Soldier of Fortune: Payback

After 2 great games, it still puzzles me why this one got published under the SOF banner. It's one of the worst fps ever. Bad gunplay, bad level design, bad story (that even stops halfway through, bad or glad it's over?) Avoid this one like the plague!

While this one is not as good as the previous entries, I think it is a nice time killer that doesn't tax my brain too much. Initially I thought it was awful because I had a hard time hitting/killing enemies. Then I found out that this was a actually a bug that shows up on modern pc's. It can be gotten rid off by forcing v-sync, e.g. through the nvidia control panel. This made a world of difference and it plays normal now.

I spent a little over an hour playing this hot garbage and can say with absolute certainty that this is by far the worst FPS I've ever had the misfortune of both paying for and playing. Where to start? Well, for one the hitboxes are completely inconsistent as in I've lost track of the number of times I have been shooting what the game has decided is a ghost. Get ready to be charged by enemies while you back pedal for survival while gasping in horror as the malestrom of rounds you send flying pass through them and into a wall. Because of this, it becomes nothing more than a guessing game as to if you'll kill them or be stareing down the "Game Over" screen for the upteenth time that minute. Also the shotguns, pistols and LMGs become useless as the only thing you'll want to stick to is an assault rifle with a grenade launcher undermount and grenades themselves. Everything else is useless! Oh, remember the Ghoul Engine from the prior to SOF titles and how impressive and ghoulishly fun it was. Gone! Instead you get some lousy blood mist, no cool death animations where they respond to where they've been shot and no organs seeping out just limbs popping off combined with the enemines collasping to the ground. You know, if the physics engine doesn't drag them down into the floor or fire their corpses off into the sun. Graphically, this game is comparable to Rocky Dennis's face and it still loses out. Gotta love that five foot in front of me draw distance with incredibly limited graphical options. If none of that disuades you from purchasing this piece of feculence then maybe when playing on "Normal" you have the life expectancy of a hemophiliac with a penchant for self harm will. You have rebounding health that plummets faster than an Enron stock. Of course, that is the best case scenario. Sometimes you'll be at full health walk into a room and get one shotted outta no where. Hope you like a pitiful checkpoint system. Long story short, play the previous games. Out.

Let's get it out of the way: it's a typical low-budget military shooter by some Eastern European amateur studio that can be finished in about four hours - like hundreds of others created in the early to mid-2000s. The difference is that somehow this one ended up getting the Soldier of Fortune name and clumsily tried to recreate the original games' dismemberment tech (and failed). And no: there's no references to any characters or events in the earlier games. If you ever played one of those aforementioned low-budget military shooters you know what to expect: it's just a cheap Call of Duty clone. You run from objective marker to objective marker while slaughtering thousands of evil foreigners. The setting and story are as cliched as it gets and the delivery is hilariously bad. Once in a while there's a boss fight or a simple silly scripted event. There's nothing more to it. Of course there's automatic healing and aim sights and far too many guns that barely differ. So it's a superbly mediocre and criminally short ride that is often so bad that it's almost good and may make you laugh at the terrible dialogue and "cutscenes" (first person close ups on badly animated faces talking with evil accents). Note: I did not encounter the technical problems others mentioned in their reviews, with bullets ignoring enemies etc.. Apparently forcing Vsync fixes the issue.