, they'll see you just fine and swiftly eliminate you. There are some stealth sections which aren't particularly good. Fortunately only in one of them an alarm means that you've failed your mission. Final fight with Osprey is more tedious than fun, too. Graphics is good for the game's release data and above mentioned Ghoul system works even better (although less spectacularly than in SF1). The shadows like to glitch and should be lowered down to "spot" to avoid the problem. The weapons choice is fairly wide with good selection of pistols, SMGs, assault rifles, shotguns and explosives. Fun fact: H&K MP5SD featured so prominently on the game cover isn't even available in singleplayer mode without using cheats or mods. Story is serviceable and concerns bioweapon this time. There are some sections where you're going through a small town attacked by a wirus. No action there so it's probably boring for many people, but it shows well, against what danger you're fighting and what's at stake. The one thing original CD release has and I don't think GOG version has, was the sequence playing during game installation stylized as TV news or documentary about viruses and epidemics, greatly enhancing the game atmosphere.

The gore of SOF was ramped up to a supernatural level for this one, plus the added rag doll p’s means you can lay the smackdown on enemies with tenfold the whoopa$$. SOFII came at a time when we needed it, can’t say the same for the 3rd one, SOFII had the action, mystery, intrigue, and TIMING of a great game. IMO it earned its place in gaming history. Yeah it’s old, but has it been replaced? Games are too scared to even tread the ground of this behemoth, so the answer would be: NO. Still waiting for game devs to grow some balls? Do you have any faith that they will? Well if your answer’s D.T.A. and you ain’t got the sweet time to wait, play this game and laugh at the devs who are crying because they’ve had the imagination beat out of them. That’s it, cry for your mommies, the fruits of greater men’s labour is still ripe for the picking. YEEEET 100 100