My Critical Review of the Latest Incarnation of Soldner

This YouTube video expresses the fun and entertainment of Soldner with a simple song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JrsH0nxylQ

Dead puppies aren't much fun.

Soldner was released in 2004. At the time, Joint Ops and Battlefield Vietnam were the only large scale warfare competitors. It promised the tactical infantry action of Ghost Recon with the vast armory of a Rainbow Six game combined with a huge motor pool of vehicles and a gigantic unlimited area to fight in.

If only it had met those goals.

It had a development team named Wings, they released an expansion pack (Marine Corps) and then went defunct. Jowood handed control over the game to the only real mod team, Project Zero, who were busy making a Desert Combat style mod called Iraqi Freedom or something. That project apparently went down the toilet once they realized they could mess up the whole game for everyone instead of just a mod. Project Zero messed things up for a while, including a failed re-release of Soldner as Semper Fidelis: Marine Corps (at this point I began to wonder what form of controlled substances were being abused by everyone involved) before they started to abuse their position and were sacked by Jowood, who hired the remaining pieces of Project Zero as gEasy, who promptly put up a website with a $200 template designed to make them look 'professional', replete with stock photos of smiling people in business suits. Right. There's still a billion unfixed glitches in the game, but that's all unaccounted for as supposedly, gEasy is working on "Soldner 2."

Duke Nukem Forever will be out first.

Soldner takes place in a topologically mapped 5 million square mile map, or something. I forget the exact area - and it doesn't matter - but it's enough to make your 2ghz 4gb of ram system wait for five to ten minutes as a loading bar sloooooowly creeps. The upside is, all the maps load instantly because each place you go is just somewhere in this huge ecosystem (I use the term loosely) and there is a cool factor in being able to drive for a few thousand miles from Cold Winter (a battle area set in a snowy, hilly region) to Riverside, a temperate area with high cliffs and rivers. Of course, there would be no functional spawn terminals, but you could go visit. No one does it, of course.

Did I mention that the expansion players are in the same playerpool as the original players, but the expansion pack players have access to better weapons and gear that non ex-pac players can't buy? Dumb, dumb, dumb.

Originally, the fans of Soldner defended it against all other games with cries of 'realism', 'weapons selection', and 'freedom to go for miles in any direction'. True, Soldner originally had a more Ghost Recon Classic style crosshair system, raised your heart rate if you had been running with a corresponding downfall in accuracy, and a few other little things that have been scrubbed out of the game bit by bit. Essentially, it is now Counterstrike: Cabela's Outdoors Edition. The fanboys who used to shout the hardest that it was "realistic" have finally started to shut up. There aren't that many fans anyway- maybe thirty people online at any given time.

No one really goes outside the area of the immediate battle area anyway, everyone sticks to a narrow subset of available weaponry with a few common noobcannons being the most likely culprits in your demise, and the same applies to the vehicles.

Anyway, the gameplay is derivative of Battlefield style games, it had a great deal of promise, the third person option is nice, the graphics can be almost attractive considering how dated the game is, the selection of guns and vehicles IS fun, but it all falls flat. I will procede to my gripes:

As it is now, gameplay is being reduced to the lowest common denominator. Isn't that what all the "noob pwners" always tell us: "stop crying and adapt, learn how to do it yourself" "get some skillz and you can become l33t" bla, bla, bla.

So we get exactly that. More and more people 'adapting' - but ultimately bringing the game down.

The minimap goes away each time you die, and you have to call it back up. If you are elected to Commander Mode, the key that brings up the minimap now puts you into commander mode, with a 5 second lag to enter and exit. There used to be a fullscreen map that could be used very handily for navigation- now it is gone. 3D threat indicators would appear around your character in third person to show where gunfire is coming from. This was a great gameplay feature, very Tom Clancy, but now-gone.

Guns are non-animated. Slides on pistols don't move, etc. The same weapon model is used for third person / first person. Ok, that's cool in a geeky way. Efficient. Originally, a 2D graphic was used for iron sights. Now, the same weapon model has extremely crude iron sights built into it, which now you get to use as 3D iron sights. Fine, now the same model is used for three functions. Just because it made the dorky eastern european programmer who implimented this feature get a stiffy doesn't mean it's a good idea. It's ugly, and works so poorly that some of the weapons, specifically the AR15 / M4 types, no longer even display the rear sight but just the front sight. What a solution, not. Someone deserves a wedgie over that.

Shotguns. WTF? A quick onceover of the XML shows that it is easy to make a gun fire multiple bullets per pull of the trigger. So, why do they suck? Its flat out smacktarded to have guns in the game that no one uses because they don't work as they should. There should be no disappointment guns.

The MP5, once a decent MP5 Navy model, is now ugly. It looks like crappy $5 springer mp5 from an airsoft store, all "tactical ninja'd" out. Too many of the new guns are shiny / shiny gray. Did ProjectZero have a fetish for shiny or gray guns?. It's like they are sprayed with gloss and buffed to a high finish. There are also too many variations. Ok, variation is good- the M4, the M4 w/ m203, the M4 sopmod- cool. But the m4 aimpoint (with a model that doesn't look any different?) and the M4A1 (why is this needed when there's a sopmod? oh, ProjectZeros shiny gray gun fetish) makes it sort of ridiculous and it also really clogs the item list. Options could be available in a drop down list and just be price addons from the base model, then you could apply suppressors, laser sights, etc too.

Cheytac, Hecate, Mechem, etc. Bolt action rifles that fire like a semi automatic.

Regarding the Cheytac: see also noobcannon. "You can only call a weapon a noobcannon if the player voluntarily chooses to use the weapon knowing it is more blatantly skill-less and grants easier kills. " HmmMMMMmmm. The Cheytac / G11 / AT4 combo - Making Soldner feel like Unreal Tournament!

It gives weird feeling to see the most popular / powerful CQB weapon be one that was never even put into production. OK, G11 is a nice sci-fi weapon, but it was a delicate weapon with swiss watch insides. Its ONE strong point was that its bursts fired fast enough that the recoil was like a single shot, but THAT isnt even implimented right. (because of idiots, probably) G11 shouldnt be so powerful that it is such a desirable weapon- an exotic, a novelty, maybe even useful, but it isn't that powerful.

The MP7 is an extremely popular inf weapon. The displayed ingame model has a 20 round magazine (doesnt protrude) but it has 40 rounds available. With a 40 round stick mag you cant even lay down with it! It is a PDW- in between a pistol cartridged submachinegun and a full rifle. Against men with full power guns, the PDW user would not have much of a chance.

The sounds are horrible. Digging around in the directories of the first Soldner CD, you can find some great samples that were never even used. Booming realistic sound that would be at home in the totally immersive audio of BF2. Currently, the sounds are very poor. It's a step up from the last patch, where half the guns sounded like an M60 captured on a microphone incapable of recording the loud part of the gunfire so all you hear is a rattling chainlink sound.

The AGS system is mildly interesting but poorly implimented. You can't spot a vehicle and have it show up on your magical tactical map, although it shows your teammates. However, certain clans such as OSG can use the poorly coded map to display opponents.

The aircraft flight is retarded, broken, irreparibly. this is another reason soldner cannot claim any sort of sim status.

Airplanes. Are. Broken.

The best way to save this part is to crank them all down to lower powered aircraft that mercenaries would be likely to have, not multimillion aircraft like strike eagles and MIGs. It is silly to have something that people can only master after weeks of practice, something so hard to control, and with phsyics so unrealistic that you could probably have a flying game built with the Duke Nukem 3d engine that would be more accurate and enjoyable. And then the people who Do master it can put down rapeage on other people- who have no chance of doing it back, and certainly not learning how in that one round. Also, game reasons to have people packed in a c130 might improve.

On to helicopters: the Pah Boh. How fun is it to be under attack and escaping a base in an ATV, in a forest and all of a sudden, no warning, boom- you are blown up because someone bought a Pah Boh and blew you up. And you do it again, and again. It is no major consolation that you can gun him down with a MG3. The whole thing tastes sour. It is one thing if you are in a MBT and necessarily on the look out or have people supporting you in anti-heli measures, but being nailed in a tiny vehicle with negligable heat sig? Silly, at best. It's just a noobcannon autolock vehicle so that people with the expansion can use it against people without it.

And, since when does the torque ratio of a heli change the impact of the rockets so much? This is really a big deal and effects the new player's ability to step into a heli and AT LEAST have it MAKE SENSE. It doesnt even make sense now, people have to walk their rockets all over the place while on the attack just to see where they will land, and don't give me the "spend a few weeks practicing"- that answer doesn't apply when applying to something that is fundamentally flawed.

I give up, I can't keep writing. Soldner is wasted potential. The massive arsenal and potential for gameplay fun are distractions that fade quickly when you get killed by a basecamper for the umpteenth time in a row, or crash out because of a glitch.