Valiona
Since: Mar, 2011
04/05/2023 00:00:00
I remember playing it when it came out. It was fun at the time, but there wasn't much value to it apart from the ultraviolence.
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The D- Team
A few years ago I was working in a used bookshop, and I noticed a Solder of Fortune novel in the donation pile. I had a thumb through, finding it to be some caper about a macho ex-SAS super soldier tasked with taking down some evil Arab oligarch with "spidery hands" and a fondness for sodomy. It's not a book I chose to finish, but it reminded me of an old demo of a So F game back in 2000, where the cultural impact of Arnold Schwarzenegger action movies were still being felt. I was missing cheap, traditional shooters, so last week I thought I'd give it a go.
So F the videogame sold itself on being super violent. The graphics are obviously very dated, built on a creaky old Quake II engine, but I was still impressed by the indulgent animations that play out whenever you shoot someone through the throat or goolies. If you pepper someone with machinegun fire, their half-dead body stays upright, jiggling for as long as you stay shooting. You don't tend to see that level of detail anymore with modern ragdolls and unremarkable canned deaths.
But ultraviolence is not enough to carry a game by itself. And whilst So F might have reviewed well some 20 years ago, I was finding the gameplay a tad too repetitive and primitive for my modern sensibilities. Levels are awkwardly shaped, occasionally easy to get lost in, and force you to loop back around the houses if you fail a jump. There is a pointless and convoluted inventory management system for carrying guns, where you have to manually drop a gun to pick a new one up, except you can't select the gun you want to drop if it is completely out of ammo, forcing to stick with an empty weapon until you find enough ammo for it to equip and drop it. The enemies are even dumber, and either stand rooted to the spot or charge mindlessly around corners at you into your arc of fire. This is not something you would see 1998's Half Life grunts doing. There is also an utterly pointless noise meter, in a game with a complete lack of stealth elements. It feels like they wanted to include tacticool gizmos for the sake of it.
The story is the same old generic supervillainy right out of the 80s, with the bad guys stealing and transporting nukes all over the World. I was surprised to see Michael Clarke Duncan in the listed in the game's credits, he voices your ill fated black sidekick. Your protagonist (whom I named "Big Bob Mc Gruff", but the game instead called "Mullins"), is pretty unremarkable. He barely has dumb catchphrases and one liners for when he takes out the villains. For a cheesy action game, I was hoping it would at least go the whole hog.
I don't know how much value there is in reviewing old titles that have been largely lost to time, but for what its worth, So F is deservedly forgotten.