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Ooh That Smell

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 0 / 1
Date: April 24, 2008
Author: Amazon User

I started gaming in 1982-3 on a 64K Apple 2+ and started playing FPS with the very first Castle Wolfenstein and I have played FPS and RPG games continually since then. Yup, I am an old guy. I played the first two versions of this game and I found Soldier of Fortune one to be maybe worthy of 2.5 stars. The second version was much better maybe a 3.5-4 star game. It was a better game in every sense than the first. This new title "Payback" is appropriate... I really want my money back. This is one of the worst games I have played in 25 years of gaming. The word sucks shows up a lot in game reviews. This game warrants a rating of "perfect vacuum causing the complete implosion of the universe and the ending of time". I didn't even offer to give this game away. I was embarrassed to even own it. Its been gone and off my PC for months and my computer is still ticked off at me.

SOF Payback Review

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: March 28, 2008
Author: Amazon User

This game is just average. It has a lot of techinical problems which distracts from playing the game. There is video garbage flashing on the screen while playing, making it hard to recognize the guys shooting at you and their location. This game will not play on Vista, but seams ok on XP. The fire fights are not bad, but the AI is just average. I would give it about 60 out of a 100 score.

Far from the greatest

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: March 04, 2008
Author: Amazon User

AI is horrible and overall it was not the greatest of games. I'd wait till it is in the 10 dollar bin.

More Bad Than Good

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: February 24, 2008
Author: Amazon User

I had such high hopes for this game when it came out. I must have played through SOF2 at least 5-7 times, not to mention several hours in multiplayer mode. First, the good points. The graphics are very nice. They are much improved over SOF2. Also, I like having a wide choice of weapons and accessories before each mission. Finally, when you reach a checkpoint/savepoint, and it follows a clip from the storyline, you are not forced to relive that clip everytime you die until you make the next savepoint.

Now, for the bad. Unfortunately, as I said before, there is more bad than good. You are not able to lean around corners in this game. For some reason, you are forced to jump out in the open if you want to shoot. Next, I do NOT like the way you have to shoot boss character a ton of times like they're superhuman or something. Certainly not realistic, and SOF2 was excellent at avoiding that. The storyline is terrible, and you will be disappointed when you reach the ending. Also, the weapons are not realistic, although they are close to the real thing. Finally, and this appears to be a disturbing trend among FPS games, the single player game is short, about 10 hours. I, for one, think multiplayer is boring, so I liked how SOF2 took awhile to play through.

All in all, I would say that it's an ok game.

Amazon's still great but the game sucks

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 1 / 2
Date: February 16, 2008
Author: Amazon User

As usual Amazon did thier job just fine but when the game arrived (I own the two previous versions) I eagerly opened it and loaded it on my computer only to find it would not run, it loaded fine but would not start. I immediately went to the internet to find patches or upgrades only to find there were none and no plans by Activision to put any out. Every forum was full of the same complaints I had. I threw it in the trash and will never buy Activision games again. Payback is an apropos title as they should payback all of the money they stole from loyal unsuspecting customers.

Worthless... no really it is.

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 2 / 5
Date: January 23, 2008
Author: Amazon User

Soldier of Fortune is a good game. So is Soldier of Fortune II. Soldier of Fortune Payback? Garbage. I really haven't been this frustrated with a game in a very long time. I also was reminded why I NEVER buy anything electronic anymore without looking up several reviews.

So what about this wonderful *cough* game? Well for starters you pop out into the middle of a war zone that makes Iraq look like a pacifist location. Odds of survival? 0.0. You're going to die. I played the game for a while on easy. I tried many times to actually enjoy this game. Did I? No! I still can't get past one part on level 1. So true I don't have a HUGE amount of experience, but I have given up on this game. Here's the breakdown.

Graphics: 5. Ok I could let this slide, as graphics aren't everything (though to some they are). It was probably a lower budget game than most.

Sound: 0. Could the voice acting be any worse or repetitive? The answer is no. It wasn't bad enough to be hokey, nor good enough to actually pass as more than some guys with a freeware voice recorder.

Music: 3. Hey, I figured I'd be generous. It's ok for the first 50 runs of the same part of level one, and then it starts to grate on you.

Fun: 1. It's fun to blow off a few heads and arms and watch people jump around for a minute, and then you realize Hey! I have had this enjoyment since Mortal Kombat in the 90's, not impressive. If there was actually something more than a pistol blowing an arm clean off, I would be impressed.

Gameplay: 0. Terrible. The controls can be customized, but so what. Guys take 10-20 AK-47 rounds to kill unless head shot, you have no hit point indicator, fire in any proxemity of you kills you almost instantly, you can't hit the boadside of a barn with a shotgun, and for all the unrealistic other crap (blowing up cars by shooting their windshield, random mortars raining form the sky, etc.) you would think they might as well have suspended disbelief a little more so that you could actually reload your damn gun quicker than 8 seconds. And being covert? Forget it! They saw you, it's too late. Oh, and bad guys also spawn out of walls, dead bodies, etc. It's a riot. Honestly people testing for mines by running through fields have a better survival rate than players in this game.

Overall 1. If you really want to shoot arms off with a single shot, yet take 10 to kill people. Want accuracy like a storm trooper. Have that need to blow up cars by shooting windshields, then this is the game for you.

But if you are sane like me (ok so it's debatable), then you will AVOID this game, and save that $20-$40 for a game that is actually worth the CD it's printed on. Oh and as a bonus, this game was banned in Austrailia! Yeah, banned for being so pathetically awful. Really, please, do yourself a favor and avoid this junk.

A poor tribute to the SoF series

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: January 22, 2008
Author: Amazon User

This is not like the original Soldier of Fortune games. Lame checkpoint save system that doesn't work correctly all of the time (i.e., you'll see multiple "save game" textual pop-ups, but if you die, you restart at the beginning of the level in my experience). Ridiculously unrealistic boss fights where 200+ rounds need to be dealt to a single man who isn't wearing body armor in order to "kill" him. A drastically toned down body dismemberment system (contrary to the advertising about this game being true to previous games in the way you can shoot parts of the enemy body off, while you "can" shoot pieces off, this isn't anywhere near as graphic as the previous SoF games were). Irritating Doom 3-style enemy spawns in areas you've already cleared (i.e., on one level, you'll shoot a sniper out of a tower and as you advance over a bridge another sniper magically appears in the tower in his exact place and starts head shooting you...)

The level environments are very linear with little or no reward for attempting to explore out of the way areas and machine gun placements are poor and nearly unusable in their turn radius (i.e., in one part of a level, I grabbed a stationary machine gun hoping to mow down droves of enemies in a mindless one way fire fight and the tangos spawned so far to the left that the gun couldn't turn to actually shoot them...I had to unequip the mounted MG and switch to a scope-equipped weapon to take them down before they killed me).

A poor tribute to the SoF series is this and not worth more than $10.00 bargin bin price at that (IMHO).

Tactical? No. Revolutionary? No. Old-School-Run-Around-Blow-People-Away? Yes!!

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 6 / 7
Date: January 11, 2008
Author: Amazon User

I am a huge fan of Soldier of Fortune 2. I have never played a game so long and had so much fun. Soldier of Fortune 2 became even more amazing as time went on because the online community really made it their own. There are an infinite amount of mods, maps, skins, and settings that people created which allowed Soldier of Fortune 2 to evolve far beyond its initial offerings.

Fast forward 4 or 5 or wow I don't know how many years I've been playing SOF2, but fast forward to now and we have Soldier of Fortune Payback. The expectations couldn't be higher. There is a devote SOF2 following which have eschewed the Halo's, the Call of Duty's, the high-octane, story-filled, first-person-shooters that have taken gaming to an entire new level. Sure, I've played all of the new titles, in fact, I love Call of Duty 4!! Yet I still find myself going to the SOF2 online gaming community that I love. The graphics are outdated, the realism is, well, it isn't; it's an old game and I love it!! And I love it for the same reasons I love the new Soldier of Fortune.

So why do I like Payback? Call it nostalgia, call it simple, call it whatever you want, it takes fps' back to where they started; running around blowing people up!! No storyline of substance, no tactically adept AI; just overly powerful weapons that rip enemies to pieces. Blood squirting, limbs flying through the air, halved assassins crawling in agony on the ground (ok hopefully this review doesn't put me on the terror watch list), but you know what I'm saying?!!! It's the punching bag of fps'!!! You have a bad day at work, or traffic is driving you crazy, or you just need a little stress relief, SOF Payback is perfect. Sometimes I just want to come home and let a little steam off. Sure a game like Call of Duty 4 is challenging, the graphics are amazing, the interface is spectacular, but I don't always feel like being pwned by a smack-talking 13 year old every 5 seconds while I'm trying to hold my breath in order to snipe good (Zoolander). Sometimes I just want to point my gun at something and blow it up.

So why only 4 stars? Well, Payback does have a few annoying things. One thing that really bugs me is that you can't lean around corners!! Common, if they built Payback around the same engine as SOF2 they had to purposely take that ability out. The other thing that bugs me is the way the game is saved. You can't quick save at any point during the game. You have to reach checkpoints, which is cool, but at least give me the option of a quick save. In single player, I'd also love to be able to carry an infinite amount of weapons. If the game isn't going for super-realism, why can't I carry an arsenal instead of a measly 3 at a time? Finally, which isn't the fault of the game, the online play is just not there!! There are only like 5-6 servers running online play and half of them you can't even log on to. When you do get on though, it's pretty fun :)

My hope for Payback is that it becomes what SOF2 became, but the modding community has to be behind it. Payback lays the foundation for some amazing possibilities. As is, it's a fun game that I'll definitely keep playing. It's not a COD4 replacement, it's more of a niche game that remains fun in its simplicity.

HUGE Disappointment

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 4 / 5
Date: January 07, 2008
Author: Amazon User

This is an unfortunate blemish on what is a great series. The dismemberment killings are poorly done and make the enemies seem like mannequins. In previous Soldier of Fortune games the enemies would scream in pain as they slowly died from blood loss after having a leg shot off. In this one enemies simply fall to the ground, it's like fighting lifeless robots. The weapons are bland and boring with nothing you haven't played in a million other FPS games and the sound and music isn't even worth mentioning.

From what I've read Raven, who did the first two SOF games, had nothing to do with this one and it shows. Multiplayer was just terrible and it makes me angry to think about it. This was easily one of the worst games I've played in a long time and is 100% the worst SOF game in the series. I just can't recommend it all. The only positive thing I can think of is that the graphics are very nicely done......but that's pretty much it and it's not enough to make up for how poor the overall presentation of the game is.

Activision BUDGET says it all

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 3 / 5
Date: December 29, 2007
Author: Amazon User

What the heck is this crap? This is NOT even worth of soldier of fortune branding, but thats what you get when you have BUDGET in the production company. Maybe if they'd have stayed with Raven it would have been half decent.
But I still tried it anyway, thankfully I got it in the new/used section for $19 bucks instead of $40, and I STRONGLY suggest you do the same, IF you ABSOLUTELY MUST try this waste of code.
Yeah its fun to see the blood, but it gets old after the same baddie model shows up every third enemy. at least the rag doll physics were updated, but the dismemberment seems to have been toned down. Its too easy to blow off a leg, and in double helix, at least you still shoot of the foot or hand of the dismembered appendange, and remeber shooting the head bit by bit till the brain was out then, pop, it exploded on the next round? Nope, no more, a head shot turns the next into a crater from the chin up, no brain. which is about what I can say for the idiot who approved this game for release.
Two thumbs down and a third if I had another hand.
Save the cash and buy Crysis or maybe COD 4.

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