Graphically speaking, it's unfortunate but one of the biggest problems with Soldier of Fortune Payback is that it has been released at possibly the worst time ever. In reality you can sum up the whole story in one word - TERR'RISTS. The story is filled with double-crosses, conspiracies and secrets-within-secrets, but in the end feels like nothing more than an attempt to justify why your faceless merc is bouncing around between the Middle East, China, and Russia. It is like the developers decided what kind of environments and levels they wanted to put in the game, and then wrote a story that stitched the levels together in some kind of vague narrative fashion. Speaking of which, while the story has never been a crucial part of the Soldier of Fortune series - the 'story' in Payback is borderline gibberish. The rest of the voice acting in the game varies from much worse to slightly better and completely fails at drawing you into the characters or the story itself. Right off the bat, you find out that they've ditched the series protagonist John Mullin in favor for a generic faceless mercenary who sounds like he's trying to pass an unusually large kidney stone every time he opens his chew-filled mouth. Unfortunately, it doesn't take long for cracks to start showing in Soldier of Fortune Payback's facade. I mean how can they mess up with such solid groundwork already laid in place by the previous games? Things didn't get much better when it was found out that a small company named Cauldron out of the Slovak Republic would be handling the development, but still people held out hope. So when Activision suddenly announced earlier this year that they were bringing the violent series back, many people were quite excited - if a little confused by the news that Raven Software was no longer the development company. Though neither game was ever considered a top-tier quality title, both Soldier of Fortune games have managed to attract and keep a solid cult following with many gamers (including myself) playing one or both of the games even to this day. A sequel was made two years later in 2002, also starring John Mullins, titled Soldier of Fortune: Double Helix and upped the ante considerably in terms of gore and violence due to their much publicized GHOUL 2.0 dismemberment system.
Developed by Raven Software (the guys making a little title called Quake 4), the first game starred a real-life mercenary named John Mullins and was made popular due to its unusual (for the time) real-world topical settings and violent, visceral combat.
The Soldier of Fortune series of games has long been a guilty little pleasure for many gamers.
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