Soldier of Fortune: Payback Review

3.1

Format PC

Developer

Publisher Activision

Genre First Person Shooter

What comes to mind when confronted by a 'value' product? Slightly watery baked beans, some of them oddly coloured. Toilet paper so thin that your fingers are in constant threat of breaking through and finding themselves in peril.

What doesn't come to mind, however, when dealing with 'value' through a product line such as 'Activision Value' is having to pass £29.99 over the counter to experience their wares. Since when was that value?

I've effectively handed over £25 (I truthfully have, what with Activision refusing to send us a copy of the game) for a sloppily coded kick in the balls, and can only hope and pray that few others have fallen foul of this lazy hackjob that cashes in on the good name of the Soldier of Fortune series.
Coded in the heart of Slovakia rather than the original games' Raven offices in Wisconsin, Payback retreads old ground on a budget that's less shoe string and more rotting Green Flash plimsolls held together with an elastic band.

Initial reactions though are surprisingly positive - its early jungle levels and Bin Laden cave affairs are not only faintly graphically impressive but also fairly well-designed, but inevitably the game is deliberately front-loaded with its best offerings.

Get a third of the way through the game and you're suddenly re-experiencing the worst excesses of late '90s shooters - like endless car park levels built solely of the same room copied and pasted again and again, or a whorehouse whose creators not only furnished it with a single, solitary (but very busy) prostitute and a 100 doors that don't open, but also modelled its design on a sprayed-out can of silly string.

And the gore? Well the advent of physics in SOF's absence means that a smile or two can be raised in combat as bodies are blasted into pieces, Middle-Eastern gentlemen clutch at their throats and misprogrammed lady bosses clutch at their absent genitalia when shot in the crotch.

But if anything though the action and violence stuff is a step backwards from what was done in SOF II - with no throwing knives, no leaning, badly animated decapitations, disappearing corpses, no hollowing out of cranial matter, and an alarming tendency for limbs to get stuck in corridor furniture and gently revolve in a weakly accusatory manner.

This is a diluted mess compared to that which contained within SOF II's GHOUL system in 2002, with only the shallow veneer of physics and a few extra blood splats to cover it up.

The action itself can be decent, the guns varied and genuinely fun to use, but the whole thing is fundamentally broken by glaring flaws that an increasingly alarmed toddler could have pointed out to the design team.

Granting grunts and bosses one-hit kills makes later levels infuriating to play (not least when checkpoint placement is so shoddy) while the very concept of having a Big Bad at the close of each level who can suck up three minigun's worth of ammo fired directly into their heads before dying is utterly baffling.

What's more, you can add to this some desultory multiplayer (a four map shower of shit), a terribly implemented regenerating health system, graphics you can only adjust by changing the resolution and some of most grunting, badly written and stultifyingly obnoxious in-ear mission banter ever committed to audio file.

With iffy politics that you'd think would hover around the right wing but actually land on the marker labelled 'pure bloody ignorance' (for a reference point take the helpful slaves, one of whom is simply called 'Helpful Slave', who practically grovel as you free them and present you with keycards) what starts out as a relatively fun excursion in the most basic departments of the first-person shooter shortly becomes a mind-numbing abhorrence.

I honestly feel like I should donate money to charity having paid for such a nasty little swindle of a game. Ultimately, if you have the mentality of someone who sticks their nose beneath the duvet to smell particularly ripe farts then go right ahead: breathe it in. It's the stink of money made through terrifying mundanity, and it smells like... freedom.

Will Porter