I just finished my first playthrough of the game's main scenario. It's good but in the end not the mindblowing masterpiece I was counting on (which kinda captures my feelings about their previous game, This War of Mine). The game acts like it is super hardcore - so consistently, in fact, that some mechanics make no sense (e.g. the inability to undo a law that was introduced during a specific crisis once that crisis is over). I felt like the sole source of difficulty in the game was bad guidance (terrible tutorial, meh UI etc.) and just throwing unpredictable stuff at the player for the sake of it. But take this away and you're left with a rather simplistic and easy city builder. The only trouble I had resulted from stuff that can only be described as unfair and contrary to the game's management core (and I think never got close to losing). And sadly they did almost everything they could to make a second playthrough of the main scenario undesirable. There's no randomised maps, no AI opponents or anything like that, not even a high score table or something that would motivate me to get even better results next time and there's not enough options to try fundamentally different approaches to designing the city. And for a single playthrough the game is a good bit too short (which is probably why there's a few extra scenarios and an endless mode by now which I haven't tried yet). That said, the experience I had with the game was amazing nonetheless. It's gorgeous, the setting is imaginative, building the city is satisfying and it's hard not to care about the stuff your citizens do to each other. It's one post-apocalyptic experience that is worth going through. I would love to see a "bigger" sequel that gives you more time and space and a lot more depth.
RTS is the one Army Men game released on PC that I never played until its release on GOG. I always assumed this would be the best one in the series, having been developed by Pandemic. Alas: having finished the campaign now I must say that this is one of the worst RTS games I've ever finished. First off: content-wise the game does not do the series justice. There's familiar characters and some dialogue in the style of other later Army Men games (e.g. Sarge's Heroes) but neither did the game make me laugh much nor did the developers use the setting for interesting stuff that other RTS titles can't do. It's just another Command & Conquer clone with some extra humour. The only meaningful difference is that all units leave behind puddles of plastic which can be harvested. And the campaign itself is just unimaginative. The real problem is that the game is a barely functional RTS. The unit behaviour is dreadful, with units almost never doing what they are supposed to, piling up on each other and sometimes downright refusing to execute a command. Orders that should take a few seconds to execute may take up to twenty and no amount of microing will help - as a matter of fact microing barely works due to these problems. There's also serious UI problems like only four numbered groups or the most useless minimap I've ever seen in an RTS. Also the units and buildings just aren't interesting. The developers failed to introduce unit types you haven't seen in the series before, there's basically only one faction that doesn't play very well and doesn't allow interesting tactics. A full base is set up in a matter of two or three minutes (minus some building upgrades). So it's really just a very dull and often frustrating RTS. Can't recommend it. For the record: I encountered no technical problems.
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.
As much as I love the original SoF, something went wrong with this sequel. I'd say that it has something to do with too large ambitions. For starters: the game has lost a lot of the original's feel. This is not Quake with human enemies anymore, this feels more like a misguided attempt at a tactical shooter with realistic (if over-the-top) violence. The gunplay just lost a lot of its power in a pursuit of more realism. The human models have lost their bulkiness, the gore has become almost too realistic, the shotgun doesn't spray pellets all over the screen anymore... And the game tries much too hard to do stuff that video games just weren't ready for yet. There's terrible stealth sections, there's a jungle that's literally hell because the only one whose sight is obstructed by the foliage is the player. And far too often you're constantly being hit by enemies you don't see which often makes the game just feel bad. There's also a problem with the game's identity. While the original SoF was little more than an excuse to slaughter a variety of archetypes of human enemies in iconic places, this one tries too hard to tie everything into a remotely plausible plot. You don't just slaughter punks and Russian or Iraqi soldiers anymore because that's what you did at the time. Here you slaughter all sorts of unrecognisable people because there's some story reason you probably don't care much about. And most locations really lack character. Prague just can't compete with a New York subway station. To top if off, the game kinda looks worse. Everything is more detailed but also ugly and especially the characters just look creepy and unreal. Polycounts may have gone up but the texture work and lighting utterly lack love. Why four stars, then? Because it's still SoF. It's still very satisfying when it's not frustrating, it's still unchallenged ultra violence in a rather fast-paced shooter with a realistic setting. There's still nothing quite like it other than the original SoF.
At first glance Soldier of Fortune may seem like a game that has only one thing going for it: an insane amount of realistic violence. There's bullet holes, knife cuts, detailed death animations but most notably pretty detailed dismemberment and even the ability to reveal an enemy's intestines e.g. via a shotgun blast to their stomach. It certainly is something that made the game recognisable and memorable. But that's not all. SoF is one of the last big titles of a particular era of shooter games. It kinda belongs in one bag with the likes of Half-Life, SiN or Kingpin. It was that particular era where most big shooter titles were powered by id Soft's technology which was all about "power". Big guns that delivered powerful impacts, bulky characters with huge hit boxes, huge amounts of gore and even physics that made everything feel massive. But it was also that generation of games that went from killing monsters in surreal dungeons towards story-driven experiences in somewhat plausible environments. And among these titles Soldier of Fortune stands out as that title that went for the biggest amount of realism (although cyber ninjas are included) and the result is a pretty unique experience. SoF beautifully combines that visceral experience of id Soft's classics with a rather realistic setting with human enemies and that makes it unique and, more importantly, ridiculously satisfying to this day. It's almost perverse how strongly this game attempts (with success!) to make killing people enjoyable. There's also some weird beauty in the (mostly) realistic locations powered by id Tech 2. But the cherry on top is how beautifully unaware the game seems to be of its moral implications, being driven by an utterly campy but serious plot with characters so badass that they are just silly. In a way SoF is the culmination of all the fury and cynicism that defined that certain aspect of 90's culture that also gave birth to Doom and Duke Nukem 3D. For me it's a timeless classic.
