Soldier of Fortune: (Payback) Full Game Review For PC

When someone tells you about a game they hate and they're like yeah it's the worst thing I've ever played and all you can think of is introducing them to a hyper release. At a similar experience with soldier fortune payback where I had a few gamers telling me it was the worst game ever made and I thought “come on, it can't be that bad”. There are plenty of bad games out there that are still enjoyable to play because of how bad they are, I think a game like road warrior is a good example and I assume soldier fortune payback would be another classic example of this as well.

This game was banned in some countries for its violence and I thought at the very least that there might be some novelty there because of that but holy shit was I wrong about this one.
Soldier fortune payback may just be one of the worst games I've ever played it's certainly one of the worst games made in the last decade that's for sure. It's comparable to the type of trash that gets released on Steam under early access, it's a buggy, glitchy, ugly unenjoyable, uninspired generic PC shit and the only redeeming feature is that it's over so quickly.

It was developed by a group called Cauldron HQ who developed chaser another lesser-known FPS game from the early two-thousands it has a reputation for being so bad that it's good but the same can't be said about payback. I have no idea why this game has the soldier fortune title. For starters, it has nothing to do with the other game aside from the organization you work for being called the shop.

THE STORY

You character as a guy named Mason the supposed mercenary, gun for hire or whatever you want to call him but whereas John Mullins in the pro games was a pretty neutral kind of guy, Mason is just a bit of a psychopath Voice acting is so horrendously bad and the whole thing feels like a first draft that's just being whipped out in a matter of hours. The story from what I could tell is that you're traveling the world to stop an arms dealer but the plot is so muddled and confusing it's hard to tell what's going on. Mason mentioned something about Hong Kong to one of the game's antagonist but I had no idea what he's referring to. Most of the dialog is so awful and painful to listen to and to make matters worse you can't even skip the cinematics.

There's often literally one or two enemy character models per level and you'll just be mowing down waves and waves of these dumb assholes as they run towards your muzzle flash like moths to a flame. These are the most generic enemy types you're ever going to see it's either middle eastern terrorists, Russians or all that kind of thing and there's just an absolute abundance of these brain-dead idiots to kill. Soldier of fortune payback seems like it's trying to follow suit with the other games keeping the violence excessive at all times and yet the gore system in this game is somehow inferior to its predecessors.

In the old games you could fire at someone and take them apart piece by piece and it felt somewhat believable despite being really over the top. In payback there's still location based damage to an extent like you can pull off groin and neck shots for instance but it's the way the damage is displayed on their character models that just looks really bizarre, like when you're shooting at an enemy it's common to see entire body parts just fall off after the hit by gunfire like their whole arm or leg is just going to fall off like you're a figurine or something.

Shoot them in the head for instance and the head will literally just evaporate into thin air there's no exit wound or anything like that, the head will just vanish it's stupid as hell. It's kind of funny initially then it just becomes embarrassing I mean think about it, a game made in 2001 has more realistic and developed gore than a game made in 2007. Speaking of stupid as hell there's the enemy AI now this is basically in the sense that they are either running around shooting at you or standing still and shooting at you. They're able to take cover and pop out methodically to fire at you and they will run away from grenades if you throw one at their feed but they're utterly brain-dead otherwise.

On the flip side, these shitheads practically never miss and soldier fortune payback ends up joining the ranks of the multitude of this sort of half-assed modern warfare inspired shooting games where you have the basic regenerating health bar and loads of hits scanning soldier type enemies. At the end of almost every level you'll have to take on a boss fight which is just an enemy with a ridiculous amount of health points it can survive a couple hundred bullets to the face. Often to make things more unfair these guys are given a grenade launcher or an RPG which is able to kill you in a single hit.

At the start of each mission there's a weapon loadout screen where you can select from a few different categories and customize the guns with attachments and all that stuff but this is such a redundant mechanic simply because it doesn't matter what type of gun you use you're gonna have to switch to whatever weapon the enemy is using in that level otherwise you'll just run out of ammo. In most levels, the enemies are always using ak-47s it kind of removes any semblance of experimentation or actual customization with shooting. I think there's a couple of moments when you come across ammo boxes which will stop you back up but holy hell these were rare.

None of the weapons have any kind of recoil or sense of weight when firing them as long as you're aiming down the sights or down a scope you can just hold down the fire button until the magazine is empty. Like a p90 for instance seem to handle about the same from the same distance as did an m16. There's all these stats for damage and accuracy but they don't seem to make that much of a difference and at times it doesn't even feel like you're firing a weapon at all there's that little recoil. When you're hit by enemies there's also very little notification that you're taking damage aside from the edges of the screen slowly turning red as you're getting closer and closer to death.

The way take damage in this game is extremely bizarre you can survive an entire magazine from an assault rifle and yet enemies are able to kill you by whacking you with the butt of their weapon like twice bullshit. There certain instances when you'll just die instantly without any idea of what the hell hit you and I can only assume these moments of glitches. The frustration compounded further by the idiotic checkpoint system, that'll often force you to replay the last 10 minutes all over again. The last level of the game has enemies with shotguns and you'll pretty much just turn a corner then be dead before you even realize you're getting shot at.

Like I said earlier, the only redeeming feature is that the whole thing's over really quickly. Even though I suffered from a multitude of deaths throughout the campaign, it's still only lasted like 2 to 3 hours. I can't really see any reason why you'd want to replay to either I mean there's no unlockables or anything like that and the only other mode on offer is the multiplayer which is absolutely dead and rightfully so.

GRAPHICS

You probably notice how ugly the game looks and yes it truly does look ugly even on the PC when the visuals are maxed out it often looks like something you'd see on the PlayStation 2. There's a bug if you don't have vsync enabled you can't even hit enemies due to some kind of hitbox error and it's literally unplayable unless you've installed the latest patch.

But even still, the game just looks so boring and flat um and textures aren't very detailed, there's a lot of bloom to try and mask how crappy everything looks and it's just really subpar.
The jungle areas look half decent I'll admit with some nice lighting but keeping in mind this is the year Crytek engine was unleashed on the world it makes soldier fortune pay back just look like crap.

MINIMUM SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS

CPU: 2.5GHz Intel® Pentium® 4 processor CPU: Core 2 Duo 2.0GHz
RAM: 512MB RAM
GPU: 256MB DirectX 9.0c Compatible 3D accelerated video card with pixel/vertex shaders version 2.0 - ATI Radeon x800 or Nvidia GeForce 6800
DX: DirectX 9.0c
OS: Windows 98SE, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Millennium Edition (Windows Me), Windows Vista
Store: 3.3 GB uncompressed Hard Drive Space
Sound: DirectX 9.0c-compatible sound card
ODD: DVD-ROM Drive
Network: Internet service required to access online features
source

RECOMMENDED SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS

CPU: Core 2 Duo 2.0GHz
RAM: 1 GB RAM
GPU: 512MB DirectX 9.0c Compatible 3D accelerated video card with pixel/vertex shaders version - ATI Radeon x1900 or Nvidia GeForce 7900
DX: DirectX 9.0c
OS: Windows 98SE, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Millennium Edition (Windows Me), Windows Vista
Store: 3.3 GB uncompressed Hard Drive Space
Sound: DirectX 9.0c-compatible sound card
ODD: DVD-ROM Drive
source

REVIEW/RATING

Graphics 5/10
Sound 5/10
Gameplay 5/10
Controls 5/10
Effect 5/10

OVERALL REVIEW/RATING

5\10

DEVELOPER

Cauldron HQ

PUBLISHER

Activision

GENRE

First-person shooter

MODE(S)

Single-player‎, Multi-player

RELEASE DATE

November 14, 2007

CONCLUSION

Soldier fortune payback is one of those rare times when I've been playing a video game and actually started to feel remorseful for what I'm doing like there's so many more productive things I could be doing right now than playing this abomination. The fact it shares its name with one of the greatest of the old shooter's is a travesty and maybe the fact they'd ban this thing where I lived was kind of a blessing in disguise. I would not recommend this to anyone, not on a train, not in a tree not in a car cauldron, let me be, I hope someone at least got that reference.