It's no Gears of War (which it desperately wants to be), but the graphics are crisp and clean and aren't oversaturated with the muddy brown and grey tones that dominate so many other military shooters. The one thing that Payback does have going for it is its look. They hardly use cover, they don't readjust their tactics when the battle's not going their way, and they think that a flanking maneuver is something you do with a nice piece of beef. They either stand in the exact same location and shoot at you until you kill them, or they run directly toward you in a straight line until you kill them. Your ethnically ambiguous insurgent terrorist enemies fight like British Redcoats in the Revolutionary War. It's as if it's trying to save you from itself.Īs bad as the level design is, the enemy AI is even worse. Another nice feature is the way that the game defaults to "no" when it asks you if you want to restart from the last checkpoint. This actually works out pretty well, since most of your in-game deaths come at the hands of enemies who spontaneously pop in behind you and fill your back with lead immediately after you trigger a checkpoint. If you die in battle, you have the option of continuing from one of the very few and far between checkpoints. If you win the fight, you continue down the path to the next encounter, as if you're running a gauntlet instead of fighting in the street. Playing through a mission boils down to moving through the level in the only way that you can until some enemies appear. And even then, you're practically forced to "go native" and use the firearms dropped by your enemies, since finding ammunition for the guns you choose at the beginning of the mission is next to impossible. There are almost no opportunities for coming up with alternative strategies in battle, other than which of your three weapons to use. There's usually only one path to go down, and it's lined with enemies that spawn at pre-determined locations to set up gunfights that can only be won in a small handful of ways. The plot is so generic that it could have been bought off of the shelf at Wal-Mart, and the voice actors deliver their lines with all the urgency of the guy at a drive-thru reading back your order to you.Įach mission is hopelessly linear, and most suffer from weak level design to boot. Payback puts you in the role of a mercenary who you don't care about who's double-crossed by an organization that you don't care about during a mission that you don't care about. In every other aspect, from plot to gameplay to level design, Payback shoots itself in the foot repeatedly. The only thing it has in common with the first two SoF games is its name and the trademark gore. Hopefully it's also the last, because Payback is a mess.
#Soldier of fortune 1 ratings series#
Soldier of Fortune: Payback is the first game in the series to be developed by the Slovak Republic's Cauldron.
Half a decade after the release of Soldier of Fortune II: Double Helix, the ultra-violent military first-person shooter franchise is back.
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