Soldier
of Fortune review
Posted by Thomas
McGuire on April 26, 2000 - Page 2/6
More Graphics
Thankfully, unlike many games
in this area "gibs" aren't easy to cause, unless
done with an appropriately powerful weapon of course, e.g. a
rocket launcher or grenade. Blasting away at corpses
(accidentally or not) will not produce the usual cloud of
blood that would occur in Quake 3. This adds to the realism of
the game and instead of gibbing, bodies tend to writhe
disturbingly on the ground when riddled with bullets, or even
when standing up, dancing in a rather sickening way almost. It
should be noted that this somewhat real violence could be
removed with a parental lock in the game. Although not many
will want to use it except those that have young kids around.
There's always the "Tactical version" for those who
want no violence period.
One of the goriest effects I
saw in action was in the snow level, where much like in the
picture above I blew a guys leg off with the shotgun. The leg
proceeded to slide down the hill and left a long trail of
blood as it did so. Quite cool in a sick kind of way. Grossman
is sure going to love this game. I'd say it's pretty safe to
say that for the moment this is the most realistic depiction
of violence in a game.
After a while of this in your
face gore you begin (well, I did) to almost enjoy it a little.
After a few levels I found myself playing with the bad guys,
rather than say letting them drop to the ground dead I would
let off an entire clip into the standing corpse and watch it
convulse around as hit by a rain of bullets. Although perhaps
the gore is only really a talking matter due to the fact that
all the enemies are human, not some alien race.
Soldier of Fortune is a fairly
pretty game. A wide variety of colors are used in the game
(not the usual Quake 2 shades of brown) and some advanced
effects are in place such as dynamic lighting, hardware
T&L support, fog, etc.
Here's with Ravens John Scott
had to say in regard to video cards and Soldier of Fortune.
Soldier of Fortune is
completely transform bound, we do not touch the texture
limits or the fill rate of most modern cards, even on a top
end machine. For our next project, we will have some form of
level of detail in the models to reduce the number of
transforms to be done, increase texture size, and increase
the splendour of the effects, utilising many more particles.
Personally, I think video card manufacturers need to divert some of their attention from developing obscenely high fill rates to optimising the transform path of their drivers. This is clearly where Soldier of Fortune would benefit the most, and as poly counts increase, where many other games would too. Hardware T&L is the way to go.
The difference between the 3dfx reference driver and the WickedGL mini driver clearly indicate how much can be gained on all cards. The Geforce romps home as the clear winner, its hardware transforms give it a considerable lead on the nearest competitor. It is the card of the moment.
While the fill rate argument
here may be untrue (seeing as only SOF is taken into account),
the hardware T&L is true, check out Reverends benchmarking
with Software
(CPU) V hardware (T&L on Geforce) lighting and you'll
see.
The
levels are highly varied graphically – from New York subways
to Africa to frozen Siberia. It’s all here, think of a Bond
film. See various beautiful locations and kill the
inhabitants. Levels are also based on "real"
locations or at the very least are based upon reality, you
won't find anything here like space stations. Reality shows
throughout whenever possible, although given that it uses the
Quake 2 engine some things are quite as curved as you might
hope for. Still, locations look lovely, particularly the
Siberia levels.
Go
to next page !
|
