Gore in Soldier of Fortune 2

With the recent revisiting video of the game on the channel, I can't miss out the opportunity to make a text review of this goryous masterpiece on the site as well.

Body damage

Beginning with dismemberment - you have 3 points of amputation per limb, the head can be destroyed and the torso has 4 sections that get destroyed, revealing a sort of a bone and organ layer below.

The one thing here that hasn't aged all too well is that bone and organ layer, which looks very low res compared to pretty much anything else in the game. Otherwise the dismemberment looks quite good for its time.

One thing I have properly noticed only now is how nice the transition is from the stump to the rest of the model. What many games (including new ones) do is put a model of a chunk of meat with a bone sticking out at the end of the shortened limb. If it sits well and there is blood around it, it can deliver a convincing result, but often times it doesn't quite look entirely right.

Here the transition looks exceptionally well.

Look at that arm stump

If you do further testing (particularly removing feet) you can see some of those transitions being not as smooth, but for the most part I think it looks great. Just one of the many things to appreciate here.

A massive feature here is the dynamic head damage. If you land multiple hits on the head with a pistol or a rifle, or if you blast the head from a distance with a shotgun what you will see is just chunks of the head removed. Specifically and exactly the parts of the head that you hit.

And if you test it further you can see just how crazy detailed it can get. You can remove the entire half of the head vertically, you can step by step remove everything and leave nothing but the jaw (something we occasionally see as a pre-made head variation in games), you can unface the character, play brain surgeon and so on.

As far as I'm aware it's the first game to do something like that, and even today dynamic head damage, particularly of this type is far from a common occurrence.

And of course I absolutely have to mention the wounds. What you will have is a response at the point of impact. Different wounds based on whether you're using a pistol\rifle\smg or a shotgun. In the case of the shotgun there's a difference for shots from a distance and from close up. And, in the case of a shotgun blast or a shot to the head (by anything in the latter) there will be an additional blood decal on the body, just to make things messier.

Peppered from a distance, with an additional blood decal because why not

As I mentioned in the Revisiting video, even today some games struggle to deliver a good response at the point of impact, and for a while SoF2 was one of the few solid examples of this mechanic.

I do have to mention that you will be seeing glass shards stick out of characters if an explosion sent glass flying their way.

Unfortunately something similar wasn't used for explosives (no pieces of shrapnel stuck in the character or anything). If explosives kill someone there will be no visual feedback, and if a grenade lands near a dead body or someone in the middle of a death animation, they'll just be gibbed.

And as for burning, we have a return of the tanning salon response from SoF1, only this time around just parts of the body will get the tan. So feels a bit better.

Environment

The non dismembering response initial response is not great- you will get one stain per character. Mag dump someone and one stain is all you'll have. I imagine the reason for that is performance limitations at the time, and I wonder if it can be fixed by mods.

On a dismembering hit however you will have several stains spawned on the impact, there will be several chunks of meat\brain that will spawn additional stains wherever they land, a stain will be spawned below a severed limb, and of course you will have the famous blood squirting effect from the stump.

The stains are mostly spawned behind the character with the trajectory of the shot, and that makes it feel nice and detailed, rather than just red paint spam we saw in some other games. The latter however is preferable to nothing at all.

THEY KILLED KENNY! (look at that nice spilling though)

And of course below each dead character you will have a blood puddle form.

As you can see in this review, there's a lot to praise the response mechanics for. Unfortunately though the aftermath is not one of those things. You will have all of it vanish, the blood, the bodies, the severed limbs, the gibs. And while it won't be as fast as we saw it in some games there's no way to configure it either, and as far as I'm aware no mods addressed it.

Animations

The response for a non fatal hit is going to be basic flinching, but if you don't immediately finish the character you will see that there's a limping animation when he moves from place to place. It isn't a full set of animations for every move that the character will do, but even something like that is still a very uncommon feature. In most games characters will just shrug off shots and keep running like nothing happened.

And, on the fatal hit you will see really nice death animations. You will have different animations based on where you hit the character and which weapon type was used. There's a wide variety of animations and they were really nicely animated, especially for its time.

I remember when I first played SoF1, this aspect really stood out to me. I've seen death animations in games before, but I've never seen them as lengthy and as visceral as they were there. And SoF2 faithfully continues that.

I should note that you can shoot the weapon out of a character's hands and they'll either flee in panic or pull out a sidearm.

What made it stand out

While the game has several exceptional features, some of which are still uncommon even today, the main thing that made it stand out is the fact that no aspect was neglected, and the exceptional amount of attention to detail that was put into every single aspect.

So you got the brutal and lengthy animations, but you also have the appropriate response on the character for whatever you did, dismemberment or wounds, and stains\blood pool\both will appear on the surroundings.

You don't have an unscratched character miming in clean environments.

Many games that are aiming for a brutal\gory feel focus on some aspects, but either completely neglect or notably underdeliver in the other ones. And in 2002, SoF2 did it incredibly well.

The game is now available on GOG.

***

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