The story is completely unimportant as your character is nothing more than a mindless ape on a rampage. The mercenary alter ego is about as Manly (with a capital M) as they come with a booming voice, a bad ass attitude and a healthy appetite for destruction. You might be inclined to watch the movies before every mission, but once you realize that your objective is simply to kill everything that moves, you will skip them.

Enough about the good parts, though, let's see where the developers went wrong with SOF: Payback. When first starting the game, I was actually pleasantly surprised. The enemies are plenty and die easily, dismembering is fun and easy, everything seems in order. After dying a couple of times, though, I started noticing the first major issue with the game.

You can choose from three difficulty levels when starting the game, but even playing the game on easy doesn't mean that you will breeze through the levels, like it does in other games. Instead, "easy" seems to be a good joke, or is probably referring to how "easy" you die. The good news is that enemies can die from one shot to the head or neck. The bad news is that you can die from one shot anywhere. Or you can die while standing still, because some helicopter has a grudge on you and decides to bomb you. There are a couple of levels where you die easily if you stand still for more than 5 seconds, be it by helicopter rockets, explosions that repeat every 20 seconds in the same place, or some guy with a rocket launcher that is sniping you from the other end of the level.

If you're not standing still and decide to take the combat to them, you will notice another major issue. While you're charging head on into the biggest mass of enemies that you see, ready to blow their heads off, they will simply ignore you and run to where you were 20 seconds ago. It seems that the AI has only two possible actions when they spot you. They can stand still and shoot you continuously, since they don't seem to ever reload, or they will run like mindless chickens ready to be shot in the back. Grenades don't seem to bother them too much since they will never avoid one and some of them will even decide to check it out closer. Probably they like being dismembered, or maybe this is just some way of showing off the engine, who knows?

So far we have enemies that are simply retarded and a difficulty level that seems more like a good joke as you're progressing. Let's move on... Since the single player campaign is not very long (at most 8 hours), artificially increasing the difficulty level is a good way of making it a bit longer. No one considers the fact that they're irritating the gamer as hell with this. When you're not banging your head against the wall or smashing the keyboard in frustration you will learn anatomy. Yes, that's right, SOF: Payback could be great educational material for future doctors and coroners everywhere, considering the amount of blood, guts and limbs that you produce.

This is one of the most violent games I've ever played. Take a glance at the screenshots and you'll believe me. The weapons are incredibly powerful and one shot from anything is enough to kill an enemy. Before dying, enemies will wander around without an arm, with blood gushing from their neck; they will try to limp to someplace safe and so on. When shot in the groin they will collapse after a couple of seconds of screaming and head shots will quickly produce a corpse that is also a fountain (of blood, of course). Not even dead are they safe, as you can continue to blow their limbs off while experimenting with different weapons. While this is fun at first, while experimenting with shooting different body parts on each enemy, it will become boring in the end and the blood will bother your vision.