[Note: this review was written by my friend Mohammed Raei from Amman, Jordan; see his personal blog here – The Freewaregenius]
Soldat is an action packed 2D third-person shooter that can be described as a ‘Worms’ variant in real time. It can be played solo or multiplayer online.
This game offers tons of weapons, maps, play modes, and opponents. You can play this game with anything from twin eagle pistols to a Gattling type machine gun. It is extremely fast paced, especially when you are facing more than 3 opponents. Objectives range from killing everything that moves to missions such as ‘capture the flag’ that have to be coordinated with a team of other human or computer controlled players.
The game is highly customizable in terms of music, weapons available, number of opponents, number of grenades, etc. You are also equipped with a personal “fly pack” which allows you to “fly” for short distances around the map. One of the nicer things is that different weapons have different fire rates and different reload times.
If you win on a certain map it does not guarantee that you will win on another and that is where the fun is. You can cycle maps, so that once you finish a map, you go to another one instead of going back to the same map.
One note regarding the number of opponents, the more opponents you have, the more your need for a faster machine/ graphics card. I usually play th
is game on an AMD Athlon XP 2000+ with an Nvidia FX 5200 and can play against 6 opponents without any problems. I also tested the network gaming feature on my slow 128k internet line and it worked without any problems.
Differences between paid and free versions: if you like this (and you probably will) you may simply want to pay for it just to support a great game. Differences include more customizability offered by paid version (custom interfaces, custom profiles), unlimited recording of battles, and colored jet flames. Nothing major.
I have been playing this game for over three weeks now and find it highly addictive. An excellent game overall that will have you hooked once you get into it.
Version tested: 1.3.1
Compatibility: Windows 98/Me/2000/XP; DirectX 8.1
Go to the download page to download the latest version (approx 2.7 megs). The program home page.
