When word got out about Soldier of Fortune: Pay Back, we were a little skeptical. First, Raven Software, who developed the first two Soldier of Fortune games, wasn’t working on it. Second, it was being developed for Activision Value, the software imprint behind a variety of Barbie and paintball games. What started out as a value-priced title developed by Cauldron (Civil War: A Nation Divided) eventually got Activision’s full attention—including help from Infinity Ward, Raven and other company heavy hitters—resulting in the Soldier of Fortune: Pay Back that’s landing on store shelves in a few weeks. Now it’s a full-priced, full-featured game that’s being published by Activision proper. Once you get past its oddball pedigree, the game provides the expected dose of over-the-top action that you’d expect from the Soldier of Fortune name.
One of the standout features from previous Soldier of Fortune titles was its innovative GHOUL dismemberment system. GHOUL allowed players to systematically blast enemies apart limb from limb, in 26 specific body zones. Shoot someone in the head, and it was likely to pop off, with the expected geyser of blood. Arms, legs and torsos could suffer similar trauma in impressively gruesome displays.
Soldier of Fortune: Pay Back features that same style of gory combat, though the game approaches it from a new angle. Rather than keep the GHOUL system, Pay Back instead features fewer points of damage while adding Havoc-enabled ragdoll physics. So while you may not be able to destroy as may specific body parts, the damage you do cause will result in an impressive array of enemy deaths, with less of an emphasis on canned animations and more on-the-fly type sequences. So that grenade you throw may launch severed limbs into the air as its victim writhes on the ground. Yeah, it’s still gruesome.
![[IMG]](http://www.gameinformer.com/NR/rdonlyres/573A65C9-30AE-46B0-8DB6-5E239B9623AD/14086/SoF1.jpg)
Cauldron had to remove that level of gore in the multiplayer game, to ensure that 12 players could experience the smoothest possible experience. While you will occasionally see impromptu field amputations, the carnage is relatively free of crimson. From what we played, though, the action is so fast-paced that you probably won’t have enough time to sit around and miss it.
Pay Back supports a now-standard variety of gameplay types, including capture the flag, deathmatch, team deathmatch, elimination, team elimination and demolition. In our first match, we hopped into a game of capture the flag against the development staff in a village map. The level, set in “fake Iraq,” featured a few wide-open areas buffered by a number of single-roomed hovels. Almost everything in sight was a harsh shade of desert tan, with the exception of the piercing blue sky. It was, in other words, a great place to meet some strangers and shoot them.
If you’re used to playing arcade-style FPSs, you’re in for a bit of an adjustment. Pay Back skirts the boundaries between realism and fantasy effectively, so while your character can’t absorb as many bullets as a Master Chief or Nathan Hale, he does regenerate health rather quickly. That’s good, since you won’t find any health packs or armor upgrades spinning around on the ground. If someone sees you first in Pay Back and they’re a good shot, you can expect to see a respawn counter. Fortunately, you can sprint short distances by pressing down on the left analog stick. In keeping with the game’s minimalist interface, you won’t see a stamina indicator or anything to let you know when you’re going to run out of steam. You usually have enough endurance to run from one area of cover to another.
If you do get caught off-guard out in the open, your opponent is going to want to make sure you’re really dead before moving on. A cool gameplay feature in Pay Back is the concept of being mortally wounded. While characters in this state will certainly die—in about seven seconds—that’s more than enough time for them to pull out their sidearm and get a chance to even the score. We got to see it in action first-hand when we turned a corner and ran into a pair of enemies. While they fired first, we had enough time to take out the flag-carrier and his defender before we bled out. And after being on the receiving end of this kind of surprise, you better believe that we ended every mini battle by pouring a few extra rounds into our opponents’ head—just to be certain.
Because we jumped into a game in progress, we didn’t have an opportunity to modify our weapons loadout. Before the second match started, we had enough time to outfit ourselves as we saw fit. Players can select four different weapons at loadout—primary and secondary firearms, a sidearm and grenades. Most of the game’s more than 40 weapons can be modified in a variety of different ways. For our primary weapon, we chose an XAR-4 assault rifle and equipped it with a sight, silencer and grenade launcher. Players can choose from flashbang, frag and smoke grenades.
Weapons are rated by a handful of attributes, including accuracy, rate of fire and reload time. Cauldron wanted to make the weapons realistic, but balanced. The team found that if the selection was completely realistic, players would only pick a couple of standout weapons, leaving others by the wayside. To counter that, things have been tweaked a bit. For instance, a particular rifle may be quite powerful, but it might have more recoil or longer reload times than its counterparts to keep things fair.
Our second match was a free-for-all deathmatch set in the tankers level. While it was still as arid and tan as the village, this level featured a maze of shipping containers that provided plenty of places to hide in and snipe from. The pacing of the game was great, and the fact that even the briefest of encounters typically ended with a fatality kept the stakes high. The game doesn’t feature a lot of bells and whistles that are so popular now, offering instead a core of solid gameplay. There aren’t any dedicated cover systems, for example—if someone is shooting at you, hide behind a building or crouch behind a wall. We’ll take a solid but basic multiplayer experience any day.
After getting our multiplayer fix, we tried our hand with the single-player mode. In Pay Back, you play as freelance adventurer Thomas Mason. The mission we played took place in the Middle East (fake Iraq, to be specific), and started off with a bang. After hitting the dusty streets in a densely packed neighborhood, insurgents hopped fences, popped out of doors and opened fire on us from balconies. Fortunately, we had a little help in the beginning in the form of a couple of friendlies. They don’t stick around too long, though. It’s not called Soldiers of Fortune, after all. Pay Back is about being a one-man army, and it definitely delivers on this front.
![[IMG]](http://www.gameinformer.com/NR/rdonlyres/573A65C9-30AE-46B0-8DB6-5E239B9623AD/14087/SoF2.jpg)
Targeting was spot on, and we could pick off our enemies with ease. Sniping was especially solid, with the targeting reticule staying accurately in place between zooming modes. Specifically, once we spotted an enemy on the horizon and targeted him, he remained targeted after zooming in with our sniper rifle—with little if any further aiming necessary. The level of human destruction was impressive, with the aforementioned carnage and animations. Enemies slumped over atop concrete barriers, dead, while others clutched their necks in agony after being ventilated by a well-placed sniper round. Did we mention that it’s an M-rated game? If you’re squeamish or just don’t think that degree of violence is absolutely necessary, you can turn off the gore.
After running through the streets, dodging snipers and destroying radar jammers, we ran into a boss battle. The boss battles aren’t what they might sound like—you’re not going to be facing enemies with jetpacks and flamethrowers for arms. Instead, you’ll just be going head-to-head against a particularly strong and aggressive enemy that’s tougher to kill. After chasing him around for a while, guns blazing, and eventually pinning him against a wall, we learned that this guy wasn’t impervious to melee attacks. There’s a reason Mason has that knife.
We also got to check out a jungle level and an area set in a network of subterranean caves. While it’s not the best-looking game of 2007, Pay Back isn’t ugly by any means. The environments are varied and interesting, and even though they aren’t as interactive in other games—forget about destroying that town’s walls—Pay Back’s single-player follows the same gameplay philosophy as its multiplayer game. Sometimes simpler is better.
We played the Xbox 360 version of the game, which is also coming out on the PlayStation 3 and PC. We spotted a few achievements, which are divided about equally throughout the single and multiplayer game modes. You can get the Quicker than Diet and Exercise achievement for destroying every part of an enemy in a single shot (thank goodness for the shotgun!). You can grab one for performing 100 knife kills across your Xbox Live career, too.
After our time with the game, we’re pleasantly surprised with how it’s coming along. It definitely faces stiff competition this holiday season, but if you’re looking for an FPS with strong multiplayer elements and an old-school feel, you may want to check it out. And while it may have started out as a value-priced game, it definitely doesn’t look, feel or play like a bargain-bin game.
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