“This should have been aborted” were the words used by our illustrious editor to describe this title as he packed it off to me for review. While I like to consider myself something of a champion for the right of the unborn video game to life I have been forced, somewhat inevitably, to agree with him. If Soldier of Fortune: Payback (henceforth referred to as “this horrible game”) was a person it would be the kind who spends most of his time tooling with a broken pick-up truck and ogling gun porn in between waiting to collect welfare cheques. The type of cretin who likes to get drunk and get into bar fights for no reason other than he likes any excuse to punch other people and the sort of inbred intelligence vacuum who refers to anyone from the great cultural diaspora of the Middle East as a ‘raghead’.

Anyway, the point is, I hate this horrible game. It manages to completely fail at pretty much everything, even right down to its central gimmick – the gore. When a gimmick is all you’ve got, it’s got to be awesome. If it’s not, all it will do is further reinforce how unimaginative and hackneyed your game is. Setting aside the innate foolishness of trying to trade on splatter alone it’s clear from even the first level that the supposedly highly advanced system of corpse dismemberment and deformation is in reality an ugly, buggy mess. Limbs instantly disappear when shot, ragdolls stick in walls, blood decals and gibs vanish within seconds. It all adds nothing to the gameplay, does nothing to improve player immersion, doesn’t even look terribly impressive and it’s broken.

Because if it didn’t have such childish attempts at ultra-violence the rest of its flaws would be laid bare for the even the most trigger happy console junky to see. I believe there’s now a law somewhere that every game on a next-gen console must include copious amounts of HDR lighting and physics, and Soldier of… sorry – this horrible game throws both into the mix regardless of whether they work or not. The physics bugs affect not just the ragdolls but most of the objects that move about in the game. Clipping is rife, enemies and vehicles will occasionally stick permanently in mid air, while the force of the largest explosions will fail to ruffle even the lightest of firearms lying in the vicinity. And thanks to the shoddy graphics and lighting work things glow that really should not glow, like sandstone walls, while your eyeballs slowly glaze over more with each new drably painted environment.

Despite some level of weapon customisation and various flavours of shooter to choose from there’s little to no tactile (and in some cases even visual) difference between most of the death-dealers on offer. Hitting anything with them is tricky too as the control system for the game makes it feel as if your character is moving through molten treacle, but this is tempered somewhat by most of your enemies being content to run towards you and gleefully soak up any damage you send their way.