This game sucks. I got through its prelude missions, which included a horribly nauseating vehicle chase and painfully stiff stealth section, then into its first main mission before giving up on it. Getting sniped through several feet of stone and dying to a grenade I never had a chance of seeing in thick underbrush (for the second time, no less) was the final straw. I probably should have stopped when I noticed the lengthy, dreadful cutscenes were not skippable.

The gore effects were pretty nice and basically the only thing I remembered of this series from when I first played it years ago. The shotgun felt good with its high firepower and fast reload and made the game a lot more fun. Definitely not fun enough to stick around, but blowing off arms and heads? It was something, at least. How easily impressed we once were.

I don't recommend this and I won't be coming back to it.

Neither better nor worse than the original game, but definitely different.

It went for more "realistic" gameplay, but this shift made the game rather frustrating at certain parts. Poor weapon handling coupled with hitscan enemies that never miss is a bit of a discouraging combo.
Luckily there is a mod called "Weapons Mod v5", which overhauls the gunplay and makes the game far more enjoyable.

The level design was quite strange, because most of the time it's pretty straight forward, but some of the later levels can test your patience, since it's very unclear where you should be going.

Despite the focus on realism, it still retains what made the first game so memorable, so there's still plenty of gory shootouts to be had here. Great fun when it all clicks together.

Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2020/03/09/soldier-of-fortune-ii-double-helix-review-pc-xbox/

Due to the success of Soldier of Fortune, Raven Software soon started working on a sequel, and a mere 2 years later, Soldier of Fortune II: Double Helix was released on May 20th, 2002. It was later ported to the original Xbox by Gratioutous Games. Considering how I feel about the PC version, I don’t know how SoFII would have done in the limitations of the original Xbox.

John Mullins returns, both the fictionalized character from the first game, and the real life John Mullins who was the main inspiration for said character who was brought on to consult and help have the game have a certain amount of accuracy. Considering that the second game is a lot more down to Earth and realistic, I’d say that a tad more of his advice and experience was used for this game than the last one.

The story starts in Prague in a prologue that takes place during the early years in John’s career. He is sent to Prague to get Dr. Piotr Ivanovich, one of the Soviet Union’s top biopreparat scientists who wants to defect in fear of his life and is willing to give up information in exchange for protection from the Soviet Union. After leaving the hotel they met in and escaping in an exciting car chase, the manage to get out of the country. 10 years later, and Mullins is now working for “The Shop” much like the last game.

With the information from Dr. Ivanovich, who now also works with “The Shop”, you are sent on a mission to prevent the usage of bio-chemical weapons that Dr. Ivanovich had been working on before he defected. The rest of the story is written like a pulpy Tom Clancy novel, filled with all of the clichés and plot points that you’d expect. You probably won’t remember a whole lot of it after you’ve finished, but is entertaining in the same way a so good it’s bad ’90s action film is as you’re watching it.

This time around the voice acting is not as enjoyably cheesy as the first games, with everyone being incredibly wooden and forgettable. However, a lot of the same actors have returned, which is nice.

The game runs of “ID Tech 3”, which is the Quake 3 engine, and the whole thing looks a bit like a mixed bag. Levels range from OK to decent at times. It doesn’t quite have something as appealing to look at like the giant castle which had a secret laboratory or the Tokyo skyline, but it still looks good for the most part. A lot of the levels have some pretty weather effect, such as rain, and levels do take place all over the world, so there is some great variety. Yet again Raven Software has taken an ID Software engine and made something alright for the most part. Except for one thing, the character models

Character models look a bit weird, but especially with their faces. When the characters are talking, their faces go into weird shapes that look like they’re going to tear apart at the seam. Half-Life did something similar back in 1998, fours years before SoF II. Maybe it’s because it looked simpler, but after the HD pack was released with Half-Life: Blue Shift the year before SoF II, which had better facial animation, SoF II just ends up looking weird.

Much like the first game, SoF II does come with the GHOUL damage system, but now upgraded to GHOUL 2.0, in which you can shoot the heads, arms, and legs off of enemies. Like the first game, I did come across a glitch in which after a bad guy got his head blown to pieces, but the guy was still running around trying to kill me. It was an unintentional piece of black humor.

The game also tries to flesh out the stealth sections by including mechanics where you can unlock doors with a lock-pick or cut tripwires, but it boils down to just pressing and holding E for a random amount of time that the game just decides on however it feels at that point in the game.

Some of the things that I complained about the first game have been improved. You can pick up health kits and it automatically replenishes your health just like the armor. Instead of an inventory, you can select certain items you are holding with the number keys. I’d still rather have specific keys for certain items that you;re holding, like G for grenades and N for the night vision. Overall, it’s better, which is nice. Speaking of items, you have Binoculars, Night Vision, and Thermal Vision.

SoF II comes with a stealth mechanic, although it’s borderline pointless. If you alert someone, an alarm goes off, and it stays on the entire section of the game that it’s used in, which means the enemies are constantly on alert for you. Since it’s incredibly easy to trip the alarm, the stealth is rendered completely pointless. There was only one level that it worked, and that in the prologue where you have to sneak Ivanovich out of the country.

Probably the biggest new feature is the Random Mission Generator, which generates a randomly generated map. Obvious, I know. The mode does come with a good variety of options to choose on, including the type of mission (escape, infiltration, assassination, and demolition), time of day, type of terrain (hills, snow, jungle, or desert), difficulty, and the ability to choose what items you want, or get whatever the mode decides to give you. The randomness is based on a random seed generator, so if you just so happened to like a level, you can save it for later. The levels end up looking a little bland, but that’s just because they’re randomly included.

SoF II comes with your standard arsenal for a First Person Shooter. You have your melee weapon with the Combat Knight. They can be thrown at enemies if you’re trying to stealth your way through a level, or are running low on ammo for your other weapons. They can be picked back up so you don’t have to run out of them. I’ve never really had low ammo, but then again I was playing on the lower difficulties because of how insanely difficult this game is. There are two handguns, two SMGs, three assault rifles, a grenade launcher, a rocket launcher, and 2 machine guns, one of which can also be found mounted in some levels.

Rounding out the arsenal are the grenades, which include the flashbang, smoke grenade, an incendiary grenade, and your regular grenades. A lot of the weapons come with add-ons that include things like laser sights and bayonets. It’s a nice, varied, and quite extensive selection of weapons. Sure, there are tons of inaccuracies that would send a gun nut up the wall, such as the way the grenade launcher reloads, but Soldier of Fortune was never really about being realistic, it was only about putting up the appearance of being realistic. The last game had a cyber ninja for fucks sake.

But by far, bot the most interesting and the most annoying weapon in the entire game is the “XM 29 SABR OICN”, which is supposed to be a long range weapon with an airburst grenade launcher with integrated night vision. Trying to switch between it being a grande launcher and automatic rifle is frustrating and is now worth using since you can just use the M4A1 with the night vision in your inventory.

Now comes the games major problems. Some of the earlier levels in the Single Player take place in Columbia, and they’re borderline impossible. The level is filled with foliage, and it’s difficult to see a lot of the enemies when they’re standing, and impossible when they’re crouching. The enemies are incredibly accurate with their aim, even if you’re trying to hide behind the same foliage that they are. The only way to hide is behind something solid, like a tree or a wall.

The enemies also frequently throw grenades, and the don’t seem to run out of them. This is also the only level with tripwires, so you have to deal with those taking off big chunks of your health, or even killing you if you’re low on health if you accidentally activate them. You could either cut them, or just jump over them. Just memorizing where they are and jumping over them is much quicker.

If the level wasn’t hard enough, there is also a helicopter that follows you around the level too, firing on you in scripted evens, and the only way to destroy it is at the end of one point during this section of the game. The entire section is having to deal with getting killed from every direction. The was one of the levels in the demo, and I wouldn’t have blamed people for this level putting them off from buying this game completely. If you can get passed this level without breaking your keyboard in frustration, then you deserve a medal. And some therapy.

The second half of the Columbia section has you meeting up with a team of marines, which brings up a whole new slew of problems. If you get too far away from them, either too far ahead or behind them, one of them yells “Execute him!”, and you die instantly. Sometimes, you don’t even hear a gunshot. I guess the in-universe reason is that the terrorists aren’t alerted to their and your presence, but it’s still obnoxious. The friendly characters aren’t very smart, but if you sit behind something and let them take out the enemies, it makes the level easier, but it also makes the level incredibly tedious.

There is another mission where you have to fight a helicopter, much like the first game, but only with the difficult cranked up to 11. You have to shoot the panels on the sides of the winds, exposing the engine in side. The helicopter can do tons of damage, so you’ll be constantly dying and quick loading. The team behind this game must have thought it was amazing, or had run out of time or budget, because the last level is also a helicopter fight, yet even more balls to the wall difficult.

Finally, there is the airport level. Years before Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2’s infamous airport scene, there was Soldier of Fortune 2. On this level, terrorists have taken over an airport in Switzerland, and because of this, there are civilians running around the level. If one of the civilians dies, game over, and you have to either start the level over again, or start from your last save.

That doesn’t sound so bad until you find out that when your enemies try and kill you, their AI is so bad that they will accidentally shoot through the civilians to try and kill you, resulting a game over. And the civilian AI is the worst of the bunch, as they keep getting in the way of the terrorists.

Couldn’t Raven Software come up with a reason to not have the civilians running around like chickens with their heads cut off? The game could have had the civilians locked in a room at the end of the level with the terrorists protecting the room, threatening to kill them, they could be hiding somewhere around the level, out of the way of both you and the enemies.

A Gold Edition of this game came out, and along with the typical bug fixes, it includes new content for the multiplayer, which is always a nice bonus.

This is going to be a lukewarm recommendation from me. While the fact that it’s a pretty good game, it’s insanely unfair difficulty makes it off-putting in a lot of ways. They didn’t even change the AI when patching the game. If there was one thing that I would change with this game, it would be the bullshit AI.