Soldier of Fortune: Payback

What would be the exact wrong way to revive an acclaimed shooter franchise? How about taking it away from its original triple-A developer, making the reboot a full-priced title after initially pegging it as a budget offering, and then releasing it in the busiest, highest-quality holiday season ever? Sadly, Activision Value somehow chose exactly that path.

Peripheral circumstances aside, Soldier of Fortune: Payback – the third iteration in a series that was originally based on a real-life magazine and mercenary lifestyle – is a thoroughly unimpressive game. The series’ hallmark has always been its extreme gore, and developer Cauldron has set arteries to “spray” in Payback. But where the first two games’ violence was gritty and hardcore, here it’s comically over the top. The people in Payback’s world must have limbs made out of fragile, blood-filled balloons because their arms, legs, and heads explode and/or sever immediately when hit with just a single bullet. It’s funny for a while, and perhaps the goofiness is a necessary evil of the game existing in the Jack Thompson era of media sensitivity to videogame violence, but the laughs don’t last.

Instead, the huge heap of problems becomes overwhelming across the campaign’s six-ish hours of gameplay. The framerate frequently hitches, the aiming controls are arthritically stiff even when cranked to their maximum sensitivity, and physics bugs abound. Enemy AI is absent – they’ll often run right by you like you’re not even there in a firefight – and the final boss fights are frustrating.

Payback even throws a cliffhanger ending at you (as if a sequel will ever even happen!). At a full $60, there’s absolutely no reason to touch this with a ten-foot-pole, especially with so many other, better shooters on the market in this record-settingly awesome holiday season.