Soldier Of Fortune 2: Double Helix

Format PC

Developer Raven Software

Publisher Activision

Genre Unknown

Keith Pullin goes to Los Angeles to meet an awfully big Marine

Has anyone noticed that in press conferences the United States' General Tommy Franks refers to al-Qaeda terrorists as 'The Bad Guys'? Why not just use the term terrorist? Maybe it's a subtle reminder to us civilians that these people are bad because, after all, it's easy to forget that flying passenger jets into skyscrapers and thereby killing thousands of innocent people in the process is actually wrong.

Meanwhile, President George W Bush is trying to convince the world that this is a war of good against evil. Get a grip George – it's not bloody Lord Of The Rings. There is no good and there is no evil. OK, the acts of terrorism we all witnessed last September were completely deplorable and totally unjustifiable, but this current situation is also partly to do with the fact that two totally different cultures have little or absolutely no understanding of each other.

CULTURE CLUB
It may be crass to draw comparisons, but videogaming presents a similar cultural divide. On one side you've got those who enjoy gaming and the escapism it offers, and on the other side there are those who rarely play or understand them yet are quick to cite them as the reasons behind mass shootings and general moral decay. If only it were that simple. A game, like a film or even a book, may trigger an action in an already disturbed mind, but it's certainly not the cause.

And so we come to the evil FPS known as Soldier Of Fortune 2. When it's finished it will be so difficult to differentiate between the game and real life that people will run out their homes and shoot each other in the head the moment they've finished playing it.
John Mullins, an ex-Green Beret with 20 years service to his name, and whose exploits the game is loosely based upon, believes realism is where Soldier of Fortune 2 wins out over its contemporaries: "We've tried to keep it as realistic as possible. You're not going to slap around a 50-calibre machine-gun – not unless you're Arnold Schwarzenegger. There's none of that nonsense. All the weapons are real. There aren't any proton guns – or whatever the hell it was in the first game. The weapons in the game are all based on guns that are in use or you would encounter on a mission – AK 47s, AK74s, RPG 7s and various other weapons that the enemy might have."

Alas, if you find it difficult to get hold of these particular guns to embark upon your real-life killing spree, you'll find it nigh-on impossible getting your hands on SOF2's star weapon, the OICW, or Objective Infantry Combat Weapon. For those of you who aren't Guns&Ammo subscribers, this real-life prototype weapon has, according to Mr Mullins, been in development for 15 years but is not yet being used by the US military because of technical problems. It's easy to see why. The OICW carries an onboard computer that actually identifies potential threats by flashing up a warning message in the sight saying 'hostile', or in the case of General Franks, 'bad guy'.

JORDAN'S DIGITAL THRILLS
Whereas John came in relatively late on during the development of the original Soldier Of Fortune and didn't get to influence design as much as he would have liked, the situation for SOF2 has been different. "I've been on this project from the start and I helped develop the scenario. I gave some ideas of real world places that I've been and places that we have operated, what they were like and what kind of things we faced."
The result, rather surprisingly then, is an all-action thriller where you must destroy a group of bio-terrorists before they can unleash a deadly virus and annihilate humanity as we know it. The James Bond-esque race against time encompasses ten exotic locations including Colombia, Prague, Kamchatka, Hong Kong and Jordan. Jordan? Exotic? We asked if she ever got her wobblers out at all, but nobody seemed to understand, least of all John who slipped into one of his 1,000-yard stares.

Still, the Colombia levels offered their fair share of titillation with amazing jungle landscapes (designed using the TORR terrain system) featuring fantastic swaying grass and superb foliage that you can use as cover. There are also some snazzy QIII Arena-powered environmental effects like snow and rain, and some very authentic-looking mist and fog. The variety of enemies is equally diverse, ranging from coke-addled drug lords to terrorists (sorry, 'bad guys'), as well as America's erstwhile foe, the Russian soldier.

TEE-SHIRT TERRORISM
It was also interesting to see that during our playtest each enemy exhibited not only different levels of AI (the LICH system apparently), but different grades of strength and endurance too. It doesn't take much to frag a jeans and tee-shirt clad terrorist, whereas a heavily protected Russian soldier needs a lot of lead inside him before exploding in a blizzard of gore.
Obviously the amount of damage your enemies take is also dependent on the weapon used. Sounding more and more like the drill instructor from Full Metal Jacket, John was happy to affirm this: "The game's main weapon is the M4 carbine with the M2 grenade launcher, which is the primary weapon of all Special Operations troops from the United States today. It's the weapon they're using in Afghanistan – and it's a very, very good little weapon. It fires a 5.56mm cartridge, which is good up to about 350 meters – devastating in its effects. You hit somebody in the middle of the chest and they're going down." Quite.

145 MILLION LEVELS
One of the features that the game's developer Raven is particularly proud of is the Random Mission Generator, or RMG if you're into acronyms (and Raven clearly is, what with its LICHs and its TORRs). Basically, you decide what type of terrain you want, what the weather should be, how many buildings you want and a whole host of other options. The generator then throws down what you asked for and you get to play a multiplayer game on that level.

Though it may not be as precise as creating a level on an editor, it does mean that nobody can gain advantage over other players by learning a map before a match. In fact, according to Raven there are a total of 145 million different maps available using this technique. While not infinite, that's still a fair few to keep you occupied and the chances of the same one coming up twice are about the same as winning the lottery.
However, the downside appears to be that you can't actually save the map if you create a particularly good one. Why Raven can't do this is unclear, but we got the impression that it's an issue that will be remedied in the future.

Still, if it all sounds too much for you, you can always frag your way through the six standard multiplayer maps including the infamous Raven office. Apparently players rather enjoy running around an exact replica of the office spreading each other's brains over the developers' desks.

Call it sick. Call it evil. Call it what you want. We call it SOF2, it's got loads of bad guys in it and it's out in April.

Keith Pullin