Generally, you can sneak up on the first enemy in a level. It appears that the developers planned to incorporate some sneaking elements into Soldier of Fortune II and then somewhere along the line gave up-but then never managed to completely remove the essentially nonfunctioning stealth features. If you skip the plot, you'll miss this part and probably just go in shooting, which is actually the only practical way to approach the game. Both the training and the early cutscenes imply that you're going to need to resort to stealth to successfully navigate the first mission.
Soldier of Fortune II is actually one of the few games in which skipping the plot actually makes the gameplay portions clearer. Now Playing: Soldier of Fortune II: Double Helix Video Review
#SOLDIER OF FORTUNE VIDEO GAME PROFESSIONAL#
This much is clear: You're still professional soldier John Mullins, and pretty much every other character is someone trying to kill you.īy clicking 'enter', you agree to GameSpot's The plot doesn't make a lot of sense, the dialogue is absurd, and, even given the unlimited possibilities of a completely artificial environment and a free-roaming camera, the developers usually can't think of anything better to fill the time between head explosions than with long scenes of people having boring meetings. Soldier of Fortune II is an action-packed, gore-soaked shooter.Ī really nice feature of the game's story is that-pretty much any time you see it creaking to life-you can press a key to put it out of its misery and move on. Though it introduces a few new features that don't quite work, it retains and improves upon virtually every element of the original, both in its single-player campaign and in its multiplayer mode. Soldier of Fortune II remains a well-made meat-and-potatoes shooter with a keen eye for the forensic pathology of head wounds. Rest assured, though, that this brief foray into good taste is the exception rather than the rule. It's a shocking moment of restraint in a game whose primary focus is the explicit depiction of people getting shot in the face. Just as he pulls the trigger, the camera tastefully cuts away to spare you the sight. Toward the middle of Soldier of Fortune II, there's a scene in which a character commits suicide by shooting himself in the temple with a handgun.