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Thankfully, unlike many games in this area "gibs" aren't easy to cause, unless done with an appropriately powerful weapon of course, e.g. a rocket launcher or grenade. Blasting away at corpses (accidentally or not) will not produce the usual cloud of blood that would occur in Quake 3. This adds to the realism of the game and instead of gibbing, bodies tend to writhe disturbingly on the ground when riddled with bullets, or even when standing up, dancing in a rather sickening way almost. It should be noted that this somewhat real violence could be removed with a parental lock in the game. Although not many will want to use it except those that have young kids around. There's always the "Tactical version" for those who want no violence period.

One of the goriest effects I saw in action was in the snow level, where much like in the picture above I blew a guys leg off with the shotgun. The leg proceeded to slide down the hill and left a long trail of blood as it did so. Quite cool in a sick kind of way. Grossman is sure going to love this game. I'd say it's pretty safe to say that for the moment this is the most realistic depiction of violence in a game.

After a while of this in your face gore you begin (well, I did) to almost enjoy it a little. After a few levels I found myself playing with the bad guys, rather than say letting them drop to the ground dead I would let off an entire clip into the standing corpse and watch it convulse around as hit by a rain of bullets. Although perhaps the gore is only really a talking matter due to the fact that all the enemies are human, not some alien race.

Soldier of Fortune is a fairly pretty game. A wide variety of colors are used in the game (not the usual Quake 2 shades of brown) and some advanced effects are in place such as dynamic lighting, hardware T&L support, fog, etc.

Here's with Ravens John Scott had to say in regard to video cards and Soldier of Fortune.

Soldier of Fortune is completely transform bound, we do not touch the texture limits or the fill rate of most modern cards, even on a top end machine. For our next project, we will have some form of level of detail in the models to reduce the number of transforms to be done, increase texture size, and increase the splendour of the effects, utilising many more particles.

Personally, I think video card manufacturers need to divert some of their attention from developing obscenely high fill rates to optimising the transform path of their drivers. This is clearly where Soldier of Fortune would benefit the most, and as poly counts increase, where many other games would too. Hardware T&L is the way to go.

The difference between the 3dfx reference driver and the WickedGL mini driver clearly indicate how much can be gained on all cards. The Geforce romps home as the clear winner, its hardware transforms give it a considerable lead on the nearest competitor. It is the card of the moment.

While the fill rate argument here may be untrue (seeing as only SOF is taken into account), the hardware T&L is true, check out Reverends benchmarking with Software (CPU) V hardware (T&L on Geforce) lighting and you'll see.

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