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Soldier of Fortune II: Double Helix
by Kyle Johnson
Sunday, June 8 2003
Violent, furious, and in the end "fun" is only one of many ways to describe Soldier of Fortune 2.
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Title:
Soldier of Fortune II: Double Helix
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Platform:
Xbox
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Publisher:
Activision |
Developer:
Gratuitous Games |
#
of Players: 1 - 4, Xbox Live |
Genre:
Action
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Origin:
United States
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Expected
Release:
June 15, 2003 |
Grapevine:
Soldier of Fortune opened many eyes when it first hit PC systems in early 2000 with its patented "Limb removal" system. |
Introduction:
In Soldier of Fortune II: Double Helix, you are John Mullins, a military consultant working for the top-secret ant-terrorist group known as The Shop. You must tackle a wide-range of missions from hostage rescue to intelligence gathering, to search-and-destroy. Soldier of Fortune II: Double Helix offers a vivid damage modeling and animations, accurate reproductions of over a dozen real world weapons and authentic combat scenarios set in far flung locations such as Prague, Colombia, Hong Kong, and Kamchatka. Additionally, many mission scenarios and objectives are inspired by the experiences of the actual John Mullins, a former Special Forces officer and military “consultant.”
Presentation:
Soldier of Fortune II: Double Helix offers very little when it comes to presentation. Most of the time you’re controlling John Mullins, so you don’t see too many cut-scenes. But when you do see those cut-scenes. they’re not top of the line. In fact, most of them are very cheesy. The voice acting over the mouth movements of the characters are very dull, to say the least. But that’s not to say they aren’t graphically impressive. They’re no better graphically than the in-game graphics. The game menus in SOFII: Double Helix are very simple, and most importantly, it is very easy to navigate through the game menus. So it’s not hard to go connect to Xbox Live, unless, of course, you don’t have Xbox Live.
While you are playing Soldier of Fortune II: Double Helix, you have your HUD display, as most games come equipped with. Stretching down on the bottom of your screen, you have a gray bar and a blue bar. The gray bar shows your armor, and, as you should have already guessed, the blue bar shows your health. You health bar turns into a red bar when your health gets below 50 percent, as to warn you you’re getting your ass kicked, or you’re being a dumbass and not being careful. To the right of your health and armor bars, you have the weapon you’re currently using displayed, how much ammo you have left in your clip, how much ammo you have left all together, and how much ammo you have left in your secondary, if your gun has a secondary firing ability.
On the far left bottom of the screen, you have a listing of the people on the same walkie talkie channel as you are, if you’re playing on Xbox Live. If you’re playing single player, you will see a big fat blank space. I guess Activision couldn’t think of anything “important” to put there. While playing offline, you will also notice that there is nothing at the top of the screen. No radar, nothing. But if you happen to be one of the many playing the game on Xbox Live, you will see you have a radar up on the top right hand side of your screen.
Why am I rambling on about where everything is? Well, I for one have no clue either. But if it matters any, now you know where everything is located, as if you wouldn’t already know once you load up the game. All in all, the presentation in Soldier of Fortune II: Double Helix isn’t half bad. It gets the job done, which is the important thing. While it may not be all flashy looking, that doesn’t matter. What does matter, is no matter who you are, as long as you can pick up that controller, put the game in the system, and load up the game, you’re set to go. Just remember to pull the trigger when you want to kill someone in the game.
Graphics:
Soldier of Fortune II: Double Helix doesn’t have that great of graphics. In fact, if you want an honest opinion, I think the game feels and looks like Goldeneye for the Nintendo 64. It’s got that feel to it when you’re playing it. The graphics aren’t bad though, it’s not like it looks like a game that’s meant to be played on the original PlayStation, it’s just that the graphics are up to par for games that are currently being played on the Xbox, such as Outlaw Volleyball and Dead or Alive Volleyball.
One thing Activision was able to pull of pretty well for Soldier of Fortune II: Double Helix is the shadowing. There are quite a few levels in the game that require you to be in the darkness to be able to take out your enemies, and with the shadows that have been presented to us in the game by Activision do the job perfectly for your stealth missions. While the shadows aren’t up to par with games such as Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell, they do the job needed in the missions that they’re needed. Nothing more, nothing less.
As I stated in the presentation part of this review, the cut-scenes aren’t very good. The graphics for them could be tons better than what was presented. The mouth animation and body animations are the areas that stick out the most that need to be improved on the most. It’s almost like the designers didn’t even bother trying to make the cut-scenes look better than the actual in game graphics, which most games do. They must have thought that most people playing the game will more than likely skip the whole cut-scene just to get back to the action. Well, yeah, a lot of people would rather be running around blowing their enemies heads off than watching some lousy chatting, especially when they animations are as poor as they are.
"My what a big scar you have." Some of the texture details in SOF2 are pretty impressive although some of the animations could use work.
Sound:
Ahh, the sound. This is quite possibly one of the best sound effects I’ve ever heard for the guns. The guns sound marvelous in the game. None of the guns sound the same, and the silenced guns are actually silenced, and don’t just have a silencer thrown on them for the hell of making them look silenced. Now if only more developers would take lessons from Activision when it comes to making their guns sound half way decent.
For once I have something nice to say about Soldier of Fortune II: Double Helix’s cut-scene. While the graphics and animation in the cut-scenes may be pure and utter crap, the sound and voices aren’t bad at all. It’s clear as to what John Mullins, and whoever else he happens to be talking to, is saying. While not crystal clear, it’s clear enough to make you listen to the cut-scenes, even if you have to look away from your television to avoid seeing the horrendous animations and graphics.
There’s not a whole lot more to say about the sound in Double Helix. The sound does a good job of letting you know what’s going on, let’s you listen to your careless opponents as they scramble around to try and find you, while you’re camping out above them getting ready to snipe them from a distance.
Controls:
What’s there to say about the controls in Soldier of Fortune II: Double Helix except for the fact that the controls couldn’t be much better. You can easily shoot your opponent with the R trigger, and then easily chase them down and pistol whip them with the butt of your shotgun or SOCOM by using the L trigger. Of course, there’s always a complaint about something in any game, no matter how small it is. In the case of Soldier of Fortune II: Double Helix’s controls, it is the simple fact of the changing of weapons in the controls. In order to change your weapons, you have to press up on the D-pad. This prevents you from changing weapons on the fly while in the middle of a fight with your opponents.
Other than that one little inconvenience, the controls in Soldier of Fortune II: Double Helix are pretty good. They get the job done, and there’s hardly any question of what does what, unless, of course, you’re new to the game.
Gameplay:
When you’re playing Soldier of Fortune II: Double Helix, you’ll discover that you’ll be given set objectives at the start of every mission. Once your mission is under way, you will be given more and more objectives. All your objectives will be shown as being in progress, and one by one, will be completed. You number one objective throughout the whole game, is to find out any information you know about a terrorist organization and their leader. You will be sent all over the world to Prague, Colombia, Russia, Hong Kong, Switzerland, Texas, and New York. In more than half of the missions (which there are a total of 54 missions in the game), you will be wandering buildings, just to talk to some people before any real actions starts.
Your real missions, which take around 25 seconds to load, are a variation of go in, find a guy/information/object and then escort it/escape without getting killed in the process. A couple missions ask that you be stealthy, but setting off alarms simply triggers an infinite supply of bad guys to chase after you instead of failing your mission.
Most of the time while you’re traveling through the missions trying to find whatever it is you’re looking for, you will notice that you will be making a lot, and I emphasize a lot of u-turns in order to find the right path to take. A lot of times, you will think that the only door you encounter is the way you’re supposed to go. If you experience that and the door does not open, chances are you will have to go back and find a different route to get to the other side of that door. And since you don’t have a radar or compass, you have no idea which door will open, and which one won’t.
Soldier of Fortune II: Double Helix has a feature that I’m sure a lot of people wish more games would have. And that feature is the random mission generator. Once you have completed the single player missions, or even if you haven’t, you can have the game randomly throw you into a mission for some extra practice. The way this works is you pick what type of mission you want from your choices of Escape, Assassination, Infiltration, and Demolition. You also get to pick the type of environment (desert, hills, jungle, or snow), night or day, difficulty, time limit, and your available inventory. Once you've done this, the game randomly generates a map, which takes even longer to load. However, even randomly generated maps are nothing all that spectacular and run into the same labyrinthine quality of the game.
Conclusion:
All in all, Soldier of Fortune II: Double Helix is a pretty fun game, despite it’s inability to have better graphics and animations. The main selling point for this game would be it’s Xbox Live capabilities, but even those are limited. With most Xbox Live games, there’s a very limited wait time for available games to show up, but in Soldier of Fortune II: Double Helix, it takes a good 20-30 seconds for games to be shown in the optimatch. Soldier of Fortune II: Double Helix is a game mainly for those who have previous experience with the previous Soldier of Fortune games, but even if you don’t’, you can easily get hooked on this game. If Activision has any plans of releasing another Soldier of Fortune game for the Xbox, they have some work to do to make it better.
--- Kyle Johnson
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