Rogue Warrior

When you first boot up the game, the main menu can be a little deceiving. A dark, daunting theme plays, and the simple yet clean looking interface is placed beside a well animated model of Richard Marcinko himself (the main character) raising and lowering his knife, ready for combat. Unfortunately the rest of the game doesn't match the somewhat promising atmosphere created by the opening. Yes, I'm sorry if I ruined the suspense of this review, but I'll just be straight up with you. This game sucks and you shouldn't play it. To be truthful, I might even recommend that you just save your time and skip my review altogether since I've told you all you need to know by now. Still going? Well okay then.

The first time I booted up the main game, I got stuck in a long loading screen. At least that's what I thought. Wait for it, wait for it. Okay, I'm pretty sure it froze. Let me restart the console. Well that's a great first impression. Anyway, the second time the game loaded fine so we can talk about the actual gameplay. This is basically your generic, linear first-person shooting game. You have two guns to switch between, and can pick up any weapon that an enemy drops. Shoot through all the enemies standing between you and the next checkpoint. They actually did try to include some stealth to the action, which could've been nice if it wasn't so poorly executed.

I tried sneaking past a guard while he was looking the other way, and as I uncrouched to move faster, his sixth sense kicked in and he whirled around to start shooting me. It's a good thing the enemies are dumb as rocks so the cheapness doesn't matter as you'll easily be able to outsmart them even on the highest difficulty setting. Speaking of which, even if you're playing on “Elites” the game will only take maybe six hours to complete. Go lower and you're probably looking at something closer to three or four hours, since there are only eight short missions to play through. It's worth noting that if you do ever try to play stealthily and sneak up behind a guard, you can get a one hit melee kill, which zooms out to show Rich performing a fancy move.

There is a story behind Rogue Warrior, but don't expect anything complex, or interesting for that matter. If you haven't ever heard of Richard Marcinko (don't worry if you haven't, mostly only history and war buffs will know who he was) he was an old time hero who has went on to become a famous (or possibly infamous) author. Rogue Warrior the game puts him in position for a secret mission to investigate North Korea, which leads to an over-the-top story surround the Cold War and how the Soviet Union has missiles aimed at the US.

Mickey Rourke voices Richard Marcinko as the main character, and ends up making the game a bigger joke than it was by itself, which at this point doesn't even hurt it. He is blurting out cusses every other word, in such an over exaggerated tone that it's hard not to laugh at how bad it sounds. When you start hearing the excessive profanities it goes from kind of funny in the very beginning, to just plain annoying by the tenth time or so, and after a while you realize just how bad it sounds and can laugh at it again. When you've been shot and Marcinko is lying motionless on the ground and then proceeds to yell out a phrase like a six year old who just learned it, you stop taking things so seriously.

If you couldn't have guessed by now, the graphics don't do Rogue Warrior any justice. At it's best, it looks like a decent to good looking game for a last generation title. At it's worst, there are some sections that make you wonder if the PS1 or N64 could have handled. I won't even get into all of the small bugs and glitches that make this game look worse. It's a bad enough looking game even when things are perfectly smooth.

If you didn't get enough of Rogue Warrior's first-person shooting action through the single player game, there's an online mode available. There aren't many options, Team Deathmatch and Deathmatch. Apparently there are many intelligent people out there, because there weren't even enough online to get a match going. Oh well, if it played like the single player game, we can assume that I didn't miss anything. Is it unfair to judge the online without even getting a chance to play it? Well maybe, but chances are you wouldn't be able to find a game either, making this mode obsolete. If you do manage to get one going, why are you playing Rogue Warrior in the first place?

Actually, despite its many flaws and shortcomings, Rogue Warrior can provide a few hours of entertainment. If you just want a straightforward shooter and can get a laugh out of the game's cheesiness, Rogue Warrior is decent at that. The problem is the outrageous asking price. This is a full retail game, priced at $60. If this were a $5 to $10 downloadable game I might recommend it, and even that's a stretch because there are still much better games at that price. Do yourself a favor and simply stay as far away from Rogue Warrior as you possibly can.

Logan Smithson, NoobFeed