Soldier of Fortune: Payback

Just to make it clear, I actually enjoyed the first two games of the series despite some of their flaws, but those games seem perfect when compared to this one. Now, in the past 15 years or so, I played a looooot of video games, and a lot of FPS's, but I can honestly and surely say that this one is, by far, the worst FPS I ever played. The only good things it has going for itself are gun sounds and reload animations, everything else is just garbage. Level design is extremely generic and limited, audio sometimes cuts out (especially near the end of the "dialogues" (if you can call them that)), health depletes very quickly, even when playing on Easy difficulty ( to be honest I don't even think that there are difficulties in this game, whatever you choose you end up on near impossible difficulty), story is nonsensical and characters are shallow and generic. And don't even get me started on the physics and gunplay.... Invisible enemies that only die by explosives and if you shoot them under a certain angle, insane ragdoll physics that throws your and enemies' bodies around for miles upon death, often times you get one shot by enemies without even realizing what happened, and to end it all the game ends at a very unexpected time, like an episode of a TV show, only this game doesn't lead anywhere because a sequel was never made.... If you have beaten the first two games, you can easily skip this one, you're not going to be missing anything as this game has nothing to do with the previous ones, it just kinda throws you into the shoes of a random protagonist with minimal explanations and no tutorial.

i'll make this simple... after two well made games with heart and ideas, after some studio and money troubles it waws decided to make a cash-in game, maximum profit minimum effort. it was a budget game, so budget it almost make todays asset flips and android copy paste games seem professional basically you got a a quickly cobbled together game with so many bugs and unfinished maps that you can easily reach spots "outside" the map, or walk into an alley that was not meant to be accessible sometimes causing a game crash. and to not make this an endless rant here is the number one frustration and problem with the game, due to laziness, and i guess incompetence, enemies spawn randomly as in not with a certain purpose, just randomly - this is not even the worst - they spawn all around you often someone right behind you, talk about cheap deaths - and i mean all around you, like you walk into an empty alley, suddenly three persons in front of you and two behind. the two first games in the series i remember really fondly but this was a disaster.

I don't tend to regret the games I've bought but surly regret being this. The hitbox for an enemy seems to be in their feet. Shoot anywhere else, and they pass through an enemy with no indication. A grenade will kill and enemy, 1 out 3 shotgun rounds might graze an enemy, and a full clip will do nothing but frustrate you. A review below suggests that forcing vsync via your graphics card setting will fix this, but I've tried this and seen no improvement. As it currently is, this game is a mess and shouldn't be on sale.

The game is literally unplayable unless you enable VSync and cap your monitor refresh rate to 60Hz, otherwise the hit detection on the guns breaks completely and your shots will never hit enemies. Even with that fixed, this is still an incredibly bland and linear shooter with little redeeming value, and insulting ends on a cliff-hanger with no resolution. Don't bother.

Soldier of Fortune: Payback has an unearned notoriety as one of the "worst games of all time," but this is far from true. What is more accurate is to say, is it's probably the buggiest game of all time, when you first get it, anyway. When shooting enemies, bullets go right through them and the crosshairs don't even register that you're aim is dead on. Ragdolls are hilarious, with enemies flying like rockets. However, all this is just compatibility issues, that are easily fixed by a quick moddb download of the 1.1 patch, followed by setting compatibility mode to Windows 98. This worked for me. Another solution for others was to force V-Sync from Control Panel (but that didn't work for me). Once the technical issue is gone, the game is everything I wanted and expected it to be. It's pretty much the same as any other "Soldier of Fortune" title, which if you are unaware is a sort of B-movie type game that takes the industry standard shooter of the day, and decides to add ridiculous levels of gore and dismemberment to it. The first SoF ran in Quake II engine and looked like Half-Life, with linear levels that you just run through, feel like an action movie badass, and enjoy near-Brutal Doom levels of gore. (Actually not quite that extreme. More like Mortal Kombat blood with Jedi Outcast's Dismemberment with the cheat code on.) SoF: Payback is no different, except it's got updated mid/late 00s graphics. In a nutshell, this game is like CoD 4 with awesome levels of gore. There's not much more to it than that, and there doesn't need to be. Is it some groundbreaking title? Of course not, nor does it need to be. Not everything has to be a Half-Life. The story is like the iconic John Carmack quote--it's like story in a porn movie. It's there, but just in the background. Not that important. It's welcome, but not meant to be taken too seriously. This is a game that is very easy to get into, turn your brain off, enjoy a few missions, and then you're done.