Solider of Fortune
Developer: Raven Software
Publisher: Activision
Genre: FPS
Release: 2/29/2000
Platforms: Windows, Linux, Dreamcast, PS2
Modes: Single-player, Multi-Player
Availability: Uncommon. Not in any online stores.
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Info:
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The version I played was the Community Edition on the PC, which is made compatible with modern systems and resolutions, additional graphical effects, and new server browser support.
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Story:
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The story of Solider of Fortune is about 4 nukes being stolen from a Russian facility and organized gang violence that took over a subway. You play as John Mullins, a mercenary working for an organization called the shop, is sent to deal with these situations with his partner Aaron Hawk. The plot is minimalist and is told during briefings for each mission. It’s not deep, but it carries the plot along well enough.
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Visuals:
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Solider of Fortune was developed in the Quake 2 engine and released in the year 2000. It was made when the id Tech 3 engine had just been released 3 months. You can tell due to it’s shaky graphic visuals, that shaky slightly. The environmental textures are of moderate resolution, but clear, detailed and scale well at any resolution. Objects and models are of some slightly lower resolution. They are are blurry if if you look at them up close though. The textures and objects do a good job in making world locations feel real. Iraq, has middle eastern textures and industrial settings look mechanical. Settings are very customizable and you can easily run the game at max setting with computers as far back as 2007.
Solider of Fortune has a custom made gore engine called the ghoul engine. The engine has about 26 zones where your bullets and explosives can decapitate a person. When you land a killing blow with a gun and hit a limb, the limb may come off and trigger an animation of the enemy falling over and clutching their limb. They scream and cry in pain until they finally end up as a corpse. It is over the top gore and hardly realistic, but makes the game stand out. With explosives, you can blow the entire body to piece. If this bothers you, you can set an option to lower the violence.
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Game-play:
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Solider of Fortune is a First Person Shooter where your goal is to get to the end of the level. The controls are relatively simple like most FPS games except there are 4 extra buttons to consider. These buttons are switching items and the weapons alternate mode buttons. Having a 7 button mouse helps simplifies this though it isn’t necessary.
There is made up of 10 missions that most are made of 3 levels each for a total of 28 levels. You will travel to places such as Iraq, Sudan, Japan, and New York. Each level made of a mix of linear and slightly open environments. The levels are nice and varied that never feel dull. Sometimes they have vertical travel to them, sometimes there are multiple paths, and sometimes there is a few short points of backtracking. Though for the most part, you are always moving forward. Probably the only level that is very open is the oil plant, but is surrounded by fog.
All weapons take slots. Pistols take 1, All non projectile weapons take 2, projectile weapons take three, and sub items have unlimited slots. Once you get to level three you will be able to select your starting equipment. Here you can only select 3 sub items, though you can carry more in the levels. This is not an issue in the first two level, but becomes an issue for the rest of the game depending on your choice of difficulty as it can limit what you use.
An interesting game feature is the sub item system. Before Halo, there were a few FPS games in the mid 90’s that had this system. Besides your weapons, you can also scroll through your items and activate them at any point. With grenades, you will instantly throw them and quickly be able to resume firing your gun. It helps a lot with the fast paced nature of the game. I find with other games, that I never uses grenades often due to how fast things can get and it takes time to switch weapons and back. Besides grenades, you can hold medkits like in Duke Nukem to recover your health. This feature keeps the game fast paced with minimal backtracking, but in encourages exploration and being careful. It doesn’t dumb down the game-play, but helps it.
There are 5 difficulty modes along with a customizable difficulty. The difference between the first three is the amount of damage you take, the amount of enemies in a level, the amount of saves you get how aggressive they are, the amount of weapons you can have, how accurate the enemies are, the amount of ammo and items you can have, and how fast the sound meter gets increased. On unfair, your movement speed doubles and you have no saves. The custom difficulty allows you to adjust all of these features. Based on what they would be for each difficulty. I recommend sticking with medium or a custom difficulty as challenging and unfair are not balanced.
I was not able to play multi-player as nobody was on when I was playing. There is Death-match, Team Death-match, Arsenal, Assassination, Control the Bunker, Control, Realistic Death-match, and Capture the Flag game modes. You can chose any character from the game and each character has a little biography to them. You can customize various option including being able to chose your internet connection and setting for it.
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Negative:
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Difficulty is a hit or miss depending on what you chose. If you are someone who likes difficulty, you think to chose challenging or unfair, but I would not recommend it. Medium is very easy to speed run through if you are experienced while setting a custom difficulty can give you the right challenge. I recommend making a custom difficulty with unlimited saves, unlimited capacity, standard or aggressive enemies, with standard or heavy spawns. This will provide the best balance of challenge and balance
In challenging, enemies, in the later half of the game, develop aimbot like accuracy, and can easily kill you in 1-2 hits. They also have longer sight range and can see past fog, unlike you. Their reaction times are also faster then your and can kill you before you can react. You can only carry a limited amount of primary weapons and all the sub items. Each weapon takes up a weapon slot which you have 5 of.
The placement of enemies and their triggers is another issue with these difficulties. While it is fine in the early levels, about once you get half way, you will have enemies that will spawn behind you from far away and sneak up on you while you are distracted with the front. Other times, the spawns include; enemies, that will suddenly come around a corner and blast you or will wait for you, some sections spawn unlimited enemies until you advance, and enemies that re-spawn if you backtrack. These spawns are not consistent ether as they sometimes don’t trigger.
The enemy themselves are not designed well for balance. Enemies can shoot you from their head, without their weapon being visible and from their gun being visible to you. While not noticeable in the first half of the game, you will notice it when you are taking hits despite them being barely visible. On difficulties lower then challenging, enemies will often hit only 1 out of 4 shots at 3 feet away.
The weapons in Solider of Fortune are very unbalanced. Despite having over 12 weapons, you will only use 2-4 throughout the game. The first weapon is the desert eagle that has the range and accuracy of a sniper rifle with the power of a shotgun and stun enemies wearing armor. It supersedes the 9mm pistol in every-way except for noise. The second is the shotgun. It has okay range and can kill an enemy in one hit at close range, but it can’t stun enemies wearing body armor, which make up many of the enemies in the last seven levels. The third is the raptor machine gun. It has good range, okay accuracy, strong damage, and can stun enemies wearing armor. The weapon is superseded by the Machine gun, halfway through the game. Last is the machine gun which can kill unarmored enemies in 1-2 hits, good accuracy, shares the same ammo as the raptor, can stun enemies wearing armor and great range. It’s only faults are the longer reload time and it takes longer to switch to and from it. Every other weapon, ends up being for a situation use or as a last resort when one of the 4 above weapons run out. Some of the weapons have a secondary attack, while the rest change the weapon holding animations, like the desert eagle switching hands.
The sound meter feels like an afterthought. The levels are too linear for sneaking without running into enemies. Especially as enemies do not make any sounds except for the sound of reloading. The sound meter is triggered by your gun shots and explosions which varies depending on the weapon. It can also be triggered by enemy gunshots, but by a lesser amount. On any difficulty lower than challenging, the meter won’t come into affect. Even on challenging, it rarely have a chance of going off except in a few circumstances. On unfair difficulty, the meter will easily go off in a few gunshots though , you run at double the speed. If the meter is going to reach the top, all you have to hold off shooting for a few seconds. Though, if you trigger the alarm, depending on the difficulty, a certain amount of enemies will spawn within 5 feet of you. The spawns will not stop until the meter starts to drop which means you need to take cover and not shoot for a second. All this does is slow down the action and adds a trap that can kill you quickly.
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Audio:
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The soundtrack is a symphonic orchestral soundtrack. Every level besides the first and the mission 6 are orchestral with those 4 levels being a more generic rock atmospheric track. Also with each level, besides the second, have an alert theme that is a faster paced version of the one being played in a level. The soundtrack suits the themes and atmosphere of each level, with New York having a heavy metal tune that fits with the trashy atmosphere.
Voice acting is surprisingly good with no bad performances at all. All the actors give a solid performance that stands out well even today. Enemies that don’t speak English, will speak their own countries language. There are no subtitles for them, but you can hear their aggression and fear in their voices. It’s a nice detail.
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Conclusion:
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Solider of Fortune is a good game as long as you stick with medium or chose a custom difficulty. The ghoul engine is a novel feature that helps the game stand out, but it can’t carry one’s interest of the game. While Challenging difficulty may seam reasonable, halfway through, you will want to switch to a lower difficulty due to the enemy placements and the aimbot accuracy of the enemies latter on. It’s not a classic when compared to other FPS games of it’s time, but it’s good on it’s own.
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