Soldier of Fortune Payback is a First Person Shooter, and a pretty standard one at that. As much as I've loved the SoF games in the past, this one just doesn't seem to deliver.

First of all, you seem to take the same amount of damage as an enemy, one shot can kill you without warning. This turns getting through some levels into trial and error.

There's a standard Bleed Out type system, where you have to keep from taking damage for a certain amount of time before taking more damage, but it doesn't work as well as in some games. Unbalanced damage makes this ineffective.

To make matters worse, the AI never seems to miss, even at easy difficulty settings. The AI is dumber, sure, but does that matter when they can still zero in on you from across the map? There are tons of enemies, too. This part of the game is actually cool, giving the game an old school type of feel to it. Now if they could adjust the aim down accordingly things would be far better.

With all that is already here, I hate to talk bad about SoF more, but it has to be done. The guns don't feel right. They don't feel like they do in other first person shooters. Just for starters, the recoil is lacking. This game really will allow you to 'spray and pray' at the enemies, as all you have to do is sever a limb to take one out. Unload a bunch of ammo at a group of enemies and watch a couple drop to the ground.

The weapons all seem to feel either too powerful, or not powerful enough. One gun will take the enemies head off, but a much more powerful gun will not. You'll get used to which weapons are good and bad as you play though.

The level design also isn't near as good as it used to be. This is what happens when development companies switch in the middle of a series, quality goes down.

The levels are decent enough I suppose, but they feel too clean. You're in the middle of a war zone, yet there's very little rubble lying around. It just doesn't draw me in like it could.

With all the problems in this game's single player mode, the game itself will quickly start to feel repetitive. There was so much potential here that was lost to poor design. Sure, this game is violent and earns its M rating, but gore doesn't make for good gaming, at least not gore alone.