Bet On Soldier Reviews

i did enjoy the game throughout my whole playthrough on the hardest difficulty, but there are some things that makes this game not recommended for others. though i've changed the review to recommended since i have been unable to find a game that replicates it's mechanics so well, even after trying iron storm i think this game had the right balance of difficulty and sense of progression. this game can be categorized as a trench warfare game, a game where you are making small gains at the rate of 1 enemy per minute, though most of that is because i picked the hardest difficulty, and although i did enjoy sniping every enemy that came across my path, i don't think this would be enjoyable to most people except if you enjoy older medal of honor games or older call of duty game since are similar at times. this game has a mechanic of gaining money for each solder slain, earning extra for headshots or object kills or simply killing higher tier enemies, this matters quite a bit in the earlier levels but in later levels it was no longer a worry, this game's whole identity kind of hangs around this mechanic with occasional minibosses known as B.O.S soldiers along with a 15-30 second introduction for each fight, these introductions aren't fun to see over again mainly because of the pacing breakup this causes, and you can only skip half of the introduction, the B.O.S soldier battles themselves are time limited, and you don't really lose anything if you run out of time, though if you win you will gain a decent pay bonus, but another thing about these battles is that they can feature enemies with hallucigen gas and flash blind bullets, these halluicigens completely mess with your camera for as long as you are in the gas plus a few seconds after, and the flash bullets completely blank out your screen for a few seconds, these effects also extend to non B.O.S enemies in the later part of the game, not fun to fight against as you can imagine. this game often takes itself really seriously, its like a double A game trying to act like a triple A game, it really tries to set up this B.O.S program as a big thing but it does somewhat get in the way of the game, this is most obvious in the cutscenes and introductions trying to weave a grand narrative but its a fairly generic plot of revenge, about 30 minutes of my playtime is just repeat cutscenes, the voice acting also tries to sound serious but even though im sure these actors tried their best about 80% of the acting comes off as pretty weak or unclear what people have said, although the voice and environment audio mixing here is good so its passable, the subtitles also get mismatched at times, particularly towards the end of the game subtitles cut a few words at first and then at the final mission actually adding or changing words entirely, possibly trying to retcon what the actors actually said, though this is most likely because the studio itself is french and most of the names and culture inside this game is european. this game does also make you have to pay for save spots which i think is a pretty cool idea even though making the save spots one time use would have been enough since there wasn't a point where i didn't have enough to save the game. this game should have gone towards a more war profit explanation for why you earn money since for the game itself is just a regular war game along with B.O.S only being important within cutscenes. this game is pretty good for a 2005 game, it has all the modern controls like E to interact middle mouse button to scope, and pretty good physics, and for the most part i didn't encounter anything game breaking other than NPC's occasionally getting stuck in their own path (though they are easy to push), even though the NPC pathing in this game is actually really good, their movements are often hard to predict while still being effective at destroying you and your team, and the teammates that you can bring are also quite useful to keep around, they do quite good damage while also taking some damage for you. there are technically 2 endings for this game although there are only small differences between them, and one of them sends you to and extra hard arena you have to fight through, the main problem with the arena is just the unskippable cutscenes that where added for each set of enemies, and after you beat the game in either ending you do get a choice to go back and fight for the second ending. there are technically 3 B.O.S games with this game having a subtitle of "blood sport", though since the other games are mechanically identical other than environment structure and probably more story, and since only one of them is on steam, it is fair to judge all three of these games as one, though if the other two games showed up on steam i'd likely still play them, but that seems unlikely since this game doesn't have a subtitle so im only going to be playing it once. for the current price of the game on steam it does have a decent amount of content and it is pretty good as a trench warfare game but overall i wouldn't consider it worth playing for most people because of these 2005 game standards and occasional unfun mechanics.

I spent my hard-earned money on this game back in the day and then gave up on it because it was so insanely difficult. Now I've tried it again and have to admit it's the most insufferable, soulless, buggy mess I've ever played. I can't imagine it was released after great first person shooters like HL2. I feel cheated out of my $60, even now 20 years later. A huge F*** Y*** to everyone invoved in this. Digital Jesters went bankrupt shortly after the release of Bet On Soldier - and quite rightly so.