Soldier Of Fortune II : Double Helix Comments by Gestalt

This review made me laugh a lot ! Here are the most amusing bits:

...'The only way to evade their attentions is to go "prone" and crawl along the ground, at which point they will quite happily stand on your head without seeing you in thick grass'...

...'you can't fire your weapon whilst lying down'...

...'guards can raise the alarm telepathically'...

Frankly, if RAVEN can't make better AI than this, then they should pack up shop and go and be street sweepers or something. Its a sad joke - and a very expensive one at that.


(AsensiblepostbyErrol TM)

If you want single player action, you'd be better off looking elsewhere.
I bought this mainly on the basis of playing it MP but thought I'd go through the SP first to get used to the weapons and everything. I wasn't enjoying the singleplayer at all and when that truck level appeared I just couldn't take it anymore. SOF2, thankfully, was bought from EB and that's where it's gone back to. I really liked SOF1 and it's a hell of a lot better in SP than this one, maybe I'll rebuy it when the price comes down for MP action but 30 notes for possibly the crappiest SP FPS I've played for many years is too much.

Why is it that so many videogaming companies refuse to attempt to push the state of the art? Soldier of Fortune 2 is yet another in the list of pointless fps games churned out by Raven et. al. in the past year.


Because unfortunately, that is what the gullible public buys, and they make money out of churning out FPS after FPS

that is what the gullible public buys, and they make money out of churning out FPS after FPS

...and sadly this appears to be the way that console games are going too. Despite the fact that FPS games suck big-time with a joypad. :-(

people are so attached to the "have a gun sticking from your navel and run around shooting people with it"

LOL - never thought of it like that !

"The shortcomings of the AI aren't enough to spoil the single player campaign completely, however hard Raven's programmers may have tried."

Ouch! I hope I'll never get a review like this one |-)

Goldeneye was saved because it was a great game... but the control with the gamepad sucked bigtime! It was the only fps I played on a console, with a gamepad (till now ;)).
I'm playing sof2 right now. I tried to play on normal, but the enemies were too shrewd... so I play now on the first level below normal (shame, shame, shame!). It's harder to play then sof1... and sometimes brings my nice xp1700/gf4 4600 down to its knees. Not talking about a stupid bug that sometimes damages the quicksave (hapenned two times). The loading time (first load) may take minutes (and my hdd is 7200rot/min). There are a lot of scripting bugs (entity trying to use itself, not hearing the gun firing, can't get out of the zoom from the sniper); also the AI can be anticipated at one point, although they're very very cunning. They were all coming towards me, round a corner, and I was shooting them one by one, in exactly the same place. I borrowed the game from a friend... I wouldn't pay for it, but without spending money it's fun in some parts... in the wait for NOLF2 and DeusEx2...

Edited 10 times. Most recently by Errol at 11:28 on 17/06/2002

Ten Edits! What was wrong with it?

"Edited 10 times. Most recently by Errol at 11:28 on 17/06/2002
Ten Edits! What was wrong with it?"

The answer is at the bottom of his post:(AsensiblepostbyErrol TM)
Obviously took a lot of effort!

Never understood the appeal of this game, aside from being able to bop people in the head/arms/legs...Can't understand how Raven supposedly copyrighted that idea when Virtua Cop was doing it nearly 10 years ago!

Peej

I was only able to complete my sensible post because the Doctor gave me a new tablet prescription today.

The new pills help quite a lot.

"Why is it that so many videogaming companies refuse to attempt to push the state of the art? Soldier of Fortune 2 is yet another in the list of pointless fps games churned out by Raven et. al. in the past year.

Luckily I can play Deus Ex, Halo and Operation Flashpoint." - Viktor

Agree with you 110%, well said that man!

I still don't know how you can write a serious review of any "Soldier of Fortune" game without reference to the appalling morality behind the games themselves. I'm not talking about anything to do with violence in a kind of comic book GTA3 way - I've no problem with that - but the SOF series is based on the ethos of one of the most racist, right wing magazines to be ever published in the US. The developers acknowledge the racism in the game, but then argued it was OK because, hey, it's what people want.

Thankfully Edge (and oddly the Official PS2 magazine) have picked up on it, and I'm not saying the game should be banned or anything because of it, but it surely at least merits a mention if only to inform people. As a letter published in Edge mentioned a few months ago, were the likes of SOF to be a movie and not a game, it'd be dismissed straightaway as a piece of nasty, xenophobic and most importantly lazy media - but instead because it's a game, it somehow makes it more acceptable, which is bad news for the industry if it's hoping to bring more people into its forray.

Frankly this is the most negative review of sof2 I've seen

Heaven forbid the reviewers here have their own opinion on games.

several minor map bugs

LOL. Do you work for Raven ?

"They can lob back your grenades at you"

Woopy-doo. :) I did say in that section of the review that "the AI does a good job of working together as a team" and go on about the same kind of stuff you're talking about. The problem is that while the AI might have some neat tricks, overall it's deeply flawed.

AI shouldn't be able to see through walls and floors, and even if it can it certainly shouldn't try shooting you through them! It also shouldn't be able to land a grenade at your feet perfectly every time it throws one, even when they have no direct line of sight to you. And this was on one of the lower difficulty settings! God knows what their accuracy is like on the harder settings.


"Can't fire while prone and you call that an AI problem?"

I didn't, did I?


"It was developed by H&K"

My mistake. I assume it was designed to the US Military's requirements though? Whoever made it though, it's an over-engineered mess in this game. :)

SoF was one of the most worthless and pathetic games of later years. Honestly, after trying out the two demos, I don't have much hope for this one.

I predicted SOF2 would be a polished turd and from the majority of forum comments I've seen elsewhere it looks like I'm right again. Overall the review seems fair given the misgivings I've seen expressed.

Why do people continue to buy garbage? I think the answer can be found in an earlier posters comments about positive reviews. The majority of the gaming media have sold out and know that too much scrutiny would cause a collapse of confidence in the genre's they lazily rely on to sell copy.

Many people, regardless of their apparant intelligence, all too easily fall for marketing spin even when historically the reality has shown it's most likely to be otherwise. A similar example is believing the Tories are now the "caring party." Examine the policies. They haven't changed one bit. They're still the same. It's only the gloss that's changed.

"The AI in this game uses hearing and sight to target the player. Turning auto-run off helps a lot in preventing the enemy from hearing you"

That doesn't explain the AI seeing me through a big pile of cardboard boxes from half way across a warehouse, while I was crouched down and not moving at all. It also doesn't justify the AI consistently hitting me with a grenade from the other side of a hill without even seeing me, simply by listening for the sound of my footsteps through the grass. They have super-human senses and aim.


"sound alarms if you fail to hide the corpse"

Does this actually happen? Because corpses just vanish after a minute or two anyway from what I've seen. The only body I ever had to move was when you had to carry someone out of a burning building in one of the missions.


"As far as the clipping through walls (enemies shoot through walls)"

Perhaps that bit wasn't worded clearly, but what I meant is that sometimes enemies will see you through a solid wall or floor and try to shoot you through it as if it wasn't there. Usually you just hear them pumping rounds into a lump of wood, but occasionally they try to throw a grenade through the obstacle and it bounces back in their faces and kills them. Only happened a couple of times to me, but it looked (or rather sounded) really silly.

The clipping is a seperate issue, and it is a lot worse in SOF2 than any other FPS I've played. Often you'll see bits of arms and legs sticking through walls and doors, and although they can't shoot you when this happens, you can shoot them and kill them through the wall, because their bounding box extends into the room you're in even though their head is in another room. Again, it looks dumb and it's an obvious problem that should have been picked up in beta testing.


"The 'can't fire your weapon whilst lying down'and raise alarms telepathically" bits are not AI related at all"

I didn't say they are. Again, sorry if that wasn't worded entirely clearly. The problem with the alarms is that it's easy to get spotted because of the guards' X-ray vision and super-human hearing, and as there's no way to stop them from raising the alarm once they've spotted you it's pretty annoying. It's not an AI problem as such, but the AI makes it more annoying than it should be.

"It sounds to me like the game is too hard for you. It frankly isn't a game for amateur FPS, and is difficult even for an experienced FPS player. Which to me is a damn good thing. I personally like the challenge."

I don't know about him, but I don't consider myself as an amateur fps player. I like my challenges as in Halo's legendary difficulty or Alien vs Predator's marine levels on director's cut (and before the patch that enabled game saving). And SoF2 sux like an Electrolux. It would've been great two years ago, but now.. pfft. Goodbye John Mullins, I'll settle for my Ghost Recon.

I find myself really troubled by the precision the enemies have when throwing grenades at you - it isn't normal indeed. And the clipping is very obvious and annoying almost all the time (they shoot from behind the door, but you still can see the fire from the shooting).
I kinda like the single player... and that's the only thing I'm playing the game for. Leaving aside the super-american-hero crap, obviously...

I think the game is far from perfect and there are MANY bugs on it, but I enjoyed it much more than RTCW, the most overrated game nowadays to me. This one adds NOTHING to the genre, at least in SOF2 you have realistic recoil and a pretty challenging AI, no matter if it cheats or not, it got me interested in playing the game. I really got tired of enemies that put themselves in front of me to kill them, and I didn't care of the flaws of this game when I got in the firefights in it. At last a semi-realistic shooter with closer-to-real opponents. If the bugs are fixed in a patch, surely this game will set a new AI benchmark.

Well, games and movies are not only entertainment, but also art. In art, there can be criteria by which we can assess the worth of a work, and also if it somehow advances the genre/medium, and if it tells us something about the human condition etc.

By those criteria, SOF2 simply is crap. It fails to deliver a convincing experience, it is a moral dwarf, it has no substance whatsover and no story to speak of. The dialogue is nearly as bad as in Episode2, and the cohesion of the plot and the structure/pacing of the levels is completely off. It just doesn't work as art.

Maybe as entertainment, for masochists.

Totally agree with single player rating.
To sumarize it in one word => uninspired.

you don't play fps much, do you ?
ooh well, at least there is someone who likes it.

Mattais - Are you quite sure that you're talking about the same game ?

I find it utterly frustrating that the games look and sound better and better, but hardly any company cares about the A.I. The best A.I. in an FPS still was in Half-Life, a game that is now 4 (?) years old. I haven't played Halo, though.
I am still waiting for a game where you have real long fights with individual opponents. Ducking behind a crate, A.I. trying to sneak around you, etc. etc. Comes to my mind that Operation Flashpoint had brilliant A.I., at least in some situations.

I am still waiting for a game where you have real long fights with individual opponents. Ducking behind a crate, A.I. trying to sneak around you, etc. etc.

Just play Counter-Strike - you get situations like the one you describe in every round.

Hm, I actually played Counterstrike for quite some time (lost a bit interest a few months ago)
, but I am nevertheless waiting for a good single-player-experience with AT LEAST Half-Life A.I. or better.

By all accounts, Unreal Tournament 2003 may well give you the single player experience that you seek.

"the truck mission (sitting on the back while the Dr. Ivanovich is driving the car). I haven't seen this type of missions before and was amazed"

You need to play more games. ;) On-rails levels like that are hardly new, and they've been done much better in other games. The biggest problems for me with that truck level were - 1) the handling of the vehicles was absolutely laughable, which ruined any sense of immersion and made it harder to aim your machinegun, and 2) the level design was pitiful as well, with tons of fogging, sparse scenery and ridiculous looking angular roads. I didn't particularly enjoy the gameplay on those levels either, and felt they didn't fit in with the rest of the game, but that's debatable depending on your personal tastes.


"this game is graphically intensive, thus leading to slower performance. It's not a bug."

No, it's not a bug, it's just poor design. Most of the levels ran fine at 800x600 on my GeForce 2, but there were a couple of maps (the Vergara mansion was probably the worst) where the frame rate dropped into single digits at some points. My best guess (as a former level designer myself) is that whoever made those maps was simply over-ambitious, and created a lay-out which was too open and didn't have enough occluding walls to split it up into more manageable areas that the graphics engine could handle.

Either way it's silly when most of the game runs perfectly well and then there's a handful of maps which are unplayably slow without turning down the graphics options. Developers often have fixed poly counts that they try to stick to, precisely to avoid this kind of thing happening. Either those maps went way over the limit that everyone else stuck to, or there's some other flaw causing the slowdowns, like too many AI characters running around at once or something.

You tell him, Gestalt.

As I see it, Eurogamer is one of the few sites to do an honest (and correct) review of this title.

You got something on yer nose there Errol.

Yes - its called the truth.

You're got the truth on the end of your nose????

Yes - I find that to be a most agreeable and convenient place to keep it.

okaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay.

People who constantly harp on about one FPS or another must have such fascinating lives. Christ, what's the difference between this, Quake, Unreal, Wolfenstein et al....bugger all that's what. They don't even pretend to try and invent a plot or a storyline, the whole game revolves around finding the biggest weapon and pulping everyone in sight with it, and to be honest if you are STILL playing FPS's some 7 or so years on, you need your lobotomy scar stitches unpicking and re-sewing a bit tighter...

Peej

Peej:

Best tag something like "IMHO" on the end of shite like that :)

Spot on review Gestalt. My2p:

AI, sigh. I've seen enemies standing against the wall during a firefight. Presumably sniffing the wallpaper.

Some of the dialoge scripting is terrible.

It's pretty, but large textures good game do not make.

Clipping. Sigh. I shot a tango sho died stuck through a door. Went to open the door, & instead picked the body up, in the process poking my own head right through the door.

It does nothing to advance the genre apart from it's use of GHOUL2 (which is in JK2 anyway).

Although spraying triads in Hong Kong with dual uzis is quite fun, it dosen't have that 'just one more go' factor.

Unlike Ghost Recon which has kept me up till 1am 2 nights this week....ZZZZzzzzz

PS: Multi player is fun, but when you can get Urban Terror / Navy Seals for free it dosen't really justify the game price.

One suspects Romero would.

I think there are limits on how FPS can move on, if anything it's splintering into sub-genre's now.

Personally I've nothing against SOF2, I've always had a great deal of time for the Raven stuff. I played the MP demo, which was ok, the SP demo was OK once you hacked the gore, but to be honest there's nothing new that attracts me to it. The GHOUL system is very nice, I got a real kick out of it, but nothing like the shock factor the first time around.

And grass, sorry, "realistic" grass, have a word. If I wanted realistic grass I'd go sit in a fecking field. j/k

That's not to say, however, it's necessarily a bad game. I've purchased games based on recommendation even when I didn't rate the demo overly. Like I've said on other threads, don't necessarily judge a game just by it's negative aspects, no game is perfect. Just ask if you've gonna enjoy it, if so go for it.

IMO.

Oh, sorry, IMHO - I thought this was all about opinions!

Peej

Viktor is on the ball about gameplay and art.

Hmm, let's see: every site that has reviewed this game has scored it between "good" and "outstanding", except this site. What it does mean? Means that the reviewers in the rest of the sites have become nuts scoring so high such a bad game? NO. Means that this game offers some things that refresh the FPS genre, without making a revolution of course, but that makes the normal player keep interest in playing the game. To realize this is just needed one thing that I haven't seen too much in the comments: COMMON SENSE.

I can't take seriously people that haven't played the game and say that it's crap, or people that takes videogaming as a form of art (I had a good laugh with this one). Come on! What do you want from SOF2? It offered ACTION, nothing more, and it gives lots of pretty cool action. It has bugs, but the reviewer makes the game appear as unplayable, when it really is very fun and the bugs don't spoil the game that much.

Hmm, let's see: every site that has reviewed this game has scored it between "good" and "outstanding", except this site. What it does mean?

It means Eurogamer take a more careful look at what's there rather than allowing themselves to be sucked in by hype. In reality most games are crap in technical, gameplay, or creative terms.

...people that takes videogaming as a form of art...

Anyone who can't discuss games in the intellectual or artistic sense is intellectually or creatively illiterate. No other medium suffers this kind of drought. Why should games be exempt?

Anyone who can't discuss games in the intellectual or artistic sense is intellectually or creatively illiterate. No other medium suffers this kind of drought. Why should games be exempt?

Very well put Max. People should try to think of them as interactive movies, with your Die Hards and Lawrence of Arabias (although the latter does seem to be lacking).

Everything looks like crap if you disect it.

Fair point, and perhaps more effort (not focus) should be placed on the positive. I do still like reviewers to nitpick. That way you are aware of the problems, however small, and decide for yourself if they'll really bother you.

"Once they put a patch as I'm sure they will it will be even better"

a) Why couldn't they get it right first time, and b) we have to review a game based on what comes out of the box or, at a stretch, the latest version available at the time of going to press. We can't sit around forever waiting for a game to be patched into its ideal state, and we can't judge a game based on what it *could* be after a few patches.

We can't sit around forever waiting for a game to be patched into its ideal state, and we can't judge a game based on what it *could* be after a few patches.

More focus should be placed on reviewing out-of-the-box versions in the industry. Maybe then developers and publishers will concentrate on weeding out bugs from the initial release.

"Your post about film and games is hilarious. It's a First Person Shooter, not Fellini for crying out loud. Personally, I wasn't expecting Shakespeare when I bought this game. I was expecting a fun, action packed war game, and that's exactly what I got. I think some of you people haven't even played the game, hence you should keep your mouths shut. Some of you are just taking the word of some guy that thinks design bugs are AI bugs. The bugs aren't even that much of a distraction and hardly affect game play at all unless you are running into that AMD FPS problem (sounds like Gestalt is), which they are fixing in the patch. It's the number one selling game in a lot of countries now, and only a handful of people and even less reviewers are complaining, so it's obviously not the piece of shit that this site is making it out to be"

Well, if we start talking about movies and games: SoF2 is not the Terminator or even Eraser of games. It's the damn Red Heat. Or more accurately, Texas Chainsaw Massacre the New Generation of games. It's uninspired, relies on the same old gore effect, doesn't look that hot etc etc. And saying that sooo many people like this, well, you know the saying about shit and flies. Hype lives!