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> Results: Soldier of Fortune: Payback
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The ESRB Says
Blood and Gore: GamerDad saw massive amounts of dismemberment and gore throughout. Drug Reference: There are drugs at the center of one of the missions. Intense Violence: Plenty of intense battles throughout. Sexual Themes: There are sexual overtones in some of the slavery and other missions. Strong Language: Everyone seems to be cursing about something all of the time. To create a sequel using a new developer, it is necessary to understand what made previous games in a franchise successful. In this case it appears that Activision thought the only thing needed to bring about a new Soldier of Fortune game was the name, references to 'The Shop' and loads of blood and dismemberment. They were very wrong - instead they reminded us that without solid core gameplay and motivation, blood and gore get boring in the first five minutes. Soldier of Fortune: Payback is a sloppy and derivative shooter that looks great and seems promising for the first few minutes - but quickly goes downhill from there. Filled with badly designed levels, terrible friendly and enemy intelligence that the developers attempt to mask using ghost spawning and cheating AI, there is not much of note: you get the usual variety of terrain to explore and weapons to fire, but the gameplay is loose and feels years old - this is clearly not Raven Software at work. Perhaps if the game reflected the 'value' in publisher Activision Value by being priced at a budget rate this would be acceptable - but as a full-price effort this is just terrible and I would recommend it even if there wasn't a half-dozen better shooters released within the past month.  
This game hits on just about every possible requirement of getting an M rating - there are drugs, human slavery, sexual overtones, loads of strong language, and intense firefights. But the thing that really cements the Adult GamerDad Age Seal is the over-the-top blood and gore and rampant dismemberment. While earlier games in the franchise had these, this game abandons Raven's attempt at realistic damage modeling (i.e. the GHOUL system) and instead just randomly has heads exploding and limbs separating - it is brutal, vile and disgusting. Having a realistic looking shooter with limbs and heads flying everywhere - still looking realistic - is really not something for younger teens.
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