Bruce Von Stiers

What happens when you have a game that is nothing but a gore fest and it sells like hotcakes? You hurry up and develop a sequel. If you’re lucky, the gaming public will love the sequel ever bit as much as the first title. This is what Activision is gambling on in its latest release. The title of the first game was Soldier of Fortune. Now they have given us Soldier of Fortune II: Double Helix. There have been quite a few gamers that have been waiting to see if the game is as good as it’s supposed to be Me, I’m not that much into hot lead and gore, but I even liked the challenges of the game. Double Helix was developed by Raven Software.

In Double Helix, like in the first title, you assume the role of John Mullins. You are a former top warrior for the US Armed Forces. Now you take on assignments from the Shop. This group takes on terrorists and extremely nasty bad guys to make the world a kinder and safer place.

The story for Double Helix deals with biochemical warfare and genomes. It seems that a scientist that Mullins helped get into the hands of the US government has discovered that someone is revamping old experiments that he initiated. There is a shadow organization called Promethus that seems to be behind this latest research.
John Mullins must seek out the many arms of Promethus and chop them off before the world can be destroyed. The folks at Raven Software supposedly set down with the real John Mullins to come up with a story line that was more in line with what might really happen in biological warfare and not some convoluted movie plot device.

As Mullins, you will be given a series of missions to complete. To be successful, you will have to be quick and deadly. You will have access to a whole arsenal of weapons. And there may be people out there to help you; or maybe not. There are more than 55 levels to complete. There is so much action that the game comes on two CD discs.

The game sports something called GHOUL II Technology. This is an element that was added to the Quake Team Arena engine that drives the game. With this added element there are 36 different damage zones on a character’s body. There are also 16 different dismemberment zones. Don’t want so much guts and gore? The game allows you to check off items that might be offensive to you and won’t show them during gameplay. You can turn off most of the blood, the death animations and, the most gruesome of all, the dismemberment of limbs.

Each level will have at least one set objective. In the first mission, you are to find Dr. Ivanovich in Prague and get him the hell out of there. You’ll find bad guys with a helicopter and some pretty nasty shotguns. In Mission 4, you’ll check out the mansion of bad guy Manuel Vegara. Find Vegara, a nasty Columbian drug lord, and integrate him. If you survive to capture Vagara, he might be able to provide some excellent intel for the Shop.

The graphics are excellent in the game. But you have to have a decent graphics accelerator card for the game to work really well. The game requires a 3D accelerator card with 15MB of VRAM and full OpenGL support. Anything less will make the game almost unplayable.

You will also need at least a Pentium II 450 MHz PC to play the game. None of those sissy 300 MHz machines need apply. 128 MB of RAM is essential, but 256 or even 512 MB of RAM would be even better. You will need a whoppin’ 1.3 GB of free hard drive space for installation, plus another 300 MB of hard drive space for a Windows swap file. And an 8x CD-ROM drive is also required.

The game also has a random mission generator. Here is where you can make up your own missions to take John Mullins on. Choose between mission types like demolition, infiltration and assassination.

There are also five types of multiplayer games. There is the Standard Deathmatch, the Team Deathmatch, Capture the Flag, Elimination and Infiltration. It’s each man for himself in the Standard Deathmatch, while you play as a member of a team on the rest of them. Infiltration has some specific mission objectives.

If you are into action/ adventure games and love hot blazing bullets mixed with gore, then Soldier of Fortune II: Double Helix is just the game to buy. It can be the best fun you could have without pulling on fatigues and slinging a MSG90A1 sniper rifle to your back.

As this is an intense and extremely violent game, it has an ESRB rating of Mature.

Soldier of Fortune II: Double Helix can be found at retailers like Circuit City and Best Buy.

For additional information about the game, visit the Activision web site at www.activision.com