Planet Bob - Soldier of Fortune

RSS Bot · April 16, 2006

Hi there!

Some fresh blood here: John Cumming wrote another Graftgold classic:

Soldier of Fortune

Ratings:

Staff: Steve Turner (music) John Cumming (everything else)

Overview:

Fresh blood for fresh ideas! This game is pretty untypical for Graftgold. It's a very NESified action-adventure type of game. You jump'n'run through sideview scrolling levels, fighting monsters, ghosts and whatnot evil creatures blocking your path. In each level you'll find dozens of shops, offering weapons, defensive gear and - most important - scrolls.

Well, unfortunately you aren't a wizard or so, you're just collecting scrolls for some old guy with a funny hat...

Some scrolls you only get when trading in other scrolls for them and your main aim is to finally trade a bunch of scrolls for "elementals". You need 4 of them to complete the game. Whenever you get an elemental, it'll unlock another part of the game, where you'll find the next.

Fun in 2006:

Excellent surprise here! This is one marvellous gem I should've played years ago already! I have some minor issues playing it in emulation (phantom readings of my joypad once againl :ponder: ), but it's great fun anyways. It's very hard to master, but the more you play it, the better you get, which is very rewarding. This is one of those games I plan to beat some day

Soldier of Fortune compared to previous Graftgold titles:

Unlike any other Graftgold title I'd say. If comparable to anything else at all, I'd rather say it shares something with Firelord, a Hewson title John programmed before joining Graftgold. What's also interesting, even though Graftgold released "Soldier of Fortune" for the Spectrum as well, it's actually two almost totally different games!

Well, one Graftgold "standard" feature we have nevertheless: The music from Steve Turner. And, while I'm unimpressed with most of his SID tunes, this one I like the most besides Uridium.

What I also have to notice is the fantastic artwork from John Cumming in this game. It seems a pretty natural step that John specialised himself to artwork as soon as Graftgolds projects got too big to handle for single people.

Greetings,

Manuel

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