SOFP combines guns, action, and gore whilst not forgeting to create an interesting enough game for them to support.
+ Some of the most compelling combat ever implented in a game.
+ Good weapon selection, plus being able to select your own equipment.
+ Impressive graphics.
+ Both Singleplayer and Multiplayer, while not perfect, are decent.
+ Terrible voice acting that is so bad its hilarious.
+ So.....much.....Blood....and....Gore....
- The game is short and can be finished in one day (not kidding, serious).
- Some nasty technical issues on the 360, including unable to start the game.
- High level of realisim and difficulty can make or break the experience.
- Did I mention how short it is?
------------------------------------------------
I'm not going to pretend to know what kind of game gamespot was playing, but I assure you that it was obviously not Soldier of Fourtune Payback. There was a day where man said nothing could beat or equal to Call of Duty. Well...that man was right about nothing beating Call of Duty 3, but he was way off about nothing equalling to it. Imagine a game that does just that! Yeah, surprisingly enough, that game may be Solider of Fortune Payback. To put it bluntly, I don't intend to try to understand any of the reviews around me; I personally found Soldier of Fortune Payback to be one of the best war games you can get on the 360, let alone one of the best multiplayer games I've seen in a while. Iconically, Soldier of Fortune Payback is the kind of game that Call of Duty should've been in the first place.
Being as a war-based fps, Soldier of Fourtune doesn't have any real story to follow. Instead, it has a special charm. Loads of guts and blood to be exact. The developers know violence and they know it well. If you're going to wip out a shotgun, expect the arms and legs to fly off of your foes in some pretty goofy manners. If you're going to wip out your rocket launcher, expect their entire bodies to do the same with a topping of red spaghetti flying out their limb sockets. The ammount of graphical gore is unparralelled in Solider of Fortune Payback and although it can be turned on or off in the main menu, it does its part in enhancing the gameplay and is a big part of the action. Is there any resisting dismembering your foe to a totally limbless heap of blood and yet still watch him trying to retreive his fumbled weapon of destruction whilst blood drooling down his neck from you jabbing a knife into his throat? (I'm not lying when I say all that can actually happen in the game). As you may wisely decipher, this is not the type of game for kiddies.
Playing as a farily annoymous US marine named Thomas Mason, the Singleplayer hardly even touches or builds any kind of immersing story or anything like that; its all lone, single-man action (although you occasionally get to fight alongside some allied marines). The Singleplayer will challange you to some standard miltary demolition objectives like "blow the thing up" and "kill the guy" style of goals and tossing some Iraq rejected mobsters along the way. Quite frankly, the game likes to present up to 9 enemies at once in a firefight in an attempt to get you into the high level of violence in the game. It does this well and in many cases where this may be fusterating, I actually found it quite compelling and I enjoyed the experience of violence. Hearing your radio speaking "Enemy renforements are coming!" usually translates into "Yay! More blood and gore to watch!". And that ain't the half of it; explosions, destructably enviorments, and even mountable gun turrets all are intact here.
Well, that's at least fun while it lasts since Soldier of Fourtune Payback is so short that it can be finished in one day, if not, sooner. Forutunetly, the game's acheivements are all the while worth earning, and a multiplayer componnent, featuring a handful of maps and several modes like (+team) deathmatch and capture the flag, bump up the game to be worth playing a second time around.
If you own something similar like Call of Duty, you won't really have any problems grasping the game's controls. You still have the 'Y' button to select weapons, the left thumbstick to move and sprint rapidly as descripted in COD, and a trusty knife to (seriously) plunge into the windpipes of your enemies and watch their throats flow into red waterfalls. Most of weapons are usual remakes of things that kinda died awhile ago; the popular pistol, the popular machine gun, the popular shotgun, and the ultimatly so popular rocket launcher. Keeping with the standard tradition of war games, none of the weapons have any sort of silly alternetive fire, but their firepower more than makes up for the lack of originality they have. You still only can still carry 2 "big" weapons and only one type of pistol. That will take a bit of time til you finally decide your weaponry during the equipment selection screen at the start of each mission, much like the Rainbow Six series.
Despite the quite linear level design (that is especially annoying since most of them are blocked off by invisible clipping walls), the game's levels are pretty fun to play and not as fusterating as most of these reviews would have you believe; you just can't run in and kill everything basically sums it up. Markers on your hud always point to where your next objective is and you almost always have a pretty decent idea how to get there. Fourtunetly for you, these levels that take place in "too hostile to be minutely realistic" hotspots like Iraq cities and deserts usually don't disapoint graphically. They all look great, and though the graphics are nothing to Crysis, most of the game looks absoulutly positive. As a result though, the framerate starts to struggle in some spots whenever action gets really heated, and its followed by some minor issues like long loading times and ragdolls getting stuck in the ground in common order. Furthermore, the A.I. is a bit of a mess. Soldiers usually charge without cover, and although its quite tension-building to see a AK47-banishing terriorist come charging towards you, they usually end up getting stuck behind a car or a trashcan. But then, its all worth seeing their face surcumb to the faithful blast of your SMG.
Soldier of Fourtune Payback's audio basically copies and pastes above. All of the weapons sound tough and raw, and you'll always get the urge to fire one. Much of the ambient audio (ie. the crows and the wind) are so brilliantly recorded that you occsionally have to pause the game and mute the TV in order to determine whether the very sound effects your listening to are from the game or from the outside your window. Stylistically, the music on the other hand is quite corny rock music and is just better turned off. Your character will also pull off a few one liners with a mildly gentle voice, and although he's got something in comedy, many of his qoutes are just drab and skew pretty flat. Not cool. But rest assured that battle cries of the dying and booms of the wartime explosions will most likely drown out these two annoyances.
The biggest false contrivince for this very underrated game needs to be fairly corrected. Specifically, its not particularly fusterating. While I can't really count how many times I've died in the game, it tries to get you on track of what the developers considered to be a "good stragegy". Running through things and killing everybody won't carve the turkey, at least not messily. So the fact that bullets going to your chest slows you down, something that Call of Duty failed to notice, adds much realisim and noggin-using to the rather basic shoot-up-the-iqaq-rejects gameplay which makes most of the game a very fresh breath of air and better than the sum of its parts. In understandable english, I'd wouldn't reccommend you to believe many of the reviews that assert the game as unplayably annoying. Soldier of Fortune is more than just a Call of Duty clone. Stimulating the fact even further, Soldier of Fourtune Payback combines guns, rockets, and insane loads of gore whilst not forgeting to create an interesting enough game for them to support.