hen 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.
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.