Soldier of Fortune: Platinum Edition

The story is mostly trite, most maps are very linear and some enemies, especially bosses, are really bullet spongey without much feedback as to whether you're causing them any damage at all. Still, the variety in settings, the punchy weapons and the fire fights overall makes this worth a playthrough today. The game works fine on Windows 11 now.

I was afraid to play this game again after 20 years... I had great memories of it and didn't want to destroy them. Fortunately, Soldier of Fortune aged surprisingly well and GOG version works flawlessly. When I started playing, I just couldn't stop until I completed it few evenings later :) There aren't many THAT absorbing games nowadays :) And the "Hard" difficulty from 20 years ago is a REALLY hard compared to these "hard(ish)" difficulty levels from current games :D

I won't waste much words on the game itself, it's phenomenal, I suggest watching Gmanlives' review to get the feel of it. To play the game as if it were a modern title, you'll want to download the SoF plus patch (http://sof1.megalag.org/sofplus/) and the registry fix for the forced mouse acceleration (https://donewmouseaccel.blogspot.com/2010/03/markc-windows-7-mouse-acceleration-fix.html). I can personally confirm these work on Windows 10 as I bought the game last year and refunded it because it played horribly, pirated a few days ago to see if these would work, was euphoric when I found out they did, and repurchased the game. But yeah, Soldier of Fortune is an amazing FPS with good gunplay and well-done level design - the weapons all mostly sound and feel good, but the SPAS-12 and the Desert Eagle deserve individual praise as they're an absolute joy to use. Highly recommend this title.

Soldier of Fortune was a powerhouse of an FPS when it released. It was extremely impressive for its time and was hugely influential when it first released. The developers of the game weren't satisfied by the limitations they had at the time. The game had extremely impressive gore and animations and wasn't even made with skeletal animations. Not only that but the environments of the game were extremely steller for the time. Soldier of Fortune released around the same time as Kingpin on the same engine but looks far better and plays a lot better. Infact I would easily say Soldier of Fortune is the best Id Tech 2 engine game. You owe it to yourself to play this game. It's one of the best first person shooters from this era.

Firstly, I want to talk about the good: The game is super-fun, fast-paced action where you simply waltz through levels whilst massacring everything in your way. Realistic shooter? Not here, despite what the game may claim. The graphics are surprisingly awesome for their time, and the game still looks very good. The best thing by far are the super-fun weapons this game has to offer, though the best of these are only available for the latter half of the game, unfortunately. But levels are fun, and for a game its time, there is an impressive amount of destructible scenery. While all that is true, I now have to talk about the bad. The first thing that really stood outto me were the difficulty options. Normal difficulty really won't provide very much challenge, even during the last few missions, yet hard will be really *quite* hard, and not a difficulty that I would recommend to anyone who has to exert most of their daily energy on work or errands, or basically anything other than video games as this difficulty will simply not be a relaxing bit of fun you can have at the end of a long day. It is also impossible to change once it has been selected, which means that there is no going back from it when a few levels deep. This is really quite frustrating. Also, some of the level design just isn't up there. Some levels will have you searching for that one last button you need push, and it will be a button that really blends in with the environment. Most of the time it's clear what you need to do, and it often occurs so naturally that it will almost happen "automatically" as you get in the zone while plowing through enemy hordes, but , you will get stuck like this. It's also worth mentioning that the story is kind of reminiscent of a bad bond movie. To me, that means it's not bad, and kind of fun, but ultimately cheesy and fogettable. But overall the game is good. It barely makes 4/5 stars, but it does. So hey, why complain. Get it if it's cheap.