It's been a little while since a Soldier of Fortune game has graced our presence. Now that Soldier of Fortune: Payback has been released, I'm wishing that we had to wait a little longer.

This game is a victim of "Rush to Release at Christmas Syndrome" if ever I saw one. 

The story gives you a good indication of how bland the game is: an escort mission goes horribly wrong, and it's up to you (yes, YOU) to terminate an extremist plot aimed at throwing the world into utter chaos. Ugh. Cliché City. If that doesn't give you an idea of how unoriginal this game is, let me delve into the game a bit further.

Soldier of Fortune: Payback is a First Person Shooter, and the third game in the SoF series - but while the first two games were really groundbreaking at the time, the third one is a let down on almost every level - except one.

Soldier of Fortune games were best known for their excessive gore and dismemberment, and Payback does not disappoint. I don't think I've EVER seen this much gore in a videogame! Thanks to the many multiple "hit areas" on the character models, enemy bodies react realistically to wherever you shoot them. Shoot them in the foot with a shotgun, and that foot is long gone, leaving only a bloody stump. Throw a grenade at a couple of guys, and wish that they included an umbrella in your inventory, to stop yourself from being showered in a rain of blood and ligaments. Death and destruction in this shooter is so viscerally enjoyable, it almost redeems itself from it's not-so-enjoyable traits.

But there are so many of them, nothing can bring the game from out of the depths of mediocredom.

For starters, there are some escort missions that break up the action a little. This would be fine, if it wasn't for the fact that the game is bug ridden. If you were freed from a blood diamond camp, would you just sit in your cell and not move, even when being shot at? Would you walk halfway down a corridor stop dead in your tracks, and block your rescuer from moving in any direction? Nope, thought not. SoF Payback has many annoying glitches like this. What makes them worse is that once the civilian has stopped moving, you can't just reload the last checkpoint, but you have to reset the game, and restart the entire level from scratch.