Soldier of Fortune doesn’t have the most interesting premise, but it is the way in that Raven Software executes it that makes the game special. Gamers are in the role of John Mullins (who is, in fact, a real person who has fought terrorism around the world), one of the world’s most deadly and cunning soldiers, who is hired by the US government to tackle the dirty missions they don't want to "officially" handle. His latest assignment has him up against impossible odds, having to retrieve stolen nukes and take out the leader of the terrorist group who organized the heist.

Converting game engines designed to run on an advanced piece of PC hardware is always a difficult task, and Soldier of Fortune makes it – but just barely. Knowing that a company was able to successfully port Quake II to the PS One without hacking it to pieces and Quake III: Arena came to the Dreamcast months earlier locked at 30 frames per second, the rush job done to Soldier of Fortune is a mind boggler. The textures making up the game’s enemies and environments are completely blurred, losing much of the detail found in the original game. The frame rate is fairly consistent, but not exactly what you would call exceedingly speedy, especially when compared to Quake III: Arena, a much cleaner, more optimized conversion of a more advanced game engine. The Quake II engine isn’t the most beautiful thing after all this time, and the washed out, Nintendo 64-esque texture blur look definitely drags things down.

Though there weren’t many first person shooters released on the Dreamcast, Soldier of Fortune demonstrates how well the controller’s design lends itself to the genre. The four main face buttons control moving forward, backward and strafing, R handles firing and the d-pad is manipulated to jump, crouch, open doors and change weapons. Moving your left thumb over to the d-pad is somewhat confusing at first, and it makes a quick transition from jumping to firing difficult, but it isn’t terrible. On the other hand, the controller’s analog stick can be a problem; it is far too sensitive, making aiming tough for precise shots. Thankfully, much of Soldier of Fortune’s gameplay is designed around charging into a room and taking out everyone’s appendages before they realize what has happened.

If you read through my review of Rune: Viking Warlord on the PlayStation 2, you would have noted that one of the most critical complaints was in regard to the terrible and frequent load times. I thought I had seen slow load times, but Soldier of Fortune is a heck of a lot worse. Maybe Runecraft didn’t take the time to pop the game into real Dreamcast consoles to see what the load times were like, but they make Rune: Viking Warlord seem tame in comparison. Not only will you wait nearly a minute and a half (or more) sitting at a loading screen, but it does not even load an entire level. Rather, there were times where a little more than 30 seconds of gameplay occurred before the bullet-loading-screen-of-death popped up again. There is no excuse for a sub-par first person shooter like Soldier of Fortune to take such a long period of time to load, and it can only be blamed on sloppy cording at Runecraft.

Besides the mind numbing loading, blurred out textures and sluggish frame rate, Runecraft has been able to bring the game to the Dreamcast without having to alter too much. PC gamers will be hard pressed to notice any level changes that might’ve been made to make the game’s levels fit into the machine’s RAM, but all the violence, all the unique mission locales and the other pieces that made Soldier of Fortune a hit on the PC have been translated fine. There is the notable exception of a multiplayer mode (we understand why now – the frame rate would crumble with more if the screen was split), but it was never a highpoint of the game, anyway, and Quake III: Arena and Unreal Tournament do much better jobs at portraying a proper multiplayer experience.

Through and through, Soldier of Fortune is a mess of a port. There are problems riddled everywhere, and if you can somehow stomach the load times, you might possibly find the great game that was talked about on the PC so often. With a PlayStation 2 version coming down the line this fall, hopefully Majesco can do a better job of bringing Raven Software’s title to a console.