CONTENT WARNING: Blood, gore and violence.
Longtime readers of this site know that I am a trash connoisseur. I will watch terrible shows and bad movies, and of course I’ll play bad video games. I chalk it up to just absorbing a lot of critically panned media in my youth, but I also look at it as a learning experience: Just why did they make it like this? Engaging with media known for its negative reception is important to critiquing media, in my opinion. Gives you a better understanding of what’s actually good or bad.
I’ve written about several bargain bin games over the years. Often made by small teams on shoestring budgets and quick development time frames, these are fascinating to play for me. Many times they’re not very good, and I can finish them in just a couple hours. Though, sometimes you can see what they wanted to do, but couldn’t for whatever reason. In some rare cases, a budget label will decide to release a new installment in a long-dormant franchise in an attempt to get a few extra sales from longtime fans. Much like today’s entry.
Soldier of Fortune: Payback is the oft-maligned third and final installment of the Soldier of Fortune franchise, loosely based on the magazine of the same name. Released in 2007, a mere two weeks after the massively popular Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, this game came and went to negative reviews, and is mostly forgotten outside of ragebait Youtubers or trash connoisseurs like me.
Payback was not developed by Raven Software, makers of the previous Soldier of Fortune games. Instead, it was developed by Slovakian development studio Cauldron, who was one of a few studios Activision Value relied on for developing their bargain bin games. According to The Cutting Room Floor, the game was tentatively titled “Mercenaries Wanted,” and likely got the Soldier of Fortune branding due to similarities between it and the previous games.
While it may seem weird for Activision to publish this game right after the biggest video game to probably come out in 2007, it actually isn’t. You see, for a while, there were two Activisions.
From 2000 to 2016, Activision Value was a publishing arm of Activision based out of Minneapolis, Minnesota. This was created from a merger of several budget publishers, including Expert Software – known for publishing a good chunk of Sega’s PC output, like Sonic & Knuckles Collection, which I’ve written about – and Head Games, makers of such infamous games like Extreme Boards & Blades and Juggernaut: The New Story for Quake II, which I’ve also written about. If you’re familiar with the oodles of video games based on the Cabela’s brand of sporting good stores, that’s almost entirely Activision Value.
Unless you looked closely, there wasn’t much of a noticeable difference between the Activision based out of California that was putting out Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, Guitar Hero and Call of Duty; and the Activision based out of Minnesota that was putting out stuff like Secret Service or the oodles of History Channel video games. They both had the Activision logo on the box, after all. I find this late 2000s era of Activision fascinating for that reason. They not only wanted be the big AAA publisher, but they also wanted to put out average schlock for $40 a pop. Guess they wanted to eat their cake and have it too.
In Soldier of Fortune: Payback, you don’t play as the bushy mustachioed protagonist John Mullins from the previous games, but instead a generic faceless soldier by the name of Thomas Mason. (No relation to Alex Mason, I assume.) Mason gets double-crossed by another Shop mercenary named Miller, and with the help from Casandra “Casey” Decker back at The Shop, Mason goes through middle eastern towns, South American jungles and Ukranian hotels to figure out who is bribing mercenaries to defect. It’s a fairly basic story pretty much meant to move the player along various locales while shooting bad guys in generic environments.
Payback is a bog-standard first person shooter for its time. Shoot, aim down sights, throw grenades, murder bad guys, complete objectives, all that jazz. If you’ve played any military action shooter from the late 2000s, Payback isn’t gonna do anything new. In fact, even the things it does do that we’re so familiar with in this genre seem quite a bit baffling.
For example, it has ironsight aiming like a Call of Duty game does, but instead of actually aiming down the weapon’s sight like you would expect, the gun just shifts to the middle of the screen while the crosshair still appears. This doesn’t happen if you attach a sight onto the weapon, but it’s still weird looking. Enemies will clearly spawn at predetermined areas once you cross an invisible threshold, more flagrantly than most other games would. Enemies will rush up to you and try to melee you to death, and the game will rotate you around if an enemy is meleeing you from behind. There’s machine gun emplacements that you can use to eliminate swaths of respawning enemies, but the enemies will do so much damage so quickly that often using them is a death sentence. It’s those little quirks that just make it feel just a bit off compared to something like Call of Duty.
While the G.H.O.U.L. limb removal system from previous games – arguably the only thing it really had going for it – isn’t really here, Cauldron does try to retain the whole blowing off limbs mechanic from those previous games. But here it just feels a bit excessive. I get that blowing off the limbs of terrorists is a hallmark of the series, but with graphics starting to get a bit more realistic, it comes off as kind of unsettling at times. I honestly wonder if Treyarch took inspiration from this game for the violent gore that appeared in Call of Duty: World at War the following year.
Some of the hallmarks of the Soldier of Fortune games were the various world environments John Mullins would explore in. The first game would take place in subways, on a moving train, in cold mountain bases, and so on. Soldier of Fortune II: Double Helix went through the streets of Prague, Colombian jungles, an ocean freighter, even Hong Kong and Switzerland. Payback on the other hand takes you through generic middle-eastern towns, unremarkable jungles, and lots and lots of caves. The final levels take place in a hotel and club in Donetsk, Ukraine, which is a nice change of pace from the constant caves, but by then it’s too little too late.
I haven’t talked much about the story because it’s not that interesting, but there’s a lot of moments that are very very questionable today. Mason goes from place to place blowing up areas, getting intel from random characters while chewing the scenery like he’s diet Duke Nukem.
Most of the characters Mason interacts with are just stereotypes, like one cutscene has Mason interacting with a middle eastern emissary who tries to give the “we’re trying to bring peace and love to the world” before Mason threatens them for a location for some other terrorist leaders, where they spill the beans, but suddenly shift to calling Mason a “weak American” like a bad middle eastern terrorist stereotype.
In fact, most of the levels necessitate Mason going to a location, finding a big bad terrorist leader, finding him, getting more intel on some other guy who is even worse than them, lather, rinse, repeat. I’ve seen better written stories on direct-to-DVD sequel movies.
One of the things I think that deserves addressing is the boss fights that often wrap up every level. With the exception of one stage where you’re fighting a helicopter while terrorists come to stop you in your tracks, every other fight is against a guy that can somehow take hundreds of bullets and shells to go down while being able to eliminate you in mere seconds.
For example, I had to fight the final boss in Donetsk, one of the brothers I had already eliminated in a parking garage. I had to fight him in a rounded corridor in the club, before he went downstairs for phase two. I eventually camped down at the stairwell between the two floors, pop out, dump as much ammo as I could before having to reload, repeat. At one point I even backtracked to an earlier part of the level to procure more ammo for my guns, and still had to do the stop-and-pop cover shooting before he finally died. It’s incredibly lazy boss design, even for a shooter for this time.
Outside of the short 2-3 hour campaign, there isn’t much else to do in terms of replay value. It does have multiplayer, but I imagine it’s been dead since day one. Again, Call of Duty 4 had come out earlier that month, everybody was likely playing that or Halo 3. It just couldn’t compete. With how the single player plays, I can’t imagine anyone really playing the multiplayer unless they wanted to feel like they got their money’s worth.
Either that or you’re an achievement hunter: A good 80% of the game’s achievements on Xbox 360 require playing multiplayer, which means this game probably has very few people who have unlocked all the game’s achievements. Even I only unlocked four achievements in my entire playthrough, and the rest of the achievements either being the aforementioned multiplayer-only ones, “beat the entire game on Normal or Hard without dying” or “beat this level on the hardest difficulty,” of which I am not going to suffer through.
Now, I love the previous Soldier of Fortune games. Raven Software didn’t always bat 1.000, but they know how to make something enjoyable and fun in even their most average work. But outside of that fancy G.H.O.U.L. system, they’re just bog standard action games. Perfectly fine B-tier action games, yes, but not anywhere near the upper echelon of its contemporaries at the time.
Payback is bad because it doesn’t even have that going for it. The shooting feels lifeless and dull, the environments aren’t that interesting to look at, enemies just rush at you without much strategy, the story isn’t even that interesting… it feels like a mindless shooter. It’s the kind of game some people think all these kind of games are without really engaging with them. To be fair, I wasn’t expecting Cauldron to put out some forgotten masterpiece – these are the guys that made Chaser, after all – but playing this game and Call of Duty 4 is a pretty good barometer to show what works and what doesn’t.
I would say this is a sad way for the Soldier of Fortune franchise to end, but in reality this does not surprise me. This is a series that was bolstered by one gimmick, and when other games usurped Soldier of Fortune in terms of gameplay and story, it just felt like it was at death’s door. Payback was just the final nail in the coffin. It’s a series that thought it could still be relevant in the face of a slowly changing gaming landscape, but finding out that it should’ve stopped after Soldier of Fortune II. Kinda like how they kept making sequels to movies like Death Wish long after they stopped being relevant.
I can’t really imagine a world where a Soldier of Fortune game would be made today. There just isn’t much going for it that isn’t already done better by its peers. That, combined with the general negative sentiment towards mercenary organizations like Blackwater over the past decade or so likely means a first-person shooter where you’re playing a mercenary killing bad guys just seems like in poor taste nowadays. However, this does not mean they will not try.
Soldier of Fortune: Payback is available on GOG, but I would not recommend spending the $10 on it. Hell, I bought this secondhand on Xbox 360 for about half that price, and I still felt ripped off. You’d be better off spending that $10 on either of the previous games over this.
Though, If you honestly want something close to a Soldier of Fortune sequel, I’d recommend Cold Winter for the PlayStation 2. It’s got more of a spy thriller theme compared to SOF’s military theme, but it has a similar limb-removal system combined with a few other cool mechanics like crafting gadgets and bombs MacGyver-style. I remember playing that long ago and thought it was a pretty good romp. Definitely better than Soldier of Fortune: Payback, that’s for sure.
Despite me not enjoying Payback, it does make me want to delve further into Cauldron’s output for Activision Value. Stuff like Jurassic: The Hunted, Secret Service, the oodles of Cabela’s games, the list goes on. I don’t expect them to be good, but I am a trash connoisseur, and I like playing bad games now and then. Plus, this era of Activision really deserves to be looked into more, with some of these games being nearly 20 years old at this point. It’s certainly better than what Activision’s putting out nowadays.
Screenshots courtesy of Giant Bomb and the World of Longplays video on Soldier of Fortune: Payback.
Available to Patreon subscribers a few days early. Wanna get in on it? Check it out here. You don’t even have to be a mercenary!
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