Soldier of Fortune (PC)

GameSpot editors' review

• CNET editors' rating: 3.5 stars Very good
  Detailed editors' rating
  Overall score: 7.7 (3.5 stars)

• Reviewed by:
  Erik Wolpaw
• Reviewed on: 04/03/2000
• Updated on: 11/09/2000
• Released on: 02/29/2000
• Originally published on GameSpot: Soldier of Fortune (PC) Review

Much of the prerelease hype surrounding Activision's Soldier of Fortune focused on the fact that developer Raven Software had hired an actual mercenary, John Mullins, as a consultant. His role was to help ensure that the first-person shooter delivered a simulation "as close as players can get to experiencing the dangers and thrills of authentic mercenary combat." Either that plan didn't work out, or actual combat is a lot more like Quake than anyone but Colonel David Grossman ever expected. Soldier of Fortune is filled with genre clichés: exploding barrels, health crates, implausible door-opening mechanisms, and thirty-on-one firefights in which Team Thirty is wildly outmatched. Thankfully, it's also damn fun.

Throughout its development, Soldier of Fortune has also been infamous for the level of realistic violence the developers promised would be included in the final product. In fact, two different versions have been released - a regular version that includes all the gore (although you can choose to turn it off) and a bloodless, Wal-Mart-friendly "tactical" version. So does the violence in Soldier of Fortune live up to the hype? It's pretty gruesome - thanks to a proprietary rendering system nicknamed GHOUL, you can target specific body parts. Shoot an enemy in the neck, and he'll grip his blood-spraying throat as he drops to his knees. Shoot him in the calf, and he'll hop around on one leg. Limbs and heads can be blown clean off with a shotgun blast. It's all sort of absurd and over-the-top. Even though there are a number of different target areas, enemy reactions to being hit in any specific area remain generally constant. Thanks to the repetitious death animations, the outrageous violence quickly fades into the background.

The enemy characters' artificial intelligence is forgettable as well. The bad guys tend either to charge straight at you or take potshots from a fixed position. You can often poke your head around a corner and calmly plug soldiers several times until they die without ever arousing their interest. Likewise, vaporizing the head of a guard will tend not to alarm other guards standing a few feet away.

Soldier of Fortune uses a modified version of the undying Quake II engine, and it looks good, if not cutting edge. In-game objects have the blocky appearance associated with id's engine, but Raven has done some excellent work creating a few memorable environments using the aging toolset. The levels range from great looking, such as the New York and Japan missions, to the same barren, inexplicably torch-lit castle and the crate-filled warehouse you've visited a thousand times before.

Yet even though the graphics are slightly dated, the dim-witted enemies are little more than strawberry-jam-filled turrets, and the plot is thin enough to be effectively absent, Soldier of Fortune is still enjoyable because it delivers some of the best pure shooting action since the original Doom. Pretensions of realism aside and with apologies to the no-doubt-very-experienced John Mullins, Soldier of Fortune is one-hundred-percent game with no simulation baggage to weigh it down. The single-player mode is a long series of often-amazingly intense firefights.

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