Soldiers of the Universe (SOTU), Rocwise Entertainment‘s and also the first FPS game that was made in Turkey. The trailer looked decent and I was excited to play a fresh first-person shooter again, sadly I got let down quite a bit.
Story
The story of SOTU goes as follows, there is a secret organization in the Republic of Turkey called “Akinci Warriors” that specializes in secret military operations. The main character called Hakan takes over his father Selim Kahraman’s place as “The Toyga” of Akinci Warriors. He will lead military operations to take his father’s revenge and he will fight against the enemies of the state. Having trained in military and for many years Hakan will be fighting a relentless struggle against terrorists along with three other heroes that joined to his side. With the intelligence gathered by the Republic of Turkey, The Military and Akinci Warriors the four so-called “heroes” will carry out operations against multiple terror organizations in Southeast Anatolia, Northern Syria, and Istanbul.
All I can say about the story is that it wanted to be deep but turned out very bland and felt kind of nationalistic as well. It doesn’t present itself well and couldn’t grab my interest at all. the game calls itself a story driven game but completely misses the spot.
Gameplay
SOTU is a modern day FPS, I hadn’t played one of those in a while so I thought it would be refreshing to play one again, but what I got was one big mess. First things first, when I started the game I was surprised by the very clean looking menu which raised my hope, I started the game and had to watch two cutscenes to introduce me to the story but it was just vague to me and the animations were very poor as well. Eventually, you get dropped in some sort of ruined town that when playing, feels like a long hallway with a few turns.
The optimization is horrible, I wasn’t able to hit a steady 60FPS on max-settings so I toned them down a bit and as a result, my FPS dropped even more, so I just had to live with inconsistent FPS. Next thing I noticed is the AI, both the enemy and friendly AI are completely broken.
Whenever an enemy sees you he just starts shooting you and even when you hide behind cover he will continue shooting until he empties his mag and has to reload, whenever you move out of cover he will instantly lock his aim on you again from any distance, as long as you are in his line of sight, and whenever you get hit your screen shakes like you are witnessing an earthquake which makes it really hard to shoot back. It also seems that enemies ignore your comrades completely and just focus on you, but your comrades don’t like shooting back either, so most firefights are just a big waiting game, and with the number of enemies the game has, it gets really boring.
The friendly AI also doesn’t know how to take cover most of the time. The character model of one of your squad-mates looks like it’s leaning against something, but last time I checked air isn’t something solid. The game did try to implement some cool features like a slide, but it doesn’t work well and is not usable at all because you’ll get killed immediately when running or sliding into the open. All these things just make the game a pain to play and not fun at all.
Apart from the boring gameplay, SOTU also features a large number of bugs. My weapon sometimes just disappeared so I had to suicide and try again or enemies just spawn in plain sight. In my opinion, this game should not have hit steam (yet) because it’s a mess and just doesn’t work correctly.
Graphics and Sound
From the looks of the trailer I expected the game to look quite good but I was completely let down when I started playing. The areas were completely empty and bland which is covered up by large amounts of dust and fog. The textures are really inconsistent, from not bad to awful, the 3D models we’re just bad apart from some of the gun models which were pretty good. There also were a couple of alright special effect like the grenade explosion.
The levels themselves are empty and boring as they are all long hallways filled with enemies and some cover thrown-in here and there. Then there is the sound, SOTU has some of the worst sound design I have ever seen. First of all the voice acting is just horrible, the voices sound cringy and without any emotion, it’s a burden to listen to if you want to follow the story.
Second are the gun-sounds. The enemy gun-sounds are obnoxiously loud, sound always the same and won’t stop, the worst thing is that toning down the “sound effects” will only cause you own gunshots to become quieter. There are also some missing sounds, at the end of the first mission you get picked up by a helicopter so I prepared myself for a loud noise but instead there wasn’t any sound at all. SOTU just fails at representing itself as a worthy game with bad graphics and sound.
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Sjaak den Heijer
Sjaak is an enthusiastic game design student from The Netherlands who has been gaming from a really young age together with his older brother. Sjaak loves writing about games and sharing his opinions about them.
