Score
Gameplay:	7
Graphics:	7
Sound:	4
FunFactor:	4
PlasmaFactor:	3
Overall:	5

Uber Soldier
April 30, 2006 by Matt Wetsel

by Matt Wetsel - April 30, 2006

There are some games that have such high reccommended system reqiurements, they practically mandate an upgrade just so you can squeeze out those extra frames or up your resolution. These kind of games are usually worth the upgrade, too, since with newer technology comes newer experiences. Sadly, this isn't the case for UberSoldier, a game that never tries to be anything more than average, but who's system requirements are so high that an upgrade might be necessary just to get the damned thing up and running. Besides, odds are if you have a system nice enough to run this game, you're already using it to play something much better.

Ubersoldier is a first-person shooter that follows in the footsteps of games like Return to Castle Wolfenstein, only it never does anything to seperate itself from the competition. Players control Karl Stolz, a Nazi soldier who was killed in duty, operated on, given supernatural powers, and finally, resurrected. He's part of a new program to make use of their dead by turning them into supersoldiers who will obey the every command of the first person who speaks to them. Something goes wrong with Karl, though, and, recalling the abuse he's suffered at their hands, proceeds to take his revenge on Nazi Germany. Umm...right.

In terms of gameplay, if you've played any FPS before, then you'll know exactly what to expect from Ubersoldier, at least in theory. Most games nowadays have some form of scripted events, but they're so painfully obvious here that they really take away from what little fun could be had otherwise. For example, you'll be inside a building trying to find a key or some documents, and your radar tells you exactly where to go - no need to explore or even attempt to create an open-ended feeling to the game. The most frustrating part, though, is you'll walk by a multitude of doors which you can't open, which usually means they're just there for show - in Ubersoldier, though, once you've found the right item (not usually keys, as that would make sense) the radar suddenly points into the room you couldn't enter and the door will now be open. It would be ok if this only happened once or twice to keep a level going, it happens so frequently that there isn't any point in exploring the levels, since the game decides when you can enter most areas. This kind of hand-holding destroys the flow of the game, since it's like having a built-in walkthrough which actively prevents you from walking off course.

I usually take the middle road and play my games on medium difficulty, not too easy and not too hard. While this holds true for Ubersoldier, it seems like the only reason it does is because of the overwhelming amount of health packs available. No matter what you do, you're going to take a lot of damage in this game, and your health will fluctate from 80 to 20 and back again within minutes. Part of it has to do with some slightly innacurate weapons, or maybe it's just poor hit detection, but regardless, you'll be taking some damage through no fault of your own.

 

Where Are We Again?

Even though it takes place during World War II in Nazi Germany, most of the time you'll have trouble knowing it. The weapons have all been modeled to look authentic, but thats where the consistency ends. You won't see much decoration to indicate the Third Reich's presence (which may have been a design decision, which is understandable), but between the vague locations and the poorly executed/integrated story, you won't feel like you're doing much of anything but going where you're radar tells you and killing more generic bad guys. To it's credit, the levels are varied enough that they're fairly recognizable, and most of the textures and models are crisp and have a decent amont of detail. The seemingly now-standard ragdoll physics do their job, but every now and then you'll shoot someone in the head and their body will go flying up in the air for no reason and slam back down. Smoke effects are subtle but pretty, and when something explodes, almost everything that can be interacted with will catch on fire for a brief time (including things like health packs), which is an interesting effect and can help create some additional chaos in a firefight.

 

This, however, is where any and all praise stops. For every efficient to pleasing graphical effect there is, there's a whole slew of some of the worst voice-acting to ever offend your senses. Of course, everyone can appreciate some odd or humorously bad voice-overs (the original Resident Evil comes to mind), but in Ubersolider it isn't funny-awful, it's quit-playing-this-stupid-game awful. If the environments didn't do much to establish that your in war-torn WWII Europe, the audio takes any chance of that feeling and throws it out the window - all characters in the game, Nazi's or your allies, have some of the lamest dialogue you'll ever hear, with voices so annoying you'd think they were done by these guys. I thought I was fighting Nazis, not pre-pubescent 14 year-olds with a sinus cold. To top it all off, enemies have about 3-4 phrases which they say over and over whenever they see you, all of which you'll grow very tired of hearing very quickly. Also, some of the ambient sound effects fluctuated in volume, often at inappropriate times (why are there birds chirping down in a sewer line??) There's some music to fill the would-be silence, but it's mostly boring filler.

The final nail in the coffin, though, isn't related to the gameplay in Ubersoldier at all, but to the entire package itself. The bare minimum requirements just to place it include a Pentium 2.4 (or AMD equivilant, 3.2 reccommended), 512 GB of Ram (1 GB reccommended), and a GeForce FX 5700 (6800 or higher reccommended). What??! Not even Oblivion needs a machine that powerful! Normally, if you meet or exceed a game's listed requirements (and my machine does), all is well, right?

Wrong. Despite meeting or exceeding every one of the reccommended specs, Ubersoldier still crawled at an unplayable frame-rate. It wasn't until I increased my AGP aperture to 256 that I was able to make it relatively stable (and it still slows down from time to time). Heck, I even defragged my virtual memory! For a game that doesn't push your hardware to its limit in terms of technology (ala F.E.A.R), this kind of slowdown is completely unacceptable and really kills any chance Ubersoldier might have had to be of any value. Who wants to put together an expensive computer, only to spend an hour trouble-shooting an unstable game which is completely and utterly average?

It also installs (without telling you) StarForce, a wonderful anti-piracy system which has been known to compromise system security and sometimes disrupt the functionality of your optical drives. Heck, some guy in California is suing Ubisoft for using it without telling consumers! It's kind of funny to see such a controversial and hardcore copy protection on a game like Ubersoldier, because honestly, who's going to pirate it? It can only run on a handful of computers in the world, and like I said before, the people who can run it are already playing much better games.