Soldier of Fortune 1 and 2 were awesome. Too bad Payback was a piece of trash.
Naturally I was excited to hear they were making another but disappointed to hear it would be a budget game. I got it when it came out anyway, it can't be that bad I told myself. I start up the game, crank up the settings, and am pleasantly surprised to see I can customize my weapons (SICK). Ok I thought, this won't be too bad. First mission begins, almost no narrative, I can live with that, it's an FPS after-all.
Major problems, yes the game has gore, yes it looks decent, graphics and gore can't make up for fundamentally broken gameplay. It just isn't fun, you move through a level shooting enemies and watching one bullet take off an arm, kind of funny at first but can't stop the impending boredom that follows. It's just all so uninspired, you move through a level and in fact there are some decent set pieces but mostly you just walk around spraying bullets into enemies who exploded into body parts. The customization of your weapons barely affects anything, guns feel weak despite ripping apart everything they touch, and possibly the biggest deal breaker are the bugs. About halfway through the game I reached a level that tested my patience to the extreme. Everytime I played it would either a. crash after so much progress had been made or b. magically make some enemies invincible. In one case I hopped down from a ledge and saw some enemies ahead, I opened up and was surprised to see my bullets hitting nothing, the enemies hit me just fine but I could not hit them, I tried moving forward and I got stuck in the geometry of the level. I repeated this segment over and over and got similar results though often I could pass it with some difficulty. The AI rarely even seems to move besides scripted actions, they mostly just stand where they are shooting you until one of you is dead. It's sad to see where SoF has gone.
-Boring
-Mindless
-Broken
-Uninspired
-Stupid
Get it if its practically free and you're bored.