Graphics

Quake 2.9?

This is one of the last games based on the Quake 2 engine, although Raven is fond of calling it "Quake 2.9" to represent the vast number of changes they've made to the engine. Despite the semantics, savvy users will quickly recognize the Soldier of Fortune's Q2 lineage in the style of player models and unfortunately, in the rather low polygon representations of certain objects like trucks. Some of the truck wheels look blockier than the roller on the Flintstones' family car! Objects on shelves can also look pretty flat and fake looking. Rounding out the disappointments were the low poly, dated look of weapon models on the ground, although they look fantastic in the player's hand.

There's a moving fish in the aquarium

Blood splash on the wall

Despite those graphical shortcomings, Raven has made up for it in other areas, particularly in the dynamic shadows, texture quality, the character art, and seemingly hundreds of animations. Raven's artists did a bang up job in creating all the 2D textures for furniture, walls and flooring, and especially with characters' faces. We also appreciated how characters' mouths actually moved while talking. It sounds like an obvious thing, but there are still games being released where the people's mouths don't move. That's a real pet peeve of ours.

Nice car

Looking good

Per Poly Collision Detection

Another plus is the addition of "bolt - on" attachments for all the characters. You'll see some soldiers wearing hats, helmets, radio backpacks, flamethrower backpacks, sunglasses, and hip bags, and other adornments. They aren't just nifty decorations that help make every character look unique (although they do a great job at that). These are all discrete objects that can actually be shot off, thanks to the per-poly collision detection. In most first person shooters, the characters are represented by bounding boxes that are exactly the same size, no matter how big or small the person appears to be. Take Quake 3 for instance: Fat Lucy actually has the same amount of shootable area as the skeleton, Bones because they're represented by bounding boxes of the same size. Don't believe us? Load up two machines with Q3, and shoot just to the side of Bones - he'll grunt in pain even though it looks like you missed.

Too bad she had to die

Hey it was her or me

Soldier of Fortune doesn't use bounding boxes - the svelte female assassins in skin tight leather jump suits are actually harder to hit than the burly soldiers carrying rocket launchers, because you actually have to hit ON the target. Going back to the bolt on attachments, this means you can shoot off hats, sunglasses, and guns out of hands. Catch a flamethrower guy by surprise? Try zooming in with the sniper rifle and shooting the gas valve just behind his shoulder - the tank will explode and the guy will go up in flames! That's not something you can do in just any shooter.