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Wew this video was a long time in the making and ended up being A LOT more work than anticipated. I hope you all enjoyed it! If you want to watch me struggle through Soldier of Fortune: Payback (this game apparently sucks) then give a follow to my twitch! www.twitch.tv/jarek4gamingdragon
I think the reason why it got high scores because the whole force stealth section and escort quests were probably cause it was the norm back in the day so people just accepted it.
@@klaasklapsigaar1081 she was a waitress barely making rent when we met. She’s an attorney now and still sweet as ever and still gaming. I’m very lucky.
I was VERY big into SOF2 for a few years when it came out. For a few years, I had a clan, rented a couple of servers, and played with the same group of players on a regular basis. Man, those were some good days. The thing is, the genius of SOF2 was ALL in multiplayer, not single player. Long after Ravensoft stopped updating and supporting the game, the mod community stepped up and kept it alive. The best mod for the game was called RoCMod. Additionally, since Ravensoft released the SDK, people could create their own maps and make them available through SOF2 fan sites for other people to download and load onto their server. I had a ton of custom maps in my server rotation. Many of the custom maps were better than the stock ones. We all really wanted SOF3 to get made but it never happened and that's when everyone moved on to other games like Call of Duty 1 and 2 and Battlefield 1942. TLDR: SOF2 was great and known for its multiplayer and the community that supported it through mods and custom maps. That's why it received such good reviews. Single player was lackluster and forgettable.
I loved the SP and still replay the game multiple times a year But the MP was next-level and there's a reason it had a very active community for nearly 20 years Unfortunately MP has kinda died off in the last couple years, but the SP still keeps me occupied to this day
Yeah multiplayer is so good that some people are still playing it. Not mentioning it is like not mention Daikatana (air controls) or KingPin (bagman mode) or Quake2's multiplayer and instead focusing solely on SP campaign - you'd be missing the majority of the point. Still Jarek was fair when it comes to criticizing the half baked stealth and pretentious "plztakemeseriously"-story of the campaig . I'm currently playing it and boy the report on hitting an enemy is still the best I've seen and oh so therapeutic! :)
6:05 I love how this idle animation is for the guy to gently pet his USAS-12 like it's a cat. If there's anything that captures the outlook on "Soldier of Fortune Magazine"-types of the 2000s, influenced by those in the 70s-90s, it's that animation...
The enemy AI is literally less advanced than Doom. The enemies in Doom at least only reacted to the sound of the player or seeing them... this AI is unable to make that distinction and runs towards you when there's an arbitrary trigger regardless of whether they could know where you are.
A lot of these older games feel better when you've played them many times before. You know where to go and what to do, it's just a fun nostalgic run and you become blind to many of the problems. I was super frustrated with many of the games I now love as a kid, I spent sometimes literal hours stuck in one map or mission because the games didn't tell you what to do or where to go, you had to figure it out. Or buy an expensive magazine or ask friends because there were no internet walkthroughs. Nowadays many of those games feel awesome, but only because I already know what I'm supposed to be doing. Kinda reminds me how people get mad at streamers who are playing a game for the first time because they don't do everything perfectly the first time and can't find every single secret.
As someone who played the series when they came out, I can't agree more with you, because I had similar thoughts as well. SoF 1 was a fun run-n-gun shooter that felt like an action movie. SoF 2 however felt like it went on this strange transition from run-n-gun to a more tactical shooter, where you needed to take cover and burst fire etc. Unfortunately I also feel like it was not handled nearly as well as it could have, and to me it did not feel better than the first game. I do like how in older games there isn't this "hand-holding" of constantly highlighting where you need to go etc. but I agree that some segments in this game did not make the next objective very obvious, and you spend ages like a dickhead trying to find a door or switch, haha. Finally the story is a lot more... mature? Serious? It no longer felt like you were an action movie star, but part of some convoluted Tom Clancy story. I dunno if anyone agrees with this, but I really feel like 9/11 changed how you could portray these kind of stories in media, but again I am comparing this to the first game, that was pre-9/11. The only thing that is better in SoF 2 is the gore, lol. I wanna say though, great review, and you got a sub from me!
According to the game's Wikipedia article, it was indeed rushed since Raven was also developing Jedi Knight II at the same time and clearly the latter took priority.
Hard agree with the stealth mechanics, there's no consistency with how enemies can detect you. On some missions, all they need is your HUD sound to go slightly into the yellow, others will be completely oblivious to anything under walking in front of them and some go full on Sixth Sense and detect you from a mile away without doing anything.
>Realistic >I can literally run around jumping in circles behind the Prague guards without them noticing >other times even tho I'm completely prone in the jungle a rebel 100m away will know exactly where I am and will hit every shot Shut up Boomer, the stealth mechanic isn't bad because it doesn't hold your hand or anything, it just can't make up it's mind whether the enemies are deaf and blind or physic
I remember playing through this on the hardest difficulty. Your review brought back some memories. I still have a somewhat positive recollection for this game mostly from the satisfaction of using the auto shotgun. By the way a good representation of the OICW (if I remember correctly) is in the original Ghost Recon game. It was a long time ago but I remember shooting the proximity fuse grenades and thinking it was pretty cool.
The one he used is apparently the vanilla version or part of the mod. The gold editions OICW became one of my favorite weapons in the second half of the game. And the scope was like a sniper overlay vs what’s shown here.
I love using cheat code to mess up with cutscenes, especially the level you went to HQ, I keep throwing knives to everyone, also before you head to the meeting room you can kill them outside the door. And also I like to knock out enemies and collect all their weapons just to watch them running around in a panic, omg so much fun and memories of this game I have. Just too bad at the time I don't have friends to play multiplayer with me.
I remember being stuck on the plane. But the rest of it is about using shot guns to shoot faces off. Or ther white phosphorus grenades to light fools on fire. That was the most brutal shooter I had ever gotten my hands on at that point, and it took FOR EVER for another game to come out where body parts fly around from a grenade explosion. It wasn't until the wolfenstein games did I feel the same way smashing a dude into pink mist with a shotgun.
I remember watching my brother play mp on this game when I was little. He was playing cs 1.6 before so I thought it was an upgraded version. Ah the memories
I had an original Xbox demo disk with this and I played it so much that I could speedrun the demo in less than 8 minutes. But I bought the full game and I didn't like it as much. Weird EDIT: the forest maps ruined it for me.
I remember trying to run this on my Pentium II and voodoo 2 graphics card back in the day. I finished the first level at 10 - 15 fps, man that was hard lol
Man I remember playing the multiplayer on my girlfriend’s dad’s computer when she was at school and I was just hanging out being a bum. Loved the multiplayer but never played the campaign. Great video!
ppls still playing sof2 multiplayer mode, but not really active nowdays. This game was pretty popular and famous in europe actually. There were many clans then and hundreds of peoples played this game all the day. The years gone and i i haven't found any better shooter game since then.
I think this is a very unbiased and logical review of the game. Your points are accurate and sharp. You pointed out a lot of frustrations I had when I played it... only I didn't know what the problems, actually, were at the time I played it because I was so young. I think there was a focus on the gore technology, by the developers, that may have taken away from other, very important, core gameplay elements. As far as I know there was no other game, at the time, with the same level of gore detail. The amount of polygons that had to be accounted for when you blew a hole through the enemy's head was of a computational power that isn't represented or even considered in games to this day. You only, ever, get decals with a little tessellation... at best. I think this game had a lot of flaws but I also think it was so early that it's reasonable to consider it as a showcase of potential. A potential in polygon rendering technology that has yet to be fulfilled in the gaming industry.
This is a Quake 3 engine game. It does nothing new in terms of rendering. Also the gore system in this game gets ruined by the horrible death animations.
I remember playing a bit payback in 2008, and that was a baaaaaad game man, really bad. Played only the first level or so, and never ever touched it again!!!
I remember the UPS server (united pot smokers) when grenades blew up, instead of a burn mark appearing where ever the n6ade blew up, it would be a pot leaf. Everybody had their soundboards to talk shit with
This OICW in the video isn’t part of the gold edition (I played it vanilla) it had better recoil control, and it was a sniper scope overlay but it's still a cool weapon if you play said version :D
This is fair, I agree the story push on the game messed up the flow of the games original play style, I loved it for the mod maps. I made some myself. Cool breakdown man.
The OICW's only real usefulness is against the helicopter miniboss / final boss. You can beat them without it, but with the OICW it's almost instant. They will dodge explosives from any other explosive weapon except the OICW and killing the rotors with the 20mm grenades is a lot easier than trying to hit them with bullets
The one in the gold edition became really useful in the 2nd half of the game where it highlights where enemies are behind smoke and mirrors and the recoil control while leaning made it a very satisfying long range gun.
Played it for 7 years in clans etc in mp when we did a clan match it was full fun and a lot of skilled players. Now servers are full with bots. It was a cool game.
This is my favorite game of all time and it had nothing to do with the single player. If you never had the opportunity to play this game online then you never got to truly experience it. I played the single player once but dropped thousands (yes, thousands) of hours into this game from 2002-2009. Really wish Payback wouldn't have killed this series and I'd buy a new PC in a heartbeat if they did a remaster. Certainly not trying to dismiss your opinion, but you said it yourself in this video; Soldier of Fortune isn't about the story, it's about the gunplay
This was one of the first online games I played and it was tons of fun. However, servers would often require you to download a map before joining and at around 2-3 KB per second download it was a very painful wait.
I have been experienced this old FPS about 16 years ago and the protagonist was John Mullins who had been former SF soldiers in the US army. But the next version "Soldier of fortune payback" was so different from this previous version and protagonist was changed another guy. This FPS sucks compared with the other newest FPS that showing high sales records in the online game platform. But this old FPS was benchmarked by so many other FPS at the time and many gamers had played online multiplay each other. Yes, it was memories for just old gamers but it was so great FPS in those days.
I loved the Columbia map for some reason. I must have remembered it for being so hard and beating it when I was 12 felt like an accomplishment. I'll have to fire this up again and see if it was as good as I remember
@@micha4431I proned in parts of the level and cut the tripwires that kill you instantly. Thank god there is custom settings and an optional tutorial mission where it tells you what to expect throughout the whole game which is why it was less bs of a level
I tried this game for the first time recently. I don't like how confusing and cryptic it is. Thanks for confirming my grievances. I'll stick to the 1st one only.
This video was pretty funny to watch. I've been speedrunning this game because of its sentimental value to me. Have you noticed that you can softlock the game after skipping a level-ending cutscene? If your fps is not capped to 30 when you are skipping a cutscene, there is a slight chance that will happen. Also, 30 fps makes you crawl faster, and your jumps don't require any space to reach their max height. There is an insane amount of horribly stupid and weird things in this game that you didn't even get around to, luckily :D. There are so many things I could still say; the story, the weapons, the voice acting, some levels... oh god... Let's just leave it at that :D. You're in for a treat with sof3 though.
@@Jarekthegamingdragon Something like that. The game is basically a memefest. Everything about it is so horrible that it's actually funny. But yeah, I'll watch when you post, eager to see what you'll say.
One thing I found out is that pressing a key bound "give all" during a level load will crash the game (which is annoying since I do it without thinking a lot)
Oh man. I've gotten that "you're just a dumb kid who didn't play old games" comment before. I'm 34. I absolutely have played old games. There's a difference between difficulty/ challenge and just bad frustrating design.
Totally agreed. I jave played most of the popular 90s fps games like Doom, Heretic, Hexen, Quake 1&2, Half Life, Duke3D, Blood, Shadow Warrior etc. Also those games had challenging, but still fair moments for the most parts. SoF1 felt similar. Whereas SoF2 just frustrated me to hell. Not even playing on easy with no recoil helped as it wasn't even the challenge that was an issue. More like the slow, tedious cutscenes, stealth sections and the memorize the pattern to win issues that made me give up.
I've just finished the game and I totally agree with your review, I put directly the custom settings with infinite quicksave at the beginning since the first soldier of fortune had the same problem. The shooting feels good but there are soooo many flaws (had to look at walkthrough too and I consider myself a FPS vet... but when the game just adds a new gameplay feature that you never used before and that you must find out of nowhere, it's just stupid (the elevator in the fucking labs where you have to backtrack randomly, the lift in hong-kong, the train in the fucking lab again)... for me it's a 6/10 at most (this fucking 10 min prone section .... wtf were they thinking ?)
I was dissapointed when i played it back in the day, but then i tried it again a few years ago and made a custom difficult setting with infinite saves, no recoil and no weapon limit. It was a lot more fun
The "Carrying capacity" option is really stupid. The "hardest" option has a ridiculous 36 round ammo pool limit for .45 ACP which ALL the early game weapons are chambered in except the shotgun. The "easiest" option is still only 144 rounds. It'd be nice if I could control weapon limit vs ammo limit separately, because to get a reasonable amount of ammo I can carry 20 guns at once but to realistically restrict myself to only a few guns I'm barely allowed to carry any ammo at all
One thing I don't like is low TTD, mostly when it comes to easy difficulties. I think that's what this game had, right? Especially if your targets are hidden in high foliage or a thick, snowy haze. At least it had plenty of cool guns and a cool gore mode. Game-wise, the OICW needed a bit of work. They should have just kept it to being a Quake-style counter terror game, and if it comes back, make it like a modern, brutally gory Call of Duty, but you get to earn money.
God the World at War Vereran AI was apocalyptic. Even at the time my friends and I were like u know this is kinda bullshit like it’s not a challenge to just be constantly dodging grenades or blowing up. If they kept the same exact gamemode but cut the frequency of grenades by 2/3 it would’ve been a much better experience. You’d think the average German infantryman was just covered in grenades duct taped to every open area on his uniform
The ragdolls in this game always bothered me. You kill a guy and he ragdolls to the ground and then for some reason his body pops in to a star fish pose. This happens every time you kill an enemy and it looks awkward and shitty. I know that's not a huge problem but it bothers me a lot.
well, it's not ragdoll basically. They did it because the bodies got some animations when you hit/shoot them on the ground. There's a lot of death animations, but all of them moves to that weird ,,star fish pose", because after you can still hit them.
As someone who only got into SoF games in 2022, i absolutely loved SoF1 and absolutely hated SoF2. The MP in 2 might be really good, but as a singleplayer guy, I have little desire to go back to it. I gave up at around the cargo ship mission
The best missions in the game happen after the Cargo Ship mission. You should use cheats to skip it and give the rest a try. The Hospital, Airport and final battle in The Shop are the peak of the game IMO
i remember playing this. but i don't remember finishing it because of the obnoxious objectives. i didn't have proper access to internet back in the day and there were no walkthroughs to speak of (or i was a dumb kid who didn't know they existed).
I know I'm 4 months late but as soon as you went through the forced stealth segment, I thought of one of my all-time favorites, and how they did stealth right; Medal of Honor: Allied Assault. There was no instant-fail, you could turn off the alarms, hell the AI had to turn on the alarm to alert the base, in which enemies are just aware and ready, rather than immediately knowing exactly where you are. Lots of things I loved about the game and it's two expansions. I even liked Breakthrough even though it was incredibly difficult, especially in the Monte Cassino missions.
I know this is an old comment but I'll post this in case anyone else see this and wants to know Add *+raven 1* to the _Target_ line of the game shortcut When you open the game, click _Single Player_ and then click the Raven logo icon above _Select Difficulty Level_ and pick a mission (If you don't load a level with the Raven icon, cheats won't work) Once in a level, hit tilde (the *`* key) Type *give all* in the console and press enter Those guns should now be in your inventory. They won't have visible icons, but you can press the weapon category key an extra couple times to select them
@@nattyfatty413thank you so much for doing the lords work! I tried going to a game faq article that sounds like it worked but the cheats are read only and give all is an unknown command, at least in the gold edition.
People like to think this but SOF2 came out in 2002. At this point we already had shooters like Half-Life, Halo, and even the original SOF that didn't have these problems. The old shooters with these problems get lost in time and forgotten but for some reason SOF2 didn't. It's a bit confusing to me.
Jarek please make a vid on "infiltration" mod for ut99. It's a tactical game that features hands down the best weapons handling system when it comes to cqb collision-detection of weapon barrels. It forces you to actually and realistically switch to smg's and handguns in tight spaces. I think some of the people that made went on to dev ground branch (wich is a meh game I could give less than a F about)
Wew this video was a long time in the making and ended up being A LOT more work than anticipated. I hope you all enjoyed it! If you want to watch me struggle through Soldier of Fortune: Payback (this game apparently sucks) then give a follow to my twitch! www.twitch.tv/jarek4gamingdragon
I think the reason why it got high scores because the whole force stealth section and escort quests were probably cause it was the norm back in the day so people just accepted it.
Awesome video... Aren't there any mods to fix all the stuff you mentioned in the beginning?
@@Web720no it was for the gore system which was better than any game body damage wise until RDR2/TLOU 2
I met my now wife playing this game 18 years ago.
Lucky
That's awesome! Congrats!
Damn good for you
Lucky bastard, but good for you :)
@@klaasklapsigaar1081 she was a waitress barely making rent when we met. She’s an attorney now and still sweet as ever and still gaming. I’m very lucky.
I was VERY big into SOF2 for a few years when it came out. For a few years, I had a clan, rented a couple of servers, and played with the same group of players on a regular basis. Man, those were some good days. The thing is, the genius of SOF2 was ALL in multiplayer, not single player. Long after Ravensoft stopped updating and supporting the game, the mod community stepped up and kept it alive. The best mod for the game was called RoCMod. Additionally, since Ravensoft released the SDK, people could create their own maps and make them available through SOF2 fan sites for other people to download and load onto their server. I had a ton of custom maps in my server rotation. Many of the custom maps were better than the stock ones. We all really wanted SOF3 to get made but it never happened and that's when everyone moved on to other games like Call of Duty 1 and 2 and Battlefield 1942.
TLDR: SOF2 was great and known for its multiplayer and the community that supported it through mods and custom maps. That's why it received such good reviews. Single player was lackluster and forgettable.
I loved the SP and still replay the game multiple times a year
But the MP was next-level and there's a reason it had a very active community for nearly 20 years
Unfortunately MP has kinda died off in the last couple years, but the SP still keeps me occupied to this day
Yeah multiplayer is so good that some people are still playing it. Not mentioning it is like not mention Daikatana (air controls) or KingPin (bagman mode) or Quake2's multiplayer and instead focusing solely on SP campaign - you'd be missing the majority of the point. Still Jarek was fair when it comes to criticizing the half baked stealth and pretentious "plztakemeseriously"-story of the campaig . I'm currently playing it and boy the report on hitting an enemy is still the best I've seen and oh so therapeutic! :)
6:05
I love how this idle animation is for the guy to gently pet his USAS-12 like it's a cat. If there's anything that captures the outlook on "Soldier of Fortune Magazine"-types of the 2000s, influenced by those in the 70s-90s, it's that animation...
Old games doesn't really tell you what to do, but when you can't see the whatever objects that you need to progress it's just game breaking
Rip grammar
That is all part of the fun
MP. This game flourished because of its Multiplayer.
Sadly, yes.
I loved the multiplayer.
Team -][FU][-| Forever Unchanged or just FU!
This is correct.
@@slipvskorn -3DK- myself.
The enemy AI is literally less advanced than Doom. The enemies in Doom at least only reacted to the sound of the player or seeing them... this AI is unable to make that distinction and runs towards you when there's an arbitrary trigger regardless of whether they could know where you are.
Sad part is that ai still exist.cant really stealth in the new tomb raiders because enemies will all just go to your location
It's like fighting a group of aimbots.
A lot of these older games feel better when you've played them many times before. You know where to go and what to do, it's just a fun nostalgic run and you become blind to many of the problems.
I was super frustrated with many of the games I now love as a kid, I spent sometimes literal hours stuck in one map or mission because the games didn't tell you what to do or where to go, you had to figure it out. Or buy an expensive magazine or ask friends because there were no internet walkthroughs. Nowadays many of those games feel awesome, but only because I already know what I'm supposed to be doing.
Kinda reminds me how people get mad at streamers who are playing a game for the first time because they don't do everything perfectly the first time and can't find every single secret.
This game was so fun on multiplayer back in the day, had custom maps like Highwire being played on a lot of servers.
As someone who played the series when they came out, I can't agree more with you, because I had similar thoughts as well. SoF 1 was a fun run-n-gun shooter that felt like an action movie. SoF 2 however felt like it went on this strange transition from run-n-gun to a more tactical shooter, where you needed to take cover and burst fire etc. Unfortunately I also feel like it was not handled nearly as well as it could have, and to me it did not feel better than the first game.
I do like how in older games there isn't this "hand-holding" of constantly highlighting where you need to go etc. but I agree that some segments in this game did not make the next objective very obvious, and you spend ages like a dickhead trying to find a door or switch, haha.
Finally the story is a lot more... mature? Serious? It no longer felt like you were an action movie star, but part of some convoluted Tom Clancy story. I dunno if anyone agrees with this, but I really feel like 9/11 changed how you could portray these kind of stories in media, but again I am comparing this to the first game, that was pre-9/11. The only thing that is better in SoF 2 is the gore, lol. I wanna say though, great review, and you got a sub from me!
According to the game's Wikipedia article, it was indeed rushed since Raven was also developing Jedi Knight II at the same time and clearly the latter took priority.
Hard agree with the stealth mechanics, there's no consistency with how enemies can detect you. On some missions, all they need is your HUD sound to go slightly into the yellow, others will be completely oblivious to anything under walking in front of them and some go full on Sixth Sense and detect you from a mile away without doing anything.
>Realistic
>I can literally run around jumping in circles behind the Prague guards without them noticing
>other times even tho I'm completely prone in the jungle a rebel 100m away will know exactly where I am and will hit every shot
Shut up Boomer, the stealth mechanic isn't bad because it doesn't hold your hand or anything, it just can't make up it's mind whether the enemies are deaf and blind or physic
Must be all that devil's lettuce they're growing up there
played 2 before 1, and liked 1 way more.
the level design and gunplay felt more fun, although the gore in 2 is just great
I remember playing through this on the hardest difficulty. Your review brought back some memories. I still have a somewhat positive recollection for this game mostly from the satisfaction of using the auto shotgun. By the way a good representation of the OICW (if I remember correctly) is in the original Ghost Recon game. It was a long time ago but I remember shooting the proximity fuse grenades and thinking it was pretty cool.
The one he used is apparently the vanilla version or part of the mod. The gold editions OICW became one of my favorite weapons in the second half of the game. And the scope was like a sniper overlay vs what’s shown here.
I love using cheat code to mess up with cutscenes, especially the level you went to HQ, I keep throwing knives to everyone, also before you head to the meeting room you can kill them outside the door. And also I like to knock out enemies and collect all their weapons just to watch them running around in a panic, omg so much fun and memories of this game I have. Just too bad at the time I don't have friends to play multiplayer with me.
I always did this too. Killing NPCs before a cutscene and watching Mullins talking to their corpses. LOL
The multiplayer part of SOF II was legendary. I played it daily for 6-7 years.
Same
@@edstar83 same
I remember being stuck on the plane. But the rest of it is about using shot guns to shoot faces off. Or ther white phosphorus grenades to light fools on fire. That was the most brutal shooter I had ever gotten my hands on at that point, and it took FOR EVER for another game to come out where body parts fly around from a grenade explosion. It wasn't until the wolfenstein games did I feel the same way smashing a dude into pink mist with a shotgun.
I remember watching my brother play mp on this game when I was little. He was playing cs 1.6 before so I thought it was an upgraded version. Ah the memories
I remember playing this a long time ago.
And having fun. Until the forest maps. God those were bad, made me drop the game.
clementine clementine
Posting your opinion twice in a row doesn't make it a popular opinion.
Same
The ray tracing here is phenomenal!
I had an original Xbox demo disk with this and I played it so much that I could speedrun the demo in less than 8 minutes. But I bought the full game and I didn't like it as much. Weird
EDIT: the forest maps ruined it for me.
Yeah I remember getting the demo CD from PC magazine years ago and I really loved the original game
I loved This game soo much 😃and have completed it many tines as a kid
I remember trying to run this on my Pentium II and voodoo 2 graphics card back in the day. I finished the first level at 10 - 15 fps, man that was hard lol
I first played it on an HP a305w with 2.7GHz Celery and integrated graphics. The Prague level with choppy low FPS is burned into my mind
Man I remember playing the multiplayer on my girlfriend’s dad’s computer when she was at school and I was just hanging out being a bum. Loved the multiplayer but never played the campaign. Great video!
That intro brings back some powerful memories
Literally the main memory of SOF for me is shooting limbs off of corpses. Def a guns & gore game like Doom
same, that was the most unique thing about it and it kind of still is
ppls still playing sof2 multiplayer mode, but not really active nowdays. This game was pretty popular and famous in europe actually. There were many clans then and hundreds of peoples played this game all the day. The years gone and i i haven't found any better shooter game since then.
did you play on clanbase? osp servers?
@@SNIPEDBYAMI i played Sof2 DH2 multiplayers severs like ctf mode ( oldboys and youngboys server or S4A battleout ) some infratation servers like 1fx)
Guys com its still alive
I loved the first to death, and 2, infuriated me in the best ways possible
Me to... Those fucking jungle levels
I think this is a very unbiased and logical review of the game. Your points are accurate and sharp. You pointed out a lot of frustrations I had when I played it... only I didn't know what the problems, actually, were at the time I played it because I was so young.
I think there was a focus on the gore technology, by the developers, that may have taken away from other, very important, core gameplay elements.
As far as I know there was no other game, at the time, with the same level of gore detail. The amount of polygons that had to be accounted for when you blew a hole through the enemy's head was of a computational power that isn't represented or even considered in games to this day. You only, ever, get decals with a little tessellation... at best.
I think this game had a lot of flaws but I also think it was so early that it's reasonable to consider it as a showcase of potential. A potential in polygon rendering technology that has yet to be fulfilled in the gaming industry.
This is a Quake 3 engine game. It does nothing new in terms of rendering. Also the gore system in this game gets ruined by the horrible death animations.
@@MrYukawarandom madness would say otherwise but it is still flawed animation wise
So when will you play payback
No
I remember playing a bit payback in 2008, and that was a baaaaaad game man, really bad. Played only the first level or so, and never ever touched it again!!!
I remember the UPS server (united pot smokers) when grenades blew up, instead of a burn mark appearing where ever the n6ade blew up, it would be a pot leaf. Everybody had their soundboards to talk shit with
I remember that too
hey a game with a realistic depiction of the OICW. nice.
This OICW in the video isn’t part of the gold edition (I played it vanilla) it had better recoil control, and it was a sniper scope overlay but it's still a cool weapon if you play said version :D
This is fair, I agree the story push on the game messed up the flow of the games original play style, I loved it for the mod maps. I made some myself. Cool breakdown man.
The OICW's only real usefulness is against the helicopter miniboss / final boss. You can beat them without it, but with the OICW it's almost instant. They will dodge explosives from any other explosive weapon except the OICW and killing the rotors with the 20mm grenades is a lot easier than trying to hit them with bullets
The one in the gold edition became really useful in the 2nd half of the game where it highlights where enemies are behind smoke and mirrors and the recoil control while leaning made it a very satisfying long range gun.
Played it for 7 years in clans etc in mp when we did a clan match it was full fun and a lot of skilled players. Now servers are full with bots. It was a cool game.
This was my first game when I bought my first pc! 2007! I replayed it yesterday since I didn't know English back then.
This is my favorite game of all time and it had nothing to do with the single player. If you never had the opportunity to play this game online then you never got to truly experience it. I played the single player once but dropped thousands (yes, thousands) of hours into this game from 2002-2009.
Really wish Payback wouldn't have killed this series and I'd buy a new PC in a heartbeat if they did a remaster.
Certainly not trying to dismiss your opinion, but you said it yourself in this video; Soldier of Fortune isn't about the story, it's about the gunplay
This was one of the first online games I played and it was tons of fun. However, servers would often require you to download a map before joining and at around 2-3 KB per second download it was a very painful wait.
I have been experienced this old FPS about 16 years ago and the protagonist was John Mullins who had been former SF soldiers in the US army. But the next version "Soldier of fortune payback" was so different from this previous version and protagonist was changed another guy. This FPS sucks compared with the other newest FPS that showing high sales records in the online game platform. But this old FPS was benchmarked by so many other FPS at the time and many gamers had played online multiplay each other. Yes, it was memories for just old gamers but it was so great FPS in those days.
I loved the Columbia map for some reason. I must have remembered it for being so hard and beating it when I was 12 felt like an accomplishment. I'll have to fire this up again and see if it was as good as I remember
Dont ever do this. Jungle level is bullshit at Best!
@@micha4431I proned in parts of the level and cut the tripwires that kill you instantly. Thank god there is custom settings and an optional tutorial mission where it tells you what to expect throughout the whole game which is why it was less bs of a level
Cracking game apart from the frustration of the jungle level which just felt down right mean.
Forreal doe
The intro though 😍
Where the fuck do I go syndrome is something I suffer also in real life.
Played them on lans, i miss those days.
I tried this game for the first time recently. I don't like how confusing and cryptic it is. Thanks for confirming my grievances. I'll stick to the 1st one only.
This video was pretty funny to watch. I've been speedrunning this game because of its sentimental value to me. Have you noticed that you can softlock the game after skipping a level-ending cutscene? If your fps is not capped to 30 when you are skipping a cutscene, there is a slight chance that will happen. Also, 30 fps makes you crawl faster, and your jumps don't require any space to reach their max height. There is an insane amount of horribly stupid and weird things in this game that you didn't even get around to, luckily :D. There are so many things I could still say; the story, the weapons, the voice acting, some levels... oh god... Let's just leave it at that :D. You're in for a treat with sof3 though.
Is the treat that payback is bad? I'm editing the video on it now and it's pretty bad. lol
@@Jarekthegamingdragon Something like that. The game is basically a memefest. Everything about it is so horrible that it's actually funny. But yeah, I'll watch when you post, eager to see what you'll say.
One thing I found out is that pressing a key bound "give all" during a level load will crash the game (which is annoying since I do it without thinking a lot)
@@nattyfatty413 haha nice. i rarely used cheats so I kinda missed that one :D
Does anyone remember Winback? God that game was cancer..
Oh man. I've gotten that "you're just a dumb kid who didn't play old games" comment before. I'm 34. I absolutely have played old games. There's a difference between difficulty/ challenge and just bad frustrating design.
Totally agreed. I jave played most of the popular 90s fps games like Doom, Heretic, Hexen, Quake 1&2, Half Life, Duke3D, Blood, Shadow Warrior etc. Also those games had challenging, but still fair moments for the most parts. SoF1 felt similar.
Whereas SoF2 just frustrated me to hell. Not even playing on easy with no recoil helped as it wasn't even the challenge that was an issue. More like the slow, tedious cutscenes, stealth sections and the memorize the pattern to win issues that made me give up.
You are correct, that level in which we have to hide ourself, and sheak everywhere was a great f*king mess, i remember that till now.😂
many hours and good memories in multiplayer. greetings to my old friends from clan xS and cky..
The Conde.
Even in N64 GoldenEye you where able to destroy the alarm if it was triggered...
I still have this game installed today. This game was all about multiplayer.
>inb4 Valentin The Mad shows up.
I remember when he said the strengths outweigh the games weaknesses at least for him.
completely agree with everything. love the game, but there are glaring flaws
Just started playing this a few days ago.
The multiplayer is where this game shined...
I've completed the first game and just by looking at the gameplay, I can tell you that he's better than the second one. And the third... JESUS.
This game was censored so heavily here in Germany, they actually replaced the human enemies with cyborgs :D
seriously?
@King Kevlar haha damn
I've just finished the game and I totally agree with your review, I put directly the custom settings with infinite quicksave at the beginning since the first soldier of fortune had the same problem. The shooting feels good but there are soooo many flaws (had to look at walkthrough too and I consider myself a FPS vet... but when the game just adds a new gameplay feature that you never used before and that you must find out of nowhere, it's just stupid (the elevator in the fucking labs where you have to backtrack randomly, the lift in hong-kong, the train in the fucking lab again)... for me it's a 6/10 at most (this fucking 10 min prone section .... wtf were they thinking ?)
It’s a shame you had to use cheat codes to make proning faster
I was dissapointed when i played it back in the day, but then i tried it again a few years ago and made a custom difficult setting with infinite saves, no recoil and no weapon limit. It was a lot more fun
The "Carrying capacity" option is really stupid. The "hardest" option has a ridiculous 36 round ammo pool limit for .45 ACP which ALL the early game weapons are chambered in except the shotgun. The "easiest" option is still only 144 rounds. It'd be nice if I could control weapon limit vs ammo limit separately, because to get a reasonable amount of ammo I can carry 20 guns at once but to realistically restrict myself to only a few guns I'm barely allowed to carry any ammo at all
Him complaining about that one gun is the reason it never went into production it was overcomplicated
One thing I don't like is low TTD, mostly when it comes to easy difficulties. I think that's what this game had, right? Especially if your targets are hidden in high foliage or a thick, snowy haze. At least it had plenty of cool guns and a cool gore mode. Game-wise, the OICW needed a bit of work. They should have just kept it to being a Quake-style counter terror game, and if it comes back, make it like a modern, brutally gory Call of Duty, but you get to earn money.
God the World at War Vereran AI was apocalyptic. Even at the time my friends and I were like u know this is kinda bullshit like it’s not a challenge to just be constantly dodging grenades or blowing up. If they kept the same exact gamemode but cut the frequency of grenades by 2/3 it would’ve been a much better experience. You’d think the average German infantryman was just covered in grenades duct taped to every open area on his uniform
Jarek: They're like the WaW ai
Me: oh god no, please no.
I loved this game on xbox as a lad
One of the best game i ever played
Well those are old school shooters
The ragdolls in this game always bothered me.
You kill a guy and he ragdolls to the ground and then for some reason his body pops in to a star fish pose.
This happens every time you kill an enemy and it looks awkward and shitty.
I know that's not a huge problem but it bothers me a lot.
Where a huge focus of the game is the gore, I can see your point
true that, but then - ragdoll rarely works well in videogames (with prime example like UT2k3/2k4 and Painkiller).
@@SpecShadow they should probably have just stuck with death animations
well, it's not ragdoll basically. They did it because the bodies got some animations when you hit/shoot them on the ground. There's a lot of death animations, but all of them moves to that weird ,,star fish pose", because after you can still hit them.
Man. I forgot this game had all these quirks. I remember the 1st one but not the second one so much
Would love to see this franchise return. But Activision owns it. So yeah, better off sticking with the classic games.
If they remake this, they might end up butcher it worse than the original creators intended 😶
**throws gold**
As someone who only got into SoF games in 2022, i absolutely loved SoF1 and absolutely hated SoF2. The MP in 2 might be really good, but as a singleplayer guy, I have little desire to go back to it. I gave up at around the cargo ship mission
The best missions in the game happen after the Cargo Ship mission. You should use cheats to skip it and give the rest a try. The Hospital, Airport and final battle in The Shop are the peak of the game IMO
Based on the info provided in the video, it's unfortunate that the game was virtually unplayable (unenjoyable) without mods.
i remember playing this. but i don't remember finishing it because of the obnoxious objectives. i didn't have proper access to internet back in the day and there were no walkthroughs to speak of (or i was a dumb kid who didn't know they existed).
Soldier of Fortune 2 Double Helix is buggy as hell, but still fun when it runs well in the non escort/stealth optional missions
Back in the day, this was my ish! The 1st one was better tho
This games online play was so incredible
The weapon inaccuracy sounds like the hit/miss mechanic from Morrowind
Idk fam, I figured this game out as an 8 year old.
same
you must be so clever. Games can have faults and poor mechanics, this game had that.
+hugh mungus Ikr? I honestly believe he's just simply bad at the game.
I had a lot of fun just playing the scenario generator as kid
Same. The RMG was slept on. I still like playing it to this day
Good job! We still play multiplayer! :)
Hooligans SOF2 I have a osp nd server
Wow people still playing SOF2 online? awesome! I used to play it everyday back in the day.
Oh my god.... the columbia mission.... gives me such bad flashbacks...
the multiplayer was so much fun back in the day
I know I'm 4 months late but as soon as you went through the forced stealth segment, I thought of one of my all-time favorites, and how they did stealth right; Medal of Honor: Allied Assault. There was no instant-fail, you could turn off the alarms, hell the AI had to turn on the alarm to alert the base, in which enemies are just aware and ready, rather than immediately knowing exactly where you are. Lots of things I loved about the game and it's two expansions. I even liked Breakthrough even though it was incredibly difficult, especially in the Monte Cassino missions.
in this game even more so than the first one, load swap is your friend
Oh where the fuck do I go syndrome...
You know what game did the OICW really well? 007 Nightfire.
Lol he pets the gun. I would to tbh
was the best multiplayer game for a long time. fair and balanced.
The multiplayer back in the days was awesome.
Dead bodies disappear.
Good review. How did you get M4SD, SG552 and MP5 in single player?
I know this is an old comment but I'll post this in case anyone else see this and wants to know
Add *+raven 1* to the _Target_ line of the game shortcut
When you open the game, click _Single Player_ and then click the Raven logo icon above _Select Difficulty Level_ and pick a mission
(If you don't load a level with the Raven icon, cheats won't work)
Once in a level, hit tilde (the *`* key)
Type *give all* in the console and press enter
Those guns should now be in your inventory. They won't have visible icons, but you can press the weapon category key an extra couple times to select them
@@nattyfatty413thank you so much for doing the lords work! I tried going to a game faq article that sounds like it worked but the cheats are read only and give all is an unknown command, at least in the gold edition.
Well, that's partly true, the missions are slow but the multiplayer is great.
4:41 Tactical seal? So a seal with a bunch of scopes and lasersights strapped to it's head?
Was thinking, eh doesn’t know the struggles of old time shooters, “im 28 years old” aw shit..
People like to think this but SOF2 came out in 2002. At this point we already had shooters like Half-Life, Halo, and even the original SOF that didn't have these problems. The old shooters with these problems get lost in time and forgotten but for some reason SOF2 didn't. It's a bit confusing to me.
@@Jarekthegamingdragon Sof2 wasnt forgotten because its gore system is something truly special.
Jarek please make a vid on "infiltration" mod for ut99. It's a tactical game that features hands down the best weapons handling system when it comes to cqb collision-detection of weapon barrels. It forces you to actually and realistically switch to smg's and handguns in tight spaces. I think some of the people that made went on to dev ground branch (wich is a meh game I could give less than a F about)
If i remember correctly i didn't finish it because of the shit stealth level
I played it for the story :( Story was all I had lol. And yes.. I do love its story XD
The stealth in this is fucking atrocious.