FREE GAME DOWNLOAD: Soldier Of Fortune Payback (PS3)

If you've ever wondered what happened to the Soldier of Fortune franchise, you're not alone. The first two Soldier of Fortune games were popular shooters in their day, blending fun single-player and multiplayer gameplay with the concept of playing as a mercenary. But after 2002's Soldier of Fortune II: Double Helix, the franchise seemed to fall off the face of the planet. Unfortunately, it should have stayed missing in action because the series has been resurrected with Soldier of Fortune: Payback, a shooter that embraces all the wrong lessons that have been learned over the past decade.
At first glance, Payback looks like a very pretty game. The visuals aren't cutting-edge, but there's an attractive quality to them, from the lavish depth-of-field blur effects that kick in whenever you reload your weapon to the lush lighting. You no longer play as John Mullins, the hero of the first two games, but rather as a new mercenary caught up in a very cliché and badly told tale of a worldwide terrorist organization that's so clever it brands all of its operatives with the very same tattoo on their necks. It's a wonder they're so difficult to find.
However, it all goes downhill quickly because Payback reveals itself to be a relentlessly linear and highly scripted shooter with a lot of flaws. Perhaps the most frustrating of these deals with the fact that the game relies on a checkpoint save system with no ability to quicksave, which means that if you're killed, you have to restart from the last checkpoint. That wouldn't be so much of an issue if those checkpoints were frequent and numerous, but they're not. Thus, much of the game's six to eight hours of gameplay is spent trying and retrying to get through the many sections of the game. Though there's a regenerating health system, you still die all too easily. It's not uncommon to have to replay a section a dozen times or more before you finally beat it.

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