Bet on Soldier review

Ying and Yang. Cauliflower and cheese. Chas and Dave. All classic combinations that have enriched people’s lives for generations. Now the crazy fools at Parisian developer Kylotonn have tried to fuse the traditional first person shooter with a gambling game.

Shooting and gambling? Now that sounds like on hell of a pairing. But they haven’t stopped there. They’ve also thrown perpetual world war and a Running Man style TV contest into the mix. And a hero with amnesia/murdered family revenge plot, just to make things interesting.

You are said hero, who has lost his memory and decides to enter a televised league of future-gladiatorial combat to seek vengeance and uncover his past. As you do. As you progress up the BOS ladder you pick various different opponents to fight during the course of an otherwise bog-standard FPS level, gaining more cash if you fight harder opponents– hence the betting aspect.

This is a game that desperately wants to stand out from the FPS crowd. And to be fair, B.O.S has some good ideas. Unfortunately it gets the basics horrendously wrong.

Slowcoach

Take for example movement – an essential component in any FPS I’m sure you agree. BOS moves with all the grace of a lumbering Frankenstein’s monster. It’s slow. It’s unresponsive. This is not how an arcade shooter should play.

The logic behind this tedious tardiness is that both your soldier and your opponents are dressed head to toe in armour. This also means they can take much more damage than in most first person shooters. And when I say much more I’m talking stupidly excessive amounts.

An early tactic you’ll learn is to stand perfectly still for extended periods while shooting your foes. Really. Forget all that weaving in and out of cover (of which there is a limited supply) which games like Halo encourage; in BOS that kind of cowardly behaviour is for wimps. Nope, you should stand in the open and take it like a man. It makes for a deeply unsatisfying experience.

Weapons? You’d be better off using harsh language

Your terminator like resilience might have proved more interesting if the weapons had a bit of clout behind them. Unfortunately they do not. They look wimpy, sound puny and take an age to whittle away enemy armour. F.E.A.R showed us how meaty gaming guns could get. In comparison, most of BOS’s weapons have all the destructive power of a pellet gun.

Cash crisis

Rather bizarrely your character is unable to pick weapons up from felled foes. Perhaps he’s forgotten on account of his amnesia, or maybe because the three-foot thick armour he wears prevents him from bending over, who knows.

Instead you most buy ammo and armour from various points scattered about each level, the idea being that careful, accurate players will use there weapons wisely and take less damage. This sounds okay in theory, but doesn’t seem to have been balanced correctly. There’s little incentive to conserve cash or be cautious with ammo.

To this catalogue of errors we can further add some truly dreadful animations. You would have thought most developers would have got the art of animating someone running down to a fine art by now. After all people do it quite a lot. But in BOS, soldiers move with all the grace of a constipated ice skater.

Needless to say AI is also laughably bad, turning the potentially promising one on one duels against fellow B.O.S contestants/soldiers into dull, pointless affairs.

So much for Newton

What about the physics? Rubbish. Well after you’ve shot at one of the shoddily animated enemies for about half an hour he may eventually decide to die. But rather than fall to earth with a clunk, as you may expect someone wearing more armour than your average tank would do, they float breezily to the floor as if they didn’t have a care in the world.

Well I’m a good way into the review and I haven’t had much to say on the positive side of BOS. Quick think on your feet man! Oh yes head shoots look quite good if you pull them off. There about the only way to finish someone off quickly, although you normally have to be pretty close to them and shoot off a helmet first, but they ‘splode pretty good.

More recommendations? Let me see. Well a few times the game went into slow motion. However this is no Max Payne style gameplay device, it was a result of random slowdown I experienced from time to time - for a game that looks pretty out of date BOS is a bit of system hog.

What about the scenery?

Okay lets try level design. Snowy valleys. Half-sunken cargo ships. War-torn wasteland. Sounds promising. But wait. All the level design is relentlessly linear and totally uninspiring. The route from A to B is always totally clear-cut, leaving little room for experimentation, variation or surprise.

Ahh, I’ve got another plus point. The mechs look good. And you get to pilot them. But they’re slow and rubbish. Which is a criticism that pretty much sums up the game. This is an ambitious title that tries to be original but fails on almost every level due to poor design. An odds-on failure.