I bought this in the name of inside gaming

inside gaming played it 10/10

Old-school FPS fun pretty much sums this game up. The voice acting/dialogue is a little cringe worthy, but that kind of adds to the appeal personally. Visually it looks pretty good, even today. Is it "OHmahGAWD CRYISISIS 3 maxxed" good? No. But that doesn't matter, especially for a game that's 8 years old. Bottom line; the game's fun and it's only $10.

So bad it's good.

I, like many people (I assume), first heard about this game from the guys at Inside Gaming. It looked interesting, I must admit, and when the price temporarily dropped down to $1.25, I knew I had to have it in my game library.

Well, one thing I can tell you now is that it IS definately worth a buck and a fourth. This has got to be the worst game I have ever played. To start with, for an FPS, the gunplay is surprisingly terrible. The guns have no real presence and all of the sounds for them, from firing to reloading, are laughably stock. Each gun takes what feels like a year to reload (I'm sure you can see where that would get frustrating.) The graphics are extremely dated, even for a game that came out in 2006. It is also a Russian-made game. This in itself does not make it a bad game by any means, but it does mean that it has had to be redubbed. The voice-overs in this game are just unbearably atrocious. Everybody in it sounds uninterested in the current situation and when they should be yelling, they tend to do little more than talk in a high whisper. They are so bad that they make the acting in Just Cause 2 look like GTA V. The horrible voiceovers are not helped by the translated text, which so far has not had any spelling mistakes, but it is very convoluted to the point that you may need to reread certain sentences more than once.

The AI is something to be studied and talked about for many, many years in the future. Oftentimes I have seen enemy soldiers run into walls and not turn around. If they are not running into walls, they are throwing grenades at the ceiling and blowing themselves up. If they are not trying to commit suicide, they are making a beeline for you so they can continuously wack you in the face. To make combat a little more interesting, the developers have put a few "creative" features into the game. If you are taking too many bullets from all sides, you can put up your "UberShield", which will absorb incoming rounds and deflect them back at your enemies. It also, unfortunately, does not let you shoot back at them, as it collects your rounds and fires them when the shield runs out. In addition to this, there are the "UberSniper" and "Berzerker" modes, which make you immune to damage after 3 headshots and 3 knife kills, respectively. While all of these features may sound very interesting, they are not implemented into the game very well at all, and half of the time they just feel like a retread of other features from previous first person shooters.

The last thing I am going to talk about in this short essay of a review is the cutscenes. You remember cutscenes, don't you? The kind of ones that are either pre-rendered or made with the ingame engine? Well, if you don't like either of those, don't worry, Ubersoldier II has got you covered! Introducing the new and absolutely revolutionary comic-book cutscene! Watch as only 4 or 5 pictures are played continuously over bland dialogue. This has never been done in a game before, and I am sure that it is going to catch on with the AAA developers all over the world. (In all seriousness, the 4 or 5 pictures that they use in their cutscenes look hand-drawn, which at least took somebody some effort to make. Occasionally, they are drawn quite well, but not too often.)

It may sound like I am taking the ♥♥♥♥ out of this game. It might not deserve it, but oh boy is it such an easy target. It is definitely one of the worst games I can think of that came out in the last decade, something on par with Ride to Hell: Retribution. There are a couple of major differences between these games, though. Ubersoldier II has got plenty of soul, and a hell of a lot of heart, while Ride to Hell is as cruel and heartless as the Devil himself. When I play Ubersoldier, I at least get the sense that there was a team of people actually TRYING to make a good game. You know what, I think they actually might have succeeded.


In short: Is this a fun game?

Hell yes!