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daylights out of anybody with a gun and baddie inclinations! SOF II is now on sale around the globe Including right here in Australia. Somebody must have been bribed a whole heap to allow us Australians to get hold of this title at the same time as everybody else. However! To be completely honest, I was completely uninspired by the first Soldier OF Fortune title. Although the game was good it just had too many of the elements Iv'e come to dread in FPS shooters. Drab texturing, all to farmiliar surroundings and nothing new and fresh to add that spark of interest thats going to keep me playing well into the night!
So, with caution prevailing I hopped onto FILEPLANET and waited in line for 40 minutes before I was able to download the demo from the NET. In Australia we CAN get cable connections as well as a badly implememted DSL phone line connection. BUT! They cost you 5 arms and 60 legs each month! And so for the run of the mill people living in PERTH AUSTRALIA, these newer technologies are simply too exspensive. So On my dialup modem it took me just over 8 hours to download the 137meg demo through Fileplanet. Connect to the net right before you go to bed and set it downloading. When you wake up you MIGHT be done, if your ISP decides you aren't to be disconnected for some dubious reason.
FIRST IMPRESSIONS! A game must rely on capturing you right from the start. Now I know this is only a demo but to be honest, I was bored and disappointed within 5 minutes. Clearly the DEMO is a resource hog, as my system battled to keep the gameplay going without stuttering. With my textures set just on "HIGH" the game didn't do too badly, mostly shifting between 30 - 50 FPS with infrequent spikes of ZERO FPS. To switch on VERY HIGH texture levels you must go into your ADVANCED video options and bump the texture quality setting up to "VERY HIGH". Then you can go back into the normal video settings and flick the TEXTURE QUALITY setting up to VERY HIGH as well. But the difference between HIGH and VERY HIGH I found to be minimal and probably not worth the performance hit I took. For upon setting the VERY HIGH texture quality my performance dropped to craphouse. I'd get a short period of 30 - 40 FPS and then a 3 second lockup before anything happened again. Simply horrible!
My question is WHY is my performance terrible? The so called VERY HIGH texturing setting provides nothing like the textures we saw in Jedi Knight II. Not as good as those we saw in Return To Castle Wolfenstien and battling to be as good as those in MOHAA. The texturing in SOF II looks really really tired, worn and lacklustre. Take a look at the indoor screenshots I took for you, the crane and the ships control room. DRAB DRAB DRAB! However not ALL the textures were like this. Take a look at the various carved stone textures. Beautiful! Not as good as the JEDI TEMPLE but very good nonetheless! Also the texture featuring the fallen leaves on the stonework (shot 13) looked a treat also. But simply not enough! Too many dull textures made this demo more of a chore to complete than a pleasure.
My Favorite! GEOMETRIC COMPLEXITY. How many polygons did RAVEN SOFTWARE use to create the world of SOF II? NOT MANY is all I can say. Truely, many things such as venting pipes and tree tunks were simply SQUARES! Boulders were amazingly square looking as were staiway rails for that matter. And so the story went for every scene I saw in the demo, some evidence of polygon culling to save on performance perhaps, but really cost the scenery big time. On the ship I could have SWORN I was playing RENEGADE or QUAKE II. Square this, pointy that, all with questionable performance. I just couldn't see where the processing power of my PC was going. JEDI KNIGHT looks ten times better than SOF II and runs ten times better! The baddies didn't look all that bad. at least they weren't blockheads or anything, they show typical Quake III engine characteristics of having adequate polygon counts and lively clothing. But nonetheless I kept feeling like I was running around in KINGPIN with it's Quake II style of washed out colouring.
You now might note screenshot number 4. I took this in exasperation at the way Raven had done the ground plants in the game. You will notice that they are good old 2D sprites that always turn their flat side towards you as you move around them. I thought we left those behind with DUKE NUKEM 3D! It looks very wierd when you look down at the gound and turn slightly, and you see all the plants adjusting themselves to face you. It just gives the game a shabby feel. In Medal OF Honour: Allied Assault, the vegetation at least has an X like build when you look down on it instead of the OLD 2D plane that is used in SOFII. MOH:AA even used sheets of plant textures to create hedges and the like which actually worked quite well, especially when the whole hedge swayed lightly in the breeze. Even Serious Sam: The Second Encounter had at least the X formation for plants. THEY got around the logistics of that by simply vegetating to a ceretain distance all around the player. Noticable at times but forgivable considering the nice scenery it provided. But note that not ALL plants are done this way. There are some nice broadleaf plants that stay put when you move, as do the tops of trees. I really have to say, that for the performance you get, the visual splendour just isn't there. As I said, Other Q3 titles look FAR better than that and still offer you good performance. But SOF II does not look good, and runs terribly on VERY HIGH settings.
One of the missions in the demo is in Colombia. You hunt around in a series of canyons all heavily vegetated. Well thats fine but I've really had enough of this canyon thing. What we need now is levels where you FEEL like you're in the middle of a HUGE forest, with large tracts of forest speading out in every direction from where you are. Too many times we've been stuck in in some gully or valley with the cliffs or steep slopes on either side preventing us from going further. It's as tired as the old FIND THE KEY way of making games and we're sick of it. Return To Castle Wolfenstien, No One Lives Forever and Medal Of Honour: Allied Assualt have all given us wide open spaces to run around in and have really set the standard as far as FP Shooters go. Now I know that I've only looked at the DEMO of SOF II and I really can't base the whole game on that. But NOTHING in the demo makes me want to go out and get the full version off the shelf for $100 Australian. In fact I see all too much to warn me well away from spending my hard earned cash on the title.
Turn your attention now to screenshot number 15. It shows a lovely vegetated valley extending off into the distance. But what a pity about those absolutely BARE ridgetops over on the other side of the valley! To boot it is painfully obvious that the ridgetops are kinda square looking. To be honest, most ridgetops in games are quite geometrically square. But the texturing used on them hides that fact. And so the ridgetop almost looks normal. Not the case here. One texture is used and not a very good one at that! All too obvious is the fact that you are running around in a square blocky world where the ridgetops are all SO poisonous that nothing can grow there. IF the texture used for the relief was more detailed in this instance, then we'd be more hard pressed to notice the angular nature of the ridgetop, or may not notice anything amiss at all. Of course the texturing needed would be one which looks best from some distance away, instead of having heaps of detail up close. It also just looks wrong to have the valley so lushly vegetated and then have the ridge slopes and tops absolutely bare. YUCK!!!!
How about the weapons you get to brandish in front of those extremely misguided floolish enemies? Glad you asked. The weapons, while nothing new, are actually quite good. SOF II is not set in a make believe world. It is set in a real world situation, with real world places and equipment. And so you have real weapons. The gun models themselves are good but are nothing special. You need something that really LOOKS like it's going to dish out some damage when you pull the trigger. Put some detail into the model that adds to your overall experience in using it. Again, We've had normal old GUNS to death. Time to add that little bit extra. I'm not talking about adding a laser as a secondary fire mode. MOHAA used recreations of actual period firearms, and made them look and sound great. Things like having the clip flip out of the breach with a metallic pinnng sound when the clip empties it's last shell, and including small details like makers marks, wood grained stocks, sights, barrels that LOOK round, all make weapons that much more enjoyable to use. I don't think the weapons in SOF II have progressed much past SOF I. They'd have been good 2 or 3 years ago, but not now. Sound in SOF II is also adequate. Often it's one of those things that you really don't take any notice of unless it's really really good, or stinks to hell. The GHOUL 2 sound system is one of RAVEN's modifications to the Quake III engine. As you progress through forest you hear the sounds of birds twittering and other forest animals voicing protest at your, or somebody's passing and those effects are really done quite well. Heck you're in a forest, those are the kinds of sounds you'd expect to hear and they're not so cheesy as to make you roll your eye's every time you hear them. The weapon sounds could do with a little more OOMPH though. Mostly they sound a little tinny and a bit weak. Put a bit of bass in there to give the sound a bit of puch! Make it really SOUND like there's POWER coming out of your gun instead of a few hastily shot peas. The enemies in SOF II really made me laugh at times. In the Colombian jungle the thing is to pop up from the bushes and send a few rounds your way, then pop back down into the bushes out of sight. Fair enough. But when YOU try creeping up on somebody through the bushes, they seem to know where you are every time. The amount of noise you make is a big factor on SOF II. You have a noise meter on your hud that tells you how much noise you're making at any one time. You might be creeping up on somebody in the prone position and hit a noisy patch, then you get slaughtered. Or so the theory goes. I found however, that no matter how quiet I was I still got shot at by an enemy off in the distance. Whats with that man?? You can either crouch as normal and move along, or lie prone and creep slowly along. Crouching and moving I found to still be noisy. Only lying prone makes you truly quiet. But I must confess I found the bad guys to be absolute morons. You'd pop out from behind a corner and see a guy on a ledge to your left looking right at you! The guy would be rock still for a little bit and then decide that it's time to pull his trigger. I saw no evasive manouvers at all, apart from the popping in and out of the bushes. Up close it just gets funnier with the bad guys seeming to not know what to do. More often than not I had guys kneeling down right in front of me and getting all ready to fire while I blasted them with my twin machine guns. Sometimes you seemed to be able to wound them and they'd just do a poor attempt at limping around in some weird circular fashion. I guess what I'm telling you is that the AI in SOF II isn't good at all. In fact, it HAS to be some of the WORST I've seen. Still, it IS only the DEMO.
The demo installed with absolutely ZERO probems. Just a NEXT click fest as usual and all is taken care of for you. The game ran first pop without even a hint of trouble. I still remember days when I bought a new game from the store, or downloaded a demo, but had to spend an hour or two on the net to find fixes for the game because of some small MISTAKE the developers had made. OR even wait a week for a patch to come out fixing some issue the game had with certain hardware or hardware configurations. A NIGHTMARE! Thankfully those days seem to be passing us by for now. But I stress again, the thing with WINDOWS XP is that you MUST have XP approved hardware with the corresponding XP drivers. If you don't have these then expect problems. For instance, I have a UMAX ASTRA 2000P scanner that simply WILL NOT work under Windows XP. BUT works a dream under Windows 98. I found the menu system to be a little confusing. The Iconic way of denoting the options and control settings is a good idea but I find the icons not to be of much help when looking for where I want to go. Also, how about telling me that I can't choose the VERY HIGH texture setting because I need to change a setting in the advaced options first. If you choose the VERY HIGH setting for textures and APPLY, you'll find it back on HIGH when you come back after the engine does the changes. No message, nothing! Grrrrrr! Also the save and load game icons that look like CD's had me stumped there for a while. Lucky that a little message box pops up telling me what the hell that button does anyhow. Most of the tweakable options in the OPTIONS section do actually have a description of what the setting does if you change it. This pops up when you put your mouse cursor over the option. In some cases it warns you that your game performance might suffer if you bump someting up so it's good for those who aren't gaming veterans. Not the simplest menu layout under the sun but you'll work it out after a while. Heck I did! In conclusionn I must say that I was disappointed with the SOF II: Double Helix demo. Level designs were not thoughtful at all. And I really couldn't see why my PC was struggling so much to produce a quality of scenery that the Quake II engine could have done just as well. With titles such as MOH:AA and RTCW out there for direct comparison, SOF:DH does NOT stack up well. I will not buy SOF:DH. Please try the demo for yourself before buying it and make up your own mind. After all, what I find annoying, you may truly find wonderful. |
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Graphics 6.5 / 10
Level Design 5.0 / 10
Sound 8.0 / 10
Enemies 6.5 / 10
Detail 4.0 / 10
Gameplay 6.0 / 10
Addictiveness 4.0 / 10