Preview by Muskrat on 7/20/00

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When I heard Sinister Games was making a game based off of the Kurt Russell movie "Soldier," I started to laugh. The movie was horrible, both in acting and in content. In the film, Kurt Russell plays Todd, a trained-from-birth elite soldier, who is replaced by the next generation of genetically enhanced units. Left for dead, he is dumped off with the rest of the garbage on a desolate planet where he bumps into a marooned colony. Unable to relate to normal humans, he is pretty much a vegetable throughout the whole movie, showing very little emotion. And yet after Sandra and her husband show him pity, he feels compelled to protect these people from certain doom. Believe me, it really is not even worth a rental.

Luckily, the game has all of the atmosphere and action of the movie and none of the bad acting or plotline. Initially you are in the wastelands, like the ones in the movie, but you move into different areas like the swamps, catwalks, and cities. On several occasions I believed I was on a new level, only to find out that because of new lighting and character positioning, I was actually on the structures above the same level that I had been in. By using these techniques of level design, the gamer gets a sense of continuity and familiarity with particular area without feeling like you have played it before.

Soldier is unique among other games of its type because it plays like a 2D, simple shooter out of an arcade, yet in a 3D world. You don't have to worry about what weapon you have; it's all about jumping into the action and blowing things up. In order to get armor, health, or better weapons, an enemy has to drop them, so it is in your best interest to play aggressively. Adding to the challenge, items that are dropped disappear in 10 seconds, so snipering is not much of an option. There are also some tricks to the game, like dodging fire by jumping and rolling, which comes in handy during some of the more complicated battles. In essence, the storyline is unimportantly and barely exists. Like in Metal Slug or Contra, your objective is clear: Destroy the enemy and get as many weapon upgrades as humanly possible. And although the game doesn't have an involved storyline, there is something satisfying about not having to micromanage ammo, weapon selection, and armor. It's simple, straightforward, and easy to jump right into.

You can play either Todd or Sandra. If you play Todd, he will have more hit points than Sandra but he will move quite a bit slower. Sandra on the other hand has speed on her side, even though she can't take as many hits. This balance in character stats makes for an interesting and different gameplaying experience depending on whom you choose to play. Many other games with male and female characters tend to give both characters the same abilities in order to make them equal. It takes a bit more effort and design to balance out characters so that one is not necessarily better than the other. I think Sinister accomplished this goal successfully, and I would be greatly interested in seeing more characters in games balanced like this.

The game is due out on store shelves sometime in August for the PC.