Soldier of Fortune: Payback
I had an opportunity to have a bit of a play with this, and my impressions are…it’s all a bit stale.
There’s just something incredibly wrong with the whole thing. It’s not just the excessive over-the-top hyperviolence or the "roughness" of its presentation. It’s like they took a bunch of cool things from other games, sewed them all into some hideous tapestry, painted it the colour of red and brown and passed it off as a title in Activision’s nefarious "Value" range.
Soldier of Fortune I had character. When you riddled an enemy with bullers from your Raptor SMG, they would dance in a manner normally reserved for action flicks. Weapons were ridiculously overstated, from the boom of the Falcon handcannon to the deafening roar of the auto shotty. It seems those traits haven’t carried over to Payback, where I think it pretends not to take itself too seriously, but secretly hopes that people will think it’s cool.
In Payback, I had no idea what the hell was going on with the AI. Enemies seemed to materialise out of nowhere and fire blindly in my direction before running around in circles. They would run up to me without a word to engage in melee combat when it was clear that I was going to shoot them repeatedly until death. At one point in the game, a group of three soldiers ran out and stood in a perfectly straight line before firing. I thought that they were going to start singing "We Ain’t Got Dames" from South Pacific before opening fire.
On the other hand, they are blessed with a sense of incredible aim and possess the ability to see through undergrowth and sheet metal, so when they fire bursts in your general direction you will get hit multiple times. On Normal, you will only take a handful of shots before you die, and then you have to restart the game from the last checkpoint, which is in a painfully inconvenient position.
But what really irked me was the gore modelling. I never realised that the bullets in Payback were loaded with tiny microbombs. I also didn’t realise the enemies in Payback were made of tissue paper. I unload a clip into a squad of men, and in seconds they’re all howling on the ground, either spraying blood decals everywhere or clutching their genitalia. You fire a burst of six rounds in the general direction of an enemy and they lose their head, right arm and left leg. It’s like using uranium-depleted slugs on manikins from Chernobyl.
Even the physics modelling felt a bit tacky. Barrels get in the way and bodies fail to clip properly in respect to their environment.
The game also boasts incredible offensive options, with "an array of more than 30 weapons". What’s the point when a single pistol shot will silence an enemy for good? What incentive is there to go through different assault rifle types when one will do the same job as another? It’s a bit like in Rainbow Six: Vegas where you question the necessity of having so much kit available. Sure, it’s a nice addition and it encourages experimentation, but in a game like Payback where any weapon is a Golden Gun, it just feels like an item from a list of "cool game things".
But it’s not all that bad. The environments are quite pleasing to look at. The weapon animations are pretty well done. There are some cool features, like a depth of field shift when you reload your weapon. And if you just feel the need to blow the limbs off some unsuspecting polygons, this should do the trick.
This would have been fantastic maybe one or two years ago. The only problem is there are so many other quality titles out there. You will play this for a few minutes and think, "Man, I could really go for some COD4 multi right now."
And when you do, this will be the last thing on your mind.
