Bet on Soldier: Blood Sport

The Good
Bet on Solder is sort of a seminal followup to the 2002 Fps Iron Storm, both games are developed by mostly the same team.

BoS has many similarities with its predecessor - again an alternate reality where WW1 never ended. But here instead in the future soldiers fight for money and the sake of entertainment in a Running-Man-esque worldwide phenomenon TV show with the title name. You take on the role of the protagonist Nolan Daneworth - a BoS fighter with amnesia who is working his way through the leagues to find out about his forgotten past & to track down two men he suspects knows the whereabouts of his missing wife.

For the most part, BoS plays out like a conventional shooter. What is different is that the game concept revolves around earning money by killing the opposition for buying new & improved weapons, ammo, equipment etc. instead of finding it laying around the level scapes fresh for the pillaging like in most other shooters. Okay.

The game is effectively broken down into missions. Before each mission one has to choose what stuff to take along beforehand. This is final - You can’t get new stuff during the mission, only at the beginning of the next & so on. Initially, one has limited funds to buy gear. You can buy basic armour, choose from an assortment of weapons - the basic Roto-Blade (re: a futuristic knife thing), one handgun type, one rifle, and also a heavy weapon. You can elect to take a shield as well, but then you can’t bring along a heavy weapon. Tough choice eh? Nah., no way. Something cool is that, providing you have the funds of course, is the ability to buy a couple mercenaries to personally help you out during a mission. More on these guys later. At this menu phase you also have to choose your BoS opponents. Depending on the length of a level determines how many of these you have to do. The fighters you choose from, called ‘champions’ in the game, have different ranks & stats, you can even read a short bio of their BoS careers. The higher ranked a BoS champ, the more money you stand to earn by defeating him.

When the actual game playing part begins, the first thing you notice is how fetching the graphics appear. The character animations are very fluid and quite realistic. When your home base is attacked at the start of the game, your team mates scuttle around in their clunky armour, issuing commands at one another amidst the kind of 50s-future inspired desolate industrial wasteland which is the battlefield. The sense of urgency and immediacy is at its height at this point of the game as you take to the fight with your comrades. When you begin slugging it out in heated firefights with the enemy soldiers, it is really cool seeing pieces of armour flake off as you plug away at your foes. Every time you register an enemy kill your money is tallied up & added to your account. One receives extra bonuses for head shots, and explosive kills. With the meagre pistol registering a head shot means having to shoot off the helmet first, exposing the gleam of the smooth polished, almost plastic looking bald heads of the unfortunate targets. The special visual effects, like when you shoot at a toxic drum, which just happen to be generously littered around the place, cause green gas to hiss & spray wildly, often causing a chain reaction of explosions from nearby barrels resulting in the soldiers coughing & choking amidst the thick fog of the aftermath. Of course, not only the enemies are affected by the gas - if you get a snoot full, the display swirls around erratically & your peripheral vision bleeds in and out until the intoxication wears off.

As you move on through the game you find reloading station outlets dotted around the level, so you can restock ammo, and repair armour - all at a cost of course. An aspect from Iron Storm which carries over here is that when you actually reload a weapon you effectively lose the rounds which were left over - so judging when to reload can be a factor. There is also a healthy amount of pay save stations about to keep progress, as well as regular check points. Knowing when to use a save station can be of importance, e.g. you wouldn’t use one after playing for a couple of minutes even if it were close by. Common sense and all that, I suppose.

The basic meat of the game-play is simply to move from one point to the next wiping out wave after wave of bad guys along the way. The process of doing this can be a lot of fun, particularly with the right equipment. The heavy Minigun was by far my fave weapon. There is one level which takes place in kind of a huge quarry/canyon area - absolutely chockablock with enemy minions and patrolling mech-like Exoskeletons. Going completely ape cakes blasting down the lumbering Exos and thinning out the hordes of on comers with this baby was easily as fun as a similar section in Crysis where you get your hands on a Minigun in a building site quarry.

Now I want to talk a bit about those mercenaries for hire I mentioned earlier on. These guys come in a variety of flavours - Engineers, snipers, & grunts. Of these the Engineers are by far the most useful - a real godsend when out in the field. While you can usually find a healthy amount of cover around the place, you are going to get shot or flamed or something else. This is where the engineers really shine. When your armour is trashed, these guys can be summoned at the click of a button to patch you completely up ready to carry on with the battle. The thing to bare in mind of course is you have to take care of these guys, by issuing simple commands like follow & stay to keep them as far away from the action as possible. Being able to get a recharge like this all the time is kind of like having a controlled god-mode.

BoS doesn’t have many vehicles in it to spice things up. Actually it only has one - yep, you guessed it - the Exoskeleton. But that is no hurt really as Exoskeletons are just so darned cool. Piloting one of these armoured behemoths gives you that warm & fuzzy feeling inside of being all powerful. Thundering down a burnt out town sending the baddies running & screaming to the sound of your heated Vulcan cannon is the mantra.

Oh, I almost forgot about the BoS fights. Okay, so at some points during a mission you will see some flashing red lights about, and that means a BoS fight is going to happen. You get this little TV style interlude announcing the challengers & the guy you are going to face with taunt you with some silver-tongued Engrish (no typo) These fights turn your average streets & citadels into arenas for the mono e mono battle royale. The guys you take on here usually have special energy shields for that extra bit of protection, so they are a little tougher than the normal baddies. These battles are still not so hard as you can usually find a little safe spot to plug away safely from harms way. You have about a minute or so to defeat your opponent, all the while the money to earn is declining the longer you take. If he wins, he gloats. If the time runs out he gloats, even though he didn’t win either. Ookay. If you win hurrah, hurrah etc., etc.

The Bad
One of the major areas where BoS falls short is that the overall play is largely very repetitive. You march from one area to the next almost mechanically laying waste to the droves of cannon fodder. Rinse & repeat until credits roll. Well not quite, but almost. Disappointingly, there is very little in the way of interacting with your environment, or having any genuinely interesting or varied missions to carry out. You may be asked to place a bomb on something or maybe to escort an engineer to a computer control panel, but short of this, there isn’t anything else for you to do except trounce the plentiful bad guys. Also, because you cannot collect ammo & weapons from fallen foes, there is little to no reason to go exploring around.

The enemy AI can be, well, very daft to be brutally honest. My earlier cannon fodder remark is not such a loose one. Most of the time enemies won’t even bother taking cover, and it is just a matter of sniping them down from a distance in an almost methodical fashion. Sometimes the enemies even have a questionable awareness of the player. One may catch a guy in the immediate vicinity just standing around gazing into space. Problems of the scripting variety can also on occasion afflict your team mates as well. In one instance I had to take an engineer to hack a gate switch, and I seemingly misplaced him during the hectic action. I backtracked a bit and found him running against the wrong side of the gate he was meant to open - I had to nuzzle him along all the way around a winding canyon before the script kicked in & the action continued.

Whist most of the graphics in BoS look sound enough, there are some noticeable exceptions. One will definitely encounter some somewhat low res ‘fuzzy textures’ here - particularly in environmental structure interiors - like brick walls and some doors, which would look more at home in a shooter from 1998. These kinds of sloppy inconsistencies don’t detract too much from the overall smart visuals, though can kinda bring you back to earth sometimes if you know what I mean.

The game story is very thin. The stuff about the hero having amnesia and searching for his estranged wife doesn’t get the pulse racing. You get some cut scenes at the beginning of the game, then there is the bulk of levels in the middle, and then you get a couple more cut scenes toward the end. It all amounts to very little.

The Bottom Line
I undeniably had some good times with BoS. The tech is ineluctably pleasing, with superb character animations & rag-doll physics, lens flairs, reflective surfaces etc. all of which holds up really well today. Plugging baldies in the head with the sniper rifle never gets old, and taking on entire armies with an exoskeleton can be a real rush. However, I think it would have been a better game if it had of been more of a true sequel to Iron Storm rather than the quasi followup that it is. It would have been great to have a much more involving storyline and generally more freedom & variety in play. I admit the whole B.o.S. thing is a novel approach, though if you will excuse the pun, a gamble which doesn’t entirely pay off. Most of the things in BoS that differs from the norm just seem like deep-laid mechanics in the game. But sadly they are just that. You know - forced mechanics, which don’t really ‘enhance’ the basic game-lay. During play, at no point did I feel as though my money was every really sparse or in dire need, or that every last bullet had to be my baby. These aspects are what gives BoS a feeling on the whole of being ultimately a flawed game that unfortunately isn’t more than the sum of its parts. A unique and interesting Fps to be sure, just not one with a great deal of staying power in the long run.