Short changed?
Happily, those quibbles I’ve mentioned aren’t indicative of a poor game as Bet On Soldier appears to be pretty much bug-free, at least, I haven’t found any in my playing of it. One big issue I do have though are the hugely long load times… and by long, I mean, LONG. On starting up the game I actually thought my machine had frozen as it just didn’t seem to be doing anything except sitting there humming to itself. Eventually the front end intro screens popped up and we were off, but the less patient amongst us might have tried CTRL-ALT-DEL before then.
Click for larger imageWhat Bet On Soldier could really do with is some sort of progress bar to let you know just what is going on. I’d much rather know that the game is just taking a while to load from watching a slow moving progress bar than to sit there wondering if my rig has locked up. Once in game, the load times don’t feel as long as the initial boot, but it’s still a bit of wait and without seeing anything happening, the first few times will make you wonder if you’ve crashed.
Click for larger imageNow much has been made of Bet On Soldier being the first retail game to feature support for AMD 64 bit extensions and we’ve been running the game on both 32 bit and 64 bit versions of Windows to see what the difference is. To be honest, I couldn’t see any. Whilst writing this review I made a phone call to Digital Jesters to share my thoughts with them on the 64 bit version and its apparent lack of difference from the 32 bit version. In chatting to Digital Jesters previously, they told us that whilst they have been working closely with AMD to take advantage of the 64 bit extensions, the game does not yet fully utilise those extensions, hence the reason why there is little or no discernable difference between the two.
Click for larger imageSimilarly, the KT engine utilises the Ageia PhysX engine to handle the in-game physics. This is most obvious when shooting explosive barrels as they propel themselves around the screen on the jet of flame produced by shooting a hole in them. It’s deeply satisfying to pop a shot into a barrel, watch it pirouette off into a group of soldiers lightly toasting them before exploding in a shower of shrapnel which destroys a pile of wooden crates next to it. But the use of the Ageia engine doesn’t stop there as Bet On Soldier has been coded to take advantage of the new Ageia PhysX chips coming out soon.
Click for larger imageNow both the 64bit extensions and the Ageia PhysX chip will see full support implemented in a patch to be released fairly shortly, in time for when the Ageia PhysX chip hits the retail market. Of course, none of that will matter to those of you running 32 bit Windows with no Ageia PhysX chip in your machine, but what Digital Jesters are saying the patch will do is speed up the load times regardless of which version of Bet On Soldier you’re running as well as enhance the game through full implementation of both AMD’s 64 bit extensions and Ageia’s PhysX chip.