AI

As you can see from above a sentry has spotted me in one the first Siberia levels. The enemy AI is a bit of a mixed affair. Most of them time they are quite smart and won't simply run after you when you disappear around a corner. More than likely they will instead keep firing at that area, just in case you have any smart ideas about popping back around the same corner. Although they don't throw much grenades at you like in Half-Life.

Then again, other times they have the same basic flaws seen in other such games, sometimes its possible to shoot one enemy and his comrade will just stand there and not notice the rather large hole in the others head after you've just sniped him. In one of the levels I was sure 2 soldier had spotted me, but no reaction happened until I fired.

The enemy soldiers do in later levels tend to start rolling out of the way at times, much like Skarrj warriors used to Unreal. A strange occurrence happened in the final Siberia level where after an enemy had been disarmed (and hence they usually look for mercy from you) he proceeded to repeatedly roll back and forth a few times for no apparent reason.

If anything I found the "dumbest" enemy to be Dekker himself who seemingly found it hard to navigate around the room (albeit it a very large one) and after getting "stuck" he couldn't make a corner and was fairly easy to pick off from that spot. Perhaps some of these minor glitches can be resolved in later patches.

Overall the AI is quite satisfactory, there are some moments of great intelligence and at others they are quite dumb. Half-Life's marines it seems are still the benchmark for AI in games, Soldier of Fortune does nothing to change this situation.

Levels

As I've stated earlier on Soldier of Fortune is based firmly within reality. You won't find any alien worlds here. Again, like I said earlier, this game plays out like a Bond film. Many of the locations are high-tech army military locations, like in Siberia. Others are quite low tech like the African locations. Either way they all look very nice and everything looks right and feels right design wise. The levels are generally well thought out and despite the linearity of the levels you don't ever really feel that you are being lead through them. There seems to be a nice logic as to what needs to be done and how you can proceed further.

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