I’m disgusted and I’m not talking about the gore. I feel disgusted I paid $5 to play this. I thought I had reached the bottom of the barrel for console FPS games last week when I reviewed the pathetic Blacksite: Area 51 but somehow this is worse. The gore and dismemberement is pretty good but the appeal wears off after about 5 minutes. How can I game this gory be so boring?
Definitely a budget title but still inexcusably lazy. Horrible voice acting, boring and convoluted story (they thought they were getting a sequel? Lol). The graphics are mid af with some horrible textures and everything 20 yards out pops in as you approach it. Tons of audio and frame rate glitches as well. The music is stock and all the menus just scream “budget title”

The shooting is mid. All the guns feel exactly the same and there’s no real kick or recoil to anything. You can shoot the magnum like a laser. The animation of the gun kicks but the reticle doesn’t move at all. On top of this the controls are unresponsive as sometimes you can’t reload cancel or have to hit the button to swap weapons 2-3 to get it to work. And of course this game is dull regenerating Health with no gimmick or strategy to it.

The game is just walk forward shooting guys and some brief escort missions. It’s all horrible but nothing is as bad as these boss fights. Good lord! Just regular dudes that are bosses so therefore they are bullet sponges because video game I guess?

Really glad this only lasted 3 hours because I couldn’t take a second more of it. Putrid stuff. I will never touch this one again.

2/10

Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2019/11/17/soldier-of-fortune-payback-pc-ps3-360-review/

If you’re one of the few who has ever wondered what ever happened to the Soldier of Fortune franchise, your question has been answered in the most disappointing way possible. It’s sad to see a series go from reasonably high profile for time it was released to bargain bin trash in 5 years. The previous entries I reviewed here and here.

Soldier of Fortune: Payback was developed by Cauldron LTD, which put out the mediocre and forgettable game Chaser, which I previously reviewed, as well as going on to make a bunch of Cabela hunting games and a couple of games for the History Channel, and was published by Activision Value, which was the Activision subsidiary that put out budget title games, which is already a great sign for Payback’s quality.

Payback’s story has very little to do with the previous installments other than the fact that you play as a gun for hire. John Mullins, both the character and real life person, are nowhere to be found in the game itself or the development of the game. Instead, Payback’s main character is freelance mercenary Thomas Mason, a name so forgettable that I had to copy and paste it just so I wouldn’t forget it in the 3 seconds I had to look up from the plot description to type it in.

When the game starts, we find Mason on a routine escort mission shortly before it goes tits up, as the other freelancer who you were on the mission with suddenly kills the person you were sent in to extract, and also turns on you. I also forgot this other characters name, as I did with every other character in the game.

None of the characters have much of a personality, all of them being incredibly cliched, and all of which you’ve seen done a million times in a million other things and done a million times better. The only other character you spend a decent amount of time with other than the one you play as is Cassandra Dekker, which is only slightly less generic than Thomas Mason. She briefs you between missions, updating you on your mission goals.

The story is completely forgettable. I don’t know if I would say that it rips off Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, but both were published by Activision, with Payback coming out a little over a week after Modern Warfare, so I have to assume that when Modern Warfare was being made, Payback was rushed out the door as a budget title to ape off Call of Duty, but for those who couldn’t afford it but still wanted to play something like it.

It’s so much like the modern military era of games that plagued the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 generaion of consoles that when I search for Soldier of Fortune: Payback, it just recommends those games to me when I search for Soldier of Fortune: Payback in Google. I know this is technically a spoiler, but the game ends on a terrible cliched plot twist and cliffhanger. I don’t know if someone behind the scenes was expecting this game to do well, but I do wish I had that optimism.

The series defining series returns, being able to blow limbs and heads off of the enemies. This feature is mildly amusing, especially in the sea of games that were starting to become lazily cinematic and linear at this time. I guess it would be enough to sell a budget game, but at this point in video games, it’s not really impressive. And it doesn’t really help that the last two games from 5 or more years ago did it better.

This was apparently enough to get the game censored in Australia and banned in Germany. Which is extra hilarious in retrospect, because Australia got an R18+ rating a few years later in 2013 and the game would have totally passed with that rating, and the fact that it’s not even that realistic to begin with, which begs the question of how it even got banned to begin with. But I doubt that Activision would be bothered to re-release it in Australia, but it can be bought on GOG.

However, the series second (unofficial) feature makes a return, with the enemies that are unfairly accurate. Apparently, this is a series staple. But unlike the first two games, I’m assuming that this has to do with the fact that this game cost nothing to make and had to be rushed out the door rather than a group of people allegedly (by me) hating their audience.

It also doesn’t help that the game features several boss fights where the boss is just a bullet sponge, and the boss just looks like one of the regular bad guys. When mixed with the unfair difficulty, these fights just come across as way to difficult. On top of that, the game spawns in enemies when your fighting said bosses. Prepare to trial and error your way through these sections for about 45 minutes to an hour per boss battle. Who knows, you might luck out and manage to get the boss stuck and kill them in a minute or two.

Also, like every FPS from this time period, it comes with regenerating health, so health packs and armor are no longer needed. I can’t really complain since I never really liked the health packs and armor from the last games. It helps streamline the game, making it quicker. Also, they finally made the G key throw grenades. It took a while for that to finally happen, but better late than never.

For some reason, enemies can grab you and turn you around to face them. The only thing that this did the first time this happened was confuse the fuck out of me when it happened. I guess it was to confused the player for a moment and add extra difficulty, but since the rest of the game is unfairly difficult, and this was just annoying, this really feels like an unnecessary gameplay feature.

Another good feature that this game has is the option to choose your load out of weapons before going into a mission. There’s a pretty decent selection guns, including several smaller firearms that can be dual wielded except for two. A couple of them come with an optional silencer, which are pretty useless. There a bunch of SMGs, two of which can be dual wielded, and they all come with optional scopes and silencers.

There are several assault rifles, and these guns come with the most optional add-ons, including various scopes, one having an optional silencer, another having a hand grip, and even one that has an attachable grenade launcher, which not only makes it the best and most effective addition, but it’s incredibly fun firing it into a group of people and watching their bodies, body parts, and blood fly around a room as the physics do their thing. There are also 4 shotguns, and one comes with an optional scope. I don’t know why a shotgun needs a scope, but OK.

On the more destructive side, there is a grenade launcher and rocket launcher. And just like the attachable grenade launcher for one of the assault rifles, running into a room and having random arms, legs, and torso shaped pieces strewn across the room is pretty fun.

Most of these guns feel exactly the same. They don’t have much recoil, but at least their as accurate as the enemy guns are. Finally, there is the selection of grenades, which include a hand grenade, a smoke grenade, and the Phosphorous Grenade, which is exclusive to the multiplayer. Since nobody is playing the multiplayer anymore, you’re probably never going to use this.

But for some bizarre unknown reason, a lot of these guns are exclusive to the console versions of Payback, and are only accessible on the PC through mods for the game. I don’t know why this is the case. I assume that the PC version was an afterthought and these guns had to be cut due to not being able to be finished in time. But thankfully they’re still in the game’s files.

Graphically, the game is OK look, but lacking in some areas. It has the browns you’d come to expect from “realistic” FPS games from that era. The game was actually developed on Cauldron’s in-house engine, much like Chaser, called the CloakNT engine.

Like the previous games, the game goes globe hopping, but this time all of the locations look a lot more samey because it the overuse of the brown filter. You have the deserts of Al Qa’im and Eshkashem, and the jungles of Mogaung, to not so interesting locations, like a brothel, a garage, and a night club. Aside from the mostly browns and muted greens, there are lots of samey looking building interiors. It really is a step down from the last two games.

Surprisingly, the game came with multiplayer, and on launch, it was actually mildly active. it came with the standard game modes that you would expect, such as Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, and Capture the Flag, but there were two other game modes, such as Demolition, which was a lot like Counter-Strike in that one team tries to plant a bomb, and the other team tries to prevent them from doing that, and Infiltration, in which one team has to get into the other team’s base to steal a briefcase and leave without the other team stopping them.

Soldier of Fortune: Payback is actually OK for a $5 – $10 bargain bin game, but I can’t recommend this to a whole lot of people, yet again, for it’s bullshit difficulty, now made worse by the fact it’s nowhere near as polished as the last two games. And the only ones who would be interested in this are fans of the Soldier of Fortune franchise and more obscure First Person Shooter fans who are morbidly curious.