Y2K Game: Soldier of Fortune

Soldier of Fortune

I played this on the Sega Dreamcast. I am fully aware that this is a PC game and it's massively better to play it there, especially nowadays. Still, I picked it up at my local retro game store because I wanted another Dreamcast title I could play with the console’s mouse and keyboard peripherals. I found it to be quite the enjoyable experience, even if there are two specific frustrations with it.

Bare Bones Story

The story is not exactly original. You play as John Mullins and you're teamed up with Hawk. You first start off by busting some weird skin heads in an underground subway. You then discover that said skin heads are running around the globe buying nukes. So, you fly around the globe destroying nukes. Once the nukes are destroyed, you chase the skin head freaks to try to end them and the shadow organization pulling their strings once and for all. It's not going to win any writing or creativity awards, but it's serviceable and provides with just enough motivation to go and shoot bad guys.

Enough

The story provides incentive to travel to different parts of the world. You start in a New York subway. You then travel to such places like Sudan, Iraq, Russia, Germany, and Japan. This lends a comforting change of scenery from one level to the next. There's also a certain diversity within each level as you move both above and below ground as well as in between buildings for each locale. It keeps the gameplay engaging and never feels dull. It's not a big contrast or anything, just a mild change of scenery.

Mindless Action

This belongs in the category of "mindless action shooter" and I am all here for it. Playing through Soldier of Fortune made me think of Slave Zero, a game I completed a while back. I love the setting of Slave Zero, but Soldier of Fortune is the better game. The problem with Slave Zero is that it's genuinely the exact same concrete grey futuristic city for the entire game. Soldier of Fortune varies things up but switching locations from one level to the next. However, they both suffer from the gameplay and action itself being mindless and lacking any depth. But I am perfectly comfortable with this.

Verdict

Overall, it's a fun game that I can recommend to fans of first person shooters that are looking for some good old-fashioned mindless action. I can only recommend the Dreamcast version if you just love the console or are just curious. The loading times are overly long and almost unbearable. And they're frequent. The frame rates tend to plummet during the more intense action sequences. We're talking slide-show status. For these two flaws, I cannot recommend it on the Sega Dreamcast. I'm certain this is not a problem on a modern PC.

The PC on Console

Even though I have zero intentions of ever playing this game again on the Dreamcast, I believe this was an insightful experiment. People often talk about how the Dreamcast brought the arcade experience home. However, after playing games such as Soldier of Fortune, MDK2, Quake III, and Omikron, I am starting to suspect that it also sought to bring the PC gaming experience to the console. If you purchase the keyboard and mouse peripherals, you basically have a living room gaming PC. This is over a quarter of a century before the Steam Machine, folks. I feel like this realization deserves its own article. In the meantime, I'll keep on gaming and keep on dreaming.