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Soldner, spectacular!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 3 / 11
Date: March 13, 2004
Author: Amazon User

If the producer was ever going to play online in this game, then id rest assure that i would do my duty as a soldier and salute him whenever he passes by. why? simple...this game, like bf 1942, operation flaspoint and upcoming ea joint ops deserves to be one of the best non-linear 1st/3rd person shooters giving gamers the choice of vehichles (70+), weapons (60+) and different soldier classes (medics, engineers, assaults, etc) better yet, if you got sick of your default weapon you can go to weapons counters and buy another one, change your outfits etc. all these different aspects are included in this game which make it very real despite a few downsides. What downsides? well, if you look at the eye candies in www.secretwars.net youll notice bad textures, but this is ofcourse due to the fact that this game's production started long ago plus take too much space in memory. When i say bad texture, i mean that the objects at far distance look bad and sorta muddy in texture. this can be solved in one way and that is to make objects fade at a certain distance. well, forget about and think of the realism, environmental sceneries, buildings and trees can all get damaged when hit by a shell, bomb or run over by a tank or another vehichle. so basically, you call this game the best game of the year. make no mistake =P

Do I smell game of the year??

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 4 / 9
Date: March 27, 2004
Author: Amazon User

70+ Wepaons, 60+ Vehicles, Soldiers More customizable then players in RPG's(around 60,000 combinations), the most realistic map you can imagine(Designed using satellite imagery of the beiring sea) which is also Fully dynamic(IE: totally destructable!), weather/day/night/season changes, complex diplomatic system, single player mission generator, up to 32 players MP(to be increased to 64 upon release) ....Basically, If you dont really want to join the army for real, play soldner.

The year is 2010 and unconventional warfare is in fashion. Major countries like the USA and Russia decide to tone down there large campaigns and now wars are fought between secret special forces.

"Military Success is no longer made by major countries but by small and highly specialized mercenary forces"

The fact that this game is set in 2010 gives the developers a "realistic" way(or rather, a good excuse) to use weapons which are still in research and development labs(Popular example: HK OICW) yet, still keeping the game as contemporary and modern as possible.

Everyone will find somthing to do in soldner. There are "Classes" such as medics, engineers, bomb kits, snipers, commanders. These are actually kits which any player can use without being restricted weapon or vehicle-wise(eg: Wolfenstien ET)

Vehicles and weapons are bought from the cash which you earn from completing mission(EG:Counter Strike), they can also be stolen from the battlefield. But if your in a team, you'll need your commanders permission to commission a vehicle since the money will be taken out of the money pool each team will have.
This might be a little frustrating for players who want(or need) access to all vehicles at the start of every match since they are quite expensive, but server options to arrange this are being implemented.

This game is going to raise the bar for non-linear, tactical shooters very, very high. With such unimaginable customization(oh bdw, Mods will be extensivly supported) This game is going to have a replayabilty factor off the charts, that is if you ever stop playing it ;)

Another Counterstrike? Or Even Better?

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 1 / 8
Date: April 28, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Well, after playing two of the games I've found out each game has it's own uniqness. Counterstrike was game of the year for many years, but has lost its popularity due to the amount of hackers. Soldner is coming out (...) Will this game dominate the shooter genre scene? or will it become a burn? I feel this game will get far, only because the amount of intensity that is involved. Tons of guns, and Tanks, with helis, and Vtol aircraft, taunts , and many more. If you all haven't played the demo get it now..You won't be disappointed...

A game with potential

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 1 / 9
Date: May 07, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Soldner has a lot of potential. Other reviews here have indicated the numbers of vehicles and weapons, the diversity of which should also be highlighted. Vehicles and weapons range from US to Russian to Chinese to German. Though the balance of so many items is questionable at this point, the diversity and tactical viability of each still has great potential. As the game is still some months from release, I am quite curious to see where the developers take all the elements of this game.

Something else worth noting is the modding potential this game has. Vehicle and weapon data is stored in XML files. That means you don't have to dig into the code or recompile your changes. I think a feature like that will be highly desireable to modders and hobbyists. Whether the game ships with excellently balanced game modes and objects, I don't know, but I have no doubt mod-groups will adapt and improve whatever is there to make it even better and more diverse. I really look forward to seeing what folks are able to do with Soldner.

It's all 'potential' with no actual results

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 10 / 12
Date: May 30, 2004
Author: Amazon User

First of all ignore the several dozen people who have posted reviews for the game before the beta was even out.

Where to start...well first let's talk about realism, or lack of it. People can turn invisible, no instant kills, no ballistics, vehicles have arcade style controls, the list goes on. Every single gun from the Colt to the M82A1 has 100% accuracy if you are lieing down. In fact the only thing that associates this game with tactical shooters is bullet spread and the amount of damage done per bullet. That's about it, even Joint Ops has more realism and they purposely targeted the arcade end of the market.

The 70+ weapons and vehicles? wipe that image from your mind my friend, it's actually about 55 and some of the weapons were actually taken out (all the pump action shotguns). Some of the vehicles are simply redundant. for example there is no reason why anyone would use the Su37 instead of the Mig 29. They're exactly the same in weapons loadout, physics, the lot, except the Su37 has an exceptionally ugly model. All the weapons loadout for vehicles are the same. In fact the A10's GAU cannon has the same values as the light machine gun MG3. In real life the GAU is a 9 foot long 7 barreled anti-tank shell firing monster, and the MG3 is a relic from WW2 that would be lucky to penetrate a Humvee's armour. You get the picture. I could go on and on about the inaccuracies but we have a 1000 word limit.

That advanced destruction system is laughable at best. Crashing a plane fully laden with explosives causes no damage, but a single tank shell in the right place can make a 5 storey building simply disappear into thin air, with no particle effects or explosions to cover it up.

Customising your soldier? yeah it's fun but the 60000 combinations were taken out, and we were left with roughly 100. Viva le difference.

Sound- Incredibly bad. They claimed to use actual real life weapon sounds, but that's a lie, full stop. They use the same sounds for multiple guns and even the existing sounds aren't real because I actually know what certain guns sound like in real life. If they were good sounds to begin with I wouldn't mind, but they're not. They sound like they're from the early Tom Clancy games. There are no ambient sounds. And I promise, you will grow to hate the sound byte of some guy saying 'zzzoolldner' again and again.

Gameplay- for a mulitplayer game it's completely unbalanced. Snipers are all powerful. They are impossible to see and can kill you from up to 1000m away. You start with enough money to buy a stinger that can take down a $20000 chopper. and just to note, the countermeasures the devs promised us aren't in the game, so when a stinger locks on you eject, simple as that. you'll continuoulsy miss each other on the huge maps and spend half an hour just trying to find someone to kill. some vechicles+weapons are ridiculously overpowered and are dirt cheap as well, so why you'd bother buying a comanche worth 15 grand and has only 6 rockets is beyond me. All jets are useless as they use the same rockets the infantry have and have a lockon range of 500m, and jets travel a minimum of 200kph meaning you fly past your target before it even pops up on the screen. And another interesting bug, it takes a full minute to actually get a lockon, so even at a chopper's slowest speed you'll fly past the target before it paints it. the modding tools are quote 'unsupported', ie. don't work. and guess what, the devs decided they'd deactivate the anti-cheat protocols, so expect to see plenty of people with infinte money+health.

Singleplayer- doesn't exist. There is no 'dynamic mission generator'. In fact there is no AI. you get no team mates and all the enemy can do is drive round in circles and occasionally try to ram you with his tank. they can't even use weapons. this contrasts with their 100% accuracy when it comes to using rocket launchers, making tanks useless.

The graphics- mediocre at best. Ground textures are seriously low-qual. Nice explosions and water though. Pity they decided to leave out compatability with ATI! ATI for god's sake, the most used graphics card, and it's not compatible with the game!

Bugs- even if everything else I mentioned was fixed, this would still destroy the game. Bugs that were pointed out to the devs countless times are still there. Specifically that massive memory leak, so regardless of your system specs you will have lots of slow down+lag. It takes 8 minutes just to load up the menu, and 5 minutes to exit it. it's really frustrating to know that every time you click the mouse you are adding another minute to your load time. you will be crashing to desktop a lot. and just to note, the average load-play ratio is 4 hours of trying to conncet, 30 minutes of play (I'm not joking).

Here are the good things about the game:- the parachuting (very nicely implemented, the swimming (nice animations), and the Z9 chopper (love the spec ops look). that's it. enjoy!

Final word- you're better off just getting the demo. it has all the weapons+vehics that are in the final game and it has singleplayer as well. It'll take years of patching just o get this game up to spec, and given the developer's track record, it's not looking hopeful. Soldner is a game that is all idea, but never actually gives any results.

AVOID THIS GAME LIKE THE PLAGE

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 9 / 10
Date: June 04, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Single player doesn't work (officialy posted - on Jowood's tech forums), And multiplayer disconnects you after 10-15 mins. The vehicle control system is buggy and untested, and the animation (or lack of it is apparent in every frame), which isn't very fast either.

Couple this with very long loading times indeed, and high the probability of having to shell out for ANOTHER upgrade just to play this title, leaves you with this advice:-

AVOID THIS GAME LIKE THE PLAGE

Buy Operation Flashpoint/Battlefield 1942 if you want proper examples of how a tactical FPS should be produced.

Both titles can be picked up on this site for much less than this poor excuse of a game.

Potential? Good game? or a good mess?

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 7 / 9
Date: June 08, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I used to be one of those rabid fans that awaited for this game release......

Wow was I disappointed! I haven't been this disappointed since I was 7-years-old, and I found out that my beloved Santa Claus wasn't real.

Some of the games largest attractors of the game was supposed to be the effects. Like collasping buildings and the overall environmental carnage that was supposed to be inflicted.

Unfortunately, this portion has fallen short in the way it looks graphically. There is no major smoke or debris from falling buildings or trees. The graphics are lackluster to explain it best in the Euro version. If my Geforce FX 5600XT can really bring out great effects from games like UT2004, Splinter Cell 2, Thief 3 and a freebie like Americas Army. Then I know my videocard isnt a problem.

Sounds, they are ok nothing really to swoon about. For a FPS set near a few year future of present time, I could care less about the sound effects.The only time I care about the sound effects is if it is in Star Wars or Star Trek.

Gameplay, well it could be better. At times the game was very sluggish and the vehicular controls are jerky and overeactive, and yes I know how a jeep and HMMWV, and M1A2 tank is supposed to respond, and no they dont turn that quick even at high speeds.The vehicular movement is jerky and incomplete overall.

Loading times are comparison slower to that of Battlefield: Vietnam, and UT2004. Where it takes less than 38 seconds to load up a game of BF:V and 21 Seconds to load up an onslaught match on UT2004. On Soldner, it took a whopping 1 minute 49 seconds on my 2.8E GHz Pentium 4 with over 1024MB of RAM!

Game and server stability are mediocre at best. I would hope this issue would be resolved since the demo had a likewise issue. But, apparently with this games euro rush it wasn't a factor that many quality control issues werent taken care of.

This review may be different with the release of the USA version, but as it stands the Euro version is incomplete. With any retail game you would hope that any game released is a finished product. We paid the money, it is the least of what those guys could do for us.

Yea, Yea, Yea make promises to me that you guys will complete the game after you release it. But, why? I am not allowed at work to only complete half of what my boss told me to do so. In college, I wasn't allowed only to hand in half a report and expect full credit for it.

Yes, it was stated that there will be later patches to fix the slew of bugs they never fixed. I heard the same thing from other devlopers from games like Starfleet Command 3, and after over 18 months still no "official" patch has been released to fix that attrocity.

My suggestion? Wait until the US Version, and some reviews and judge for yourself, but right now as the game stands...Don't waste your time, or hard earned cash, the concept is there unfortunately all it is right now is just that a concept. Soldner may try to be a goundbreaking game, but you may also have a groundbreaking headache to go with it.

I just hope these Encore and Wings can pull off the impossible and get this game working right before it hits the rest of the guys in the USA. If not, those devlopers and the game itself could find themselves deported to locations unknown.

I wish I could give these guys a good review, but as it is right now I am highly disappointed with how incomplete this game current stands in it's Euro state.

A good game with some problems

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 2 / 6
Date: June 17, 2004
Author: Amazon User

When I first downloaded the beta version of Soldner:Secret Wars I went into the game like a blind mouse. I soon figured out that this was no ordinary 3rd person shooter, it was a massivley customizable war experiense.This game was like an RPG for modern combat. I aslo relized that the most inexperienced gamer could not just join in and start owning every one they saw, instead of a game where you just pick a gun, you use fake money and "purchase" weapons, the better the weapon the larger amount of money. In order to buy better guns you have to play and earn the money. The Unit Customization System(UCS) allows for thousands of different choices, it will be awhile until similar players start showing up. The buildings in soldner can have holes blown in them( by tanks, rockets, grenades, etc.)The only down falls I found with soldner, in the beta demo, is that not all of servers for online play are reliable, the loading process is very long and has nothing to entertain the player, amd the last problem i have seen is that while in first person your gun seems to disappear, and that the hans dont seem to adjust to the gun(i.e. if you have an M4 with a 203 grenade launcher on the bottom the hand seems to be going right through the 203 launcher and holding the barrel. If the full version fixes the different problems found on the beta demo then this game will get a full five stars by my standards.

Nice Idea - Poor Implementation

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 7 / 9
Date: June 26, 2004
Author: Amazon User

That's not a typo, the name of this game is actually Soldner. This first person shooter claims to have 2 million miles of terrain to explore.

The character creation is rather nice. There are amazing combinations of helmet, clothing, design, etc. to truly make a character that reflects your attitude. The chance of finding someone else just like you in the game is slim.

Game graphics are rather decent. There are various terrains, rain, snow, fog. There are buildings, forests, meadows. In addition, the terrain is deformable. You can shoot out the glass windows, blow up the buildings, knock down the trees. The buildings send up clouds of smoke as they fall.

On the downside, though, the graphics engine is very flaky. You can be driving along a road and POOF it'll vanish beneath your feet, only to reappear later on. It might temporarily turn at a 90 degree angle and then revert to its normal orientation.

Sound is reasonably good, with stirring battle music and sounds of gunshots and tanks seeming relatively realistic. There isn't much ambient sound to truly immerse you, though.

Single player is quest based, moving from task to task. You can take over tanks, jeeps and other vehicles along your road to glory.

In multiplayer, you're on a server with up to 32 people. Unfortunately the servers - including the patch server - seem to be randomly sick, making it hard to even try out the online gaming.

While this is a great concept, it doesn't seem to be quite fully implemented. The long load times, flaky graphics, and server issues keep adding 'speed bumps' in your enjoyment, which might ultimately cause you to just go play another game that works properly.

Better than I expected

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 5 / 6
Date: July 03, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I almost didn't buy this game because of the negative reviews. It seems that either people love the game or hate it. Those who hated it didn't seem to think it was fast-paced enough. This is why I liked it. The vendor has patched the game and corrected the problems other reviewers complained about. The graphics and gameplay were flawless in single mode and online play.

One reviewer complained that the area was too big and combat was to seldom, however, the maps guide your way to the objectives and if you follow the mission there is always action. I have played online popular online war games and this is quite different. One thing is that you can use almost anything. Second, you can destroy almost anything. Third, it has more strategy and offers more options for coordinated efforts among team members.

Some of the other popular games are blood baths where you rush in and try to kill someone before you get killed. You respawn and rush in again. The action is at a blinding speed and a soldier's lifespan is quite short. This game can be fast paced when taking an objective, but there is more time to think, coordinate an attack and set up a defense.

I have to give it 5 stars. It is slower paced than some games, but has many advantages that other games are missing. When I say slower paced I don't mean slow paced. There is plenty of action but you have time to plan your move before going into the action.

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