Review (PC)

Take NOLF, add lots and lots of gore, remove the humorous dialogue, and sprinkle in a few extremely frustrating play sequences and you've got Soldier of Fortune 2. It should come as no surprise then, that I got tired of SoF2 after about 2/3 of the singleplayer campaign. Like NOLF, I finished the campaign, due to my misapplied sense of determination more than any compelling motivation from the game. Like NOLF, SoF2 is, at its core, a superb action game. Why Raven felt the need to cut their own game off at the knees at regular intervals by ram-rodding the player through clumsy, frustrating, and unfun "stealth" sequences (again, like NOLF) is one of the great mysteries of our time. Is there some secret law or mandate that states a game can't consistently stick to its strengths? Have we, as gamers, mistakenly given developers the impression that we won't buy games unless they deliver fun in a sinusoidal pattern?

Good

• The tactical AI is very nice. Enemies take cover, work in groups, use smoke grenades to provide cover, pick up dropped weapons, try to flank. They'll even pick up your own thrown grenade and toss it back at you if given the time.

• The Ghoul animation system makes for gunplay that is more satisfying than any shooter in recent memory. It allows SoF2 to rise above the increasingly repetitive and trite shooter recipe. Not very far above, but far enough.

• Random map generator. In my AOE2 review, I made the following comment regarding random map generation, I can't stress how much it facilitates replayability. I wish the games whose gameplay I really truly enjoy could offer up this kind of push-button variability." SoF2 is the first shooter I know of that has attempted a random map generator. And, mostly, it works! The generated maps can't supplant a good hand-crafted map, but they're sufficiently interesting to at least provide an enjoyable turkey shoot (only outdoor maps are generated). The map generator isn't going to keep SoF2 on your harddrive when you're otherwise inclined to move on, but Raven deserves a big huzzah for the offering. It's the thought that counts. I'd love to see this feature get refined and become a regular staple of shooters for which it's viable.

• Riding shotgun! There are a few sequences where you are in a vehicle and your sole responsibility is to shoot things as someone else controls the vehicle. The Quake3 engine isn't quite up to the task of scrolling terrain past vehicles either in the air or on the ground, but nevertheless the experience is thrilling for its novelty. It's a really nice change of pace to be relieved of some responsibility, and be able to just focus on laying down some cover fire.

Bad

• Learning-by-death. Go read my Max Payne review to find out how much I like this (hint: I hate it). Here's the problem: the higher difficulty settings are attractive because the AI behaves more realistically. However, with that behavior comes other, less-desirable consequences. In particular, they become insanely accurate and have lightning fast god-like reflexes and an inhuman field of view. What I'd like, and no shooter has yet offered me this, is the ability to dial up the AI's behavioral characteristics without simultaneously exaggerating their twitch combat reactions into the realm of robotic. I love it when the AI does all of those neat tactical things I mentioned above. I hate it when I snap peak around a corner (in the dark) and get sniped in the forehead by an enemy that wasn't even looking in my direction, because in the handful of frames that got processed whilst I was peaking, all of the AI algorithms conspired to decide that the enemy detected me, aimed, and fired a perfect shot. How does this relate to learning-by-death? Well, when the AI is that hyper-sensitive and hyper-accurate, the game degenerates into a continuous stream of encounters that kill you when you initially trigger them, causing you to quickload and use your now prescient knowledge to act in just as god-like a fashion. In addition to completely murdering the flow of the action, this causes the majority of the fun to evaporate because you're no longer surviving extended combat sequences as a result of your own tactical abilities. Instead, you're using quicksave and quickload in order to construct a perfectly executed level run one tiny piece at a time.

• Grenades. The interface makes it too difficult to tactically use grenades. They are mired down in the weapon selection menu, and if you want to employ a particular kind of grenade you might have to browse to the end of your entire grenade arsenal to select it. The AI, on the other hand, seems to have a third arm attached to its body that is dedicated solely to throwing of grenades at you. To see how to incorporate grenades into the interface for a tactical, realistic shooter, go play Infiltration for UT. Furthermore, I'm not convinced that the enemy grenades and my grenades have the same detonation timings. Theirs always seems to explode faster than mine. I'd say that nearly half of the time, my grenades would get tossed back at me, while I never had a single opportunity to toss back one of theirs, and was usually lucky if I heard the bastard bounce more than once before it blew up and killed me.

• You crawl at a mind-numbingly, frustratingly slow pace. Furthermore, you can't do anything while you're prone or crawling. Who the hell ever heard of a soldier that can't shoot his rifle while he's prone?

• The ladder interface is bittersweet. It's nice to be able to just walk up to a ladder and move up it, but traversing down a ladder and getting off of it are problematic. You can't jump off a ladder. Furthermore, I had a terrible time falling off ladders inadvertently, just because I was looking around and hit a perspective that the game decided was an indication on my part that I wanted off the ladder (for example when I was 3 stories up an elevator shaft).

• On missions where an alarm can be triggered, the AI is capable of triggering the alarm instantly. This is absolutely terrible (and a significant part of why the stealth sequences suck so much). In other words, if a guard sees you (in his 270 degree field of view) the alarm is instantly triggered, as if he was a member of some Borg group-mind that knows instantly and constantly what each of the worker-drones is experiencing. Shoot at someone and the alarm instantly goes off. Make too much noise and the alarm instantly goes off. Don't bother trying any distraction ploys, because the alarm will instantly go off. Thief (I/II) are the only games so far (that I've played) that have done stealth successfully. There should be some soft borders around your interactions with the enemy when detection is involved. For instance, if you get spotted, the guard should either engage your OR run off somewhere in order to sound the alarm. If you engage a guard, and there's no one else nearby, you should be able to deal with that engagement without having the alarm go off instantly. This ties in to the whole quicksave/quickload problem. It's infinitely more enjoyable to be able to play a game that lets you recover from your own "mistakes" without having to resort to the quickload key. And they're not mistakes, really. Mostly, you're going through a process of discovery, and that discovery itself shouldn't inherently involve repeated failure. In SoF2, it does, and that's not fun.

• Game design rule: Never, ever, ever take retribution out of the player's hand. About 2/3 of the way through the game, one of the major bad guys dies (that's no spoiler). The problem is that John Mullins kills him, and he does it in a cutscene. This is absolutely terrible. Have your cutscene if you wish, in order for the bad guy to deliver his deposition or plot advancement. But do not presume to do for me that which I have played the entire fucking game in order to do myself. If I wanted to see bad guys die without my involvement, I'd watch a Steven Seagal movie. Shame on you, Raven.

Ugly

• Ok, here we go: SoF2 possesses at least one sequence that is so heinously frustrating that it made me want to take the CD out of my computer and snap the fucker in half. It's in the Kamchatka levels, where you've hooked up with the scientist and are using a gondola of sorts to travel through a tunnel to another section. The gondola has wire walls and a grated floor, so you can (and will) get shot from every direction. You cannot save while you're in the gondola. Someone deserves to spend at least a century in the lowest level of purgatory just for that. The reason it's so bad is because as you travel through the tunnel, guys appear from different directions (including below you) and kill you. They don't attempt to kill you. They kill you. This is due, no doubt, to the fact that I had the difficulty dialed high enough to keep the tactics interesting, which also endowed the AI with godlike reflexes. At this setting, being visible to the AI for more than a few moments makes you dead. And here you are, suspended from the ceiling in a wire cage, traveling at a sedate pace through an enemy infested tunnel. You cannot use any grenades or your M203 (because of the gondola siding). And you can't save, so even once you die and learn where to pre-aim your perfectly timed shots, you have to go back to the beginning and attempt the entire sequence again, only to die from the *next* set of guys. God help the player who is actually trying to get through SoF2 with a limited number of saves.

• There's another horribly frustrating sequence that involves the "boss". He's in a helicopter. From a previous boss encounter, you've discovered how to destroy this kind of helicopter. Only, it doesn't work with this one. After doing what you're supposed to do (namely, shoot a specific spot on each engine several times) the helicopter doesn't blow up. Apparently, after the last engine shot, the cockpit window magically falls off, allowing you to take sniper shots at the pilot. Here's the problem: when I first saw the helicopter, I attempted to take sniper shots at the pilot and it was painfully clear that they had no effect. So I worked on the engines. It's very difficult to tell when you've succeeded in hitting the specific spot on the engines, so when it didn't blow, I thought I had to keep shooting at them. What had actually happened was that the cockpit's bulletproof-ness had magically gone away and I was supposed to now shoot at the pilot. How in god's name am I supposed to know this? I didn't see any cockpit shield fall off. I'm busy trying to avoid the bajillion machine gun rounds aimed at me along with the frequent volleys of rockets! Furthermore, the engines still have a glowing spot on them, which I've dutifully learned means I'm supposed to shoot them. So I keep shooting at them, never knowing it's purely futile. Eventually I run out of ammo and fish up a walkthrough on the web. Upon discovering what's actually happened, I was pissed off like I have never been pissed off at a game before.

• If you do (or don't do) something that triggers a mission failure, you're just killed instantly. You're not given any indication or message that states what went wrong. This is why it took me so damn long to discover that someone I had knocked out had recovered and sounded the alarm.

• No bots in multiplayer. You know what this means? That's right, as soon as I finish this review, SoF2 is getting uninstalled. How can they have invested so much in their AI, and then completely eliminated it from multiplayer? This is even more disappointing when you consider that SoF2's sibling, Jedi Knight 2, *does* have bots. I know what you're thinking, everybody plays online with their fancy broadband on 32-player servers filled to the hilt with (mostly) intelligent human beings. Who cares about bots? Me. I care. Put them in the goddamn game because I want to use them in multiplayer. Maybe I want to play with a few buddies on my LAN. Without bots the game is a non-starter. So despite how much SoF2 has going for it, it is still miles behind Infiltration. God Bless Sentry Studios. Raven, if you're listening: note for the record that multiplayer bots are the sole reason why I've personally purchased over half a dozen copies of UT.

Beautiful

• The shotgun. SoF2 possesses the single most satisfying shotgun ever implemented in shooterdom.

• The ability to set the number of saves to unlimited. This probably doesn't deserve to be on this list, but I'm including it because without it, SoF2 would be a tortuously miserable failure. Without the ability to have unlimited saves, I'd be sitting here writing about how I'd quit SoF2 after the first mission, and how you should avoid the game like the plague because it is a frustrating and insulting exercise in random and punitive death. So, kudos to whichever Raven developer won the argument in the design meeting and convinced them to put 'unlimited' as an option in the custom difficulty settings.

Summary

So is SoF2 fun? That's easy: yes and no. It's main ingredients are top quality. A few horrible game design decisions spoil the singleplayer soufflé. All indications are that the multiplayer is where SoF2 really shines, and I see no reason to doubt that, given its excellent weapon set, and its engine heritage. Unfortunately, the lack of bots in multiplayer means that you need either broadband, or a full-blown lan party to reap the fruits of Raven's labor. If you've just a few friends over, you most certainly won't be playing SoF2, since it simply does nothing to accommodate a small number of players.

Tips

• If you knock out somebody (as with the butt of your handgun) they will eventually wake up. On most missions, they'll just sound the alarm and cause more trouble for you, but there is at least one mission where you'll fail outright if any alarm is triggered. I was expecting people who are knocked out to stay knocked out (as in Thief) and was very confused and frustrated when I kept failing a mission because of a spontaneous alarm which seemed to have no correlation to what I was doing. For the rest of the game, anyone I knocked out got drug to a secluded spot and had their throats cut. Ruthless, yes, but it's their own fault. If they'd just stayed knocked out...

• Speaking of the butt of your handgun - you can use it to knock out panes of glass completely.

• When you receive training on the OICW at the Shop firing range, you may have trouble using the grenade launcher to destroy the target in stall 4, behind the wall. You're instructed to use the 'range+' feature of the OICW HUD, but this never worked for me. Now matter how I adjusted the range (and I was very persistent) the grenade would never destroy the target. So, in order to just complete the training, I destroyed the target with the grenade launcher before the wall was raised. There's a few moments after destroy target #3 where target #4 is available but the wall isn't there.