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The game itself is mission based, with missions taking place within various leagues… as you progress through the missions you gradually work your way up the leagues, earning more cash as you go. As well as being able to take a couple of mercenaries into the missions with you, you’ll quite often meet up with soldiers on your side, some of who will lend you hand or point you in the right direction for the objective you need to achieve. In this respect, Bet On Soldier is much like most other FPSs out there and though you can give basic commands to your mercenaries, for most of the time they act like the AI troopers in Call Of Duty. The react to threats and sometimes get in your way, but they will take cover if taking damage or needing to reload, though there doesn’t seem to be anyway to repair their armour, so once they’ve taken too many hits, you’ll be on your own.
Now, I mentioned armour earlier on and it’s in the armour and health department that Bet On Soldier differs from other FPS games by quite a margin. Unlike most other FPSs, what you enter a battle with is what you’ve got for the entire mission. Dead soldiers don’t drop weapons, ammo or health packs… there’s no handy boxes of grenades lying about. So once you start taking damage and running out of ammo your only chance is to make it to a repair station and buy yourself more kit. You can’t swap out what you took into the mission, but you can completely repair your armour and replenish all your ammo with the exception of your heavy weapon. Your health is stuck where it is, there’s no way to heal at all until you reach the end of the level.
Bet On Soldier uses a great modular damage system, which affects you just as it does the AI… so you need to keep a close eye on your armour indicator. Once that goes black you’ll start losing health with each hit, but until then, your armour takes all the damage for you. This introduces a new set of tactics, as you’ll now have to decide whether or not to try and push forward and take the next repair point ahead of you, or fall back and repair then fight your way forwards again. And of course, you’ve then got to worry about how to spend your cash… do you buy full armour repairs or leaves the legs and get more ammo? How far away are you from facing off against the enemy elite? Should you try and save some cash now to be sure to go in against him fully tooled up? Tricky…
As you can see adding in the money as an ever present factor to consider will change the way you play. But on top of this is the modular damage system, which again will affect how you play. The armour system has been nicely integrated into this, so that scuffed up battle armour on the guy you’re blasting away at isn’t there just for the look, it really is stopping your bullets from hurting him. When you place your crosshair over an enemy, you get a little icon pop up which shows the state of his armour. Black areas are where his armour is totally shot away, so aiming for them is a good idea… except shooting someone in the legs takes a fair few more rounds to kill them than two or three well aimed shots to the head. And yes, it will take a few shots to the head as you’ll have to shoot away his helmet first before delivering the ‘coup de grace’.
Beware though, as the AI can see where your armour is most damaged too, so if you leave it too long, you’ll find that they’ll all soon be aiming at your weak spot and your un-replenishable health will soon disappear. In fact, the AI in Bet On Soldier are pretty damn hot, even at this stage of the game’s development. They take cover to reload, they react to being shot at and only rarely do they just try and walk in a straight line at you. Quite often, if they’re cornered and taking damage, they might even try a kamikaze style charge right at you… and it might be coincidence but they buggers seem to wait for you to reload before they do it too.
On one of the larger maps which was a vast open mining area, I was running around looking for the enemy to find them all in one group hiding in a ditch. As soon as I fired on one, the whole lot of them opened up on me, leading me to leg it away… a few of them chased me but once I’d dealt them enough damage they legged it back to their mates sharpish… lobbing a couple of grenades in there caused them to scatter in all directions… pretty good stuff.
