Soldier of Fortune for PC - Preview

originally written for PC Accelerator

Some gamers believe the first-person shooter is a tired genre, that game companies should aspire to discover new ways of enhancing gameplay.  Other gamers think, “If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it.”  Both Half-Life and Rainbow Six raised the bar by which FPS games were measured, and they demonstrated that by injecting some ingenuity into a proven formula, legends are born.  Ravensoft, makers of Hexen and Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force, hope to meet the high water mark with Soldier of Fortune.

The story of SoF is familiar enough: one man must stop a group of terrorists from using a stolen nuclear weapon to fulfill their socio-political agenda.  You are John Mullins, an elite government agent hired to take care of the wetworks that the usual channels cannot handle.  SoF is set in the real world, a nice change from most FPS games that integrate fantasy or science fiction into the plot, and uses 12 weapons based on those found in real-world arsenals.  The single-player game takes place on 31 levels over 10 missions, and follows a cohesive storyline, something other FPS titles have disregarded.  SoF does have multiplayer, however, with game types such as Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Assassin, Arsenal, and Capture the Flag.

In order to have a successful title in the crowded “Arena” of first-person shooters, there has to be a hook.  Half-Life boasted astonishing AI, Quake III sported curved surfaces, Soldier of Fortune’s hook is the GHOUL rendering system.  The main code is a heavily modified version of the Quake II engine.  GHOUL is a system that builds and renders characters and objects for 3D games.  It has several features that give the now-dated QII engine a new coat of paint.  First and foremost, GHOUL supports 26 “gore” zones on each player and enemy and per-polygon physics and collision detection.  This means that when you shoot a bad guy in the foot, he hops around in pain, shoot him in the shoulder, and he’ll spin clutching his shoulder, shoot him in the head, and he’ll drop like a bag of sod.  One of the greatest showcase items of this technology is throwing knives at an enemy and seeing them stick into and move with different parts of the body.  The motion-capture is based on which part of the body is damaged, and each body segment has a “pain skin” that will show different damage for different weapons.  Guns leave holes with exit wounds, knives leave bloody slashes, and point-blank shotgun blasts can disembowel an enemy spilling his intestines onto the floor.

SoF is not for the faint of heart.  It is, quite possibly, the most violent game in recent memory.  There will be the requisite, politically correct gore setting, so if flying gibs are not your thing, you can still play the game.  However, for fans of extreme levels of violence, SoF will deliver and then some.  Since the GHOUL renderer also supports bolt-on models and attachments, you can blow arms and legs clean off, or just disarm an enemy by shooting the gun out of his hand.

Ravensoft may have an instant classic on their hands.  By bringing gamers back down to Earth, and using the good ole-fashioned guns of our favorite action movies, Ravensoft has created a game that mixes the story and action of Half-Life with the weapons and settings of Rogue Spear.  It remains to be seen if Soldier of Fortune will find its place alongside those greats in every respectable gamer’s Archive of Legends.