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Lee Press on Nails?

GHOUL also allows for "bolt on attachments" to character models. In the game you'll see players wearing sunglasses, hats, backpacks, radios, armor, and more. OK, you're thinking so what? Lots of games have these kinds of features. Well, the fact is that a lot of those games "cheat" in that clothing and "accessories" like guns, glasses, backbacks, and armor are merely attached to the character model at the correct point.

Run!	Faces can be pretty detailed

Not so in Soldier of Fortune - each of those items is a true object, which means guess what? You can shoot them off! The per-polygon physics and collision detection combined with "bolt on attachments," allows you to shoot off a terrorist's sunglasses! Knock down a helmeted soldier with a shotgun to the chest - as his body hits the ground you'll see his helmet fly off his head and roll around on the ground. Got a hostage situation on your hands? You can shoot weapons out of enemy's hands, effectively disarming them. The sophisticated animation and AI will show them shaking their hand in pain, and then meekly surrendering to you because they're unarmed!

Haven't I seen you before?

Another problem that Raven attempts to address is the repetitiveness of enemy appearance. A lot of times you'll play games where there are only a handful of enemy characters that look different. Generic joe #1, Joe Blow #2, John Q Public #3, etc. In Soldier of Fortune, you'll notice that there's a lot more variety in faces - every section is unique, like eyes, hair, nose, etc. SoF has a total of 277 different face textures. Mix and match all of those with the accessories like hats, sunglasses, etc. and you're never going to say to yourself "I've killed this guy before."

He's wearing glasses

Headquarters

Lighting

GHOUL also features advanced lighting and shadowing techniques. Among these features is hardware accelerated lighting, which cards like the GeForce 256 and Savage 2000 can accelerate. I didn't have the chance to test the game on our GeForce cards or our Savage 2000, but features like that are probably best left to look at in the final game code anyway.

The 9mm packs some pop

Lots of blood spray in SoF

Overall look

Soldier of Fortune is an impressive looking game, probably more so in motion than what you can see in the stillshots. While the actual wireframe models aren't quite as detailed as games with more recent engines, the amount of work that Raven put into animation overshadows those minor shortcomings. So while the Q2 engine is starting to show its age, the advanced animation really speaks for itself when you see SoF in motion.