By Mark Brown

“Goddamn cock breath commie motherfuckers”, a typical Rogue Warrior line, growled from a gravel chewing Mickey Rourke, almost deserves a review in itself. In fact, Rourke’s ludicrous catchphrases and expletive-filled speeches, which run the gamut from goat sodomy to genital sizes, are the only tolerable part of this insipid first-person shooter.

In the interim from the game’s 2006 announcement to its silent late-2009 release, the game has gone through more wardrobe changes than Lady Gaga. All promises of a tactical squad game, a “personality shooter” and a tongue-in-cheek 80s B-movie have drained away to reveal this, a proud statue dedicated to wasted time and money.

Rogue Warrior is a first person-shooter that follows the inflated memoirs of true-life Navy SEAL Richard ‘Demo Dick’ Marcinko. According to Rebellion’s biographical take on the man, Dick can run at lightning speed, brings a knife to a gun fight and is impervious to bullet fire during close-quarters combat. Their penchant for flawed reproduction extends to landscape as well, painting Korea and Russian as a series of anaemic corridor crawls and identical monochromatic warehouses.

Despite employing much of the modern FPS handbook, including close-up melee kills, a cover system and light stealth mechanics, its fire fights rarely extend beyond listless shooting ranges. The proprietary engine it’s built upon (after tossing out Unreal Engine 3) is fragile, and details like consistent accuracy, reliable hitboxes and believable A.I., which top-tier developers fret over endlessly, are barley acknowledged.

It’s obvious that Rebellion have had some interaction with an FPS in the past five years, considering the game’s modern cover system, yet it still plays and looks like a low rate Xbox or PS2 shooter. Corridors, warehouses and other ambiguous spaces make up the play field, different enemies are indistinguishable and the concept of using a secondary play style to alter the pace is lost on this monotonous non-stop shooter.

//”I’ve got bad guys to send to commie heaven”
Mickey Rourke isn’t the only surprising source for audio in this game. How about the putter of a broken moped engine used for gunfire, the peas on cardboard used for bullet ricochet and the limp fart used for grenade explosion? The washed out graphics and low poly characters are straight out of the last generation, and the constant dips in frame rate will make you sure your console is about to expire.

But perhaps Rogue Warrior’s biggest grievance, an even bigger middle finger than generic presentation and dreary shootouts, is its two-hour runtime. Before you’ve even got properly started, the credits (accompanied by a rap-remix of Rourke’s best lines) start to roll. No challenge modes, no useless trinkets to find, few interesting achievements to hunt and, with a campaign this dry, no reason to ever brave it again.

There is a multiplayer mode, albeit it with nothing more than lone wolf and team deathmatch game types, but finding anyone else who actually owns the game is nigh on impossible.

The game’s only unique features, according to the marketing spiel, are ‘Golden Globe winner and Oscar nominee’ Mickey Rourke’s voiceover lines and 25 different instant-kill moves that involve jabbing a giant blade into the jugular, forehead, ribcage or 22 other body parts of identikit enemies. Elsewhere, Rogue Warrior is just lacking in original or exciting content: no more than ten weapons, one type of grenade and no real sophistication to the stealth or melee combat make for a drab, joyless experience.

//”Lights out motherfuckers”
After Shellshock 2, a similarly abysmal shooter, you have to wonder if the developers at Rebellion even know they’re making awful games, devoid of merit and ambition in equal measure. What kind of atmosphere lingers around the halls of a development studio that offers little but total and complete contempt for the eventual owners of their games?

This isn’t a game with lofty concepts ruined by an inexperienced team, or a project with unrivalled ambition marred by nuisance bugs. This is a lazy, dreary and appallingly uninteresting game – and Rebellion, somehow, in their infinite wisdom, still managed to mess it up.

2/10

What does this score mean?

By Greg Giddens

Sometimes, the best characters come from truth rather than fiction.

This is certainly true of Rouge Warrior, a tactical shooter developed by Rebellion, set in the eighties in the USSR and North Korea. You play as real life American Navy Seal Richard Marcinko, partaking in missions based on his military experiences, pulling off signature moves the man himself used to perform back in the day.

He’s an irrefutably cool character, and the concept is solid.  But it’s ultimately unoriginal, and unfortunately this unoriginality threatens to plague the entire game.

//Déjà vu
Rouge Warrior struggles to do anything new. It sticks rigidly to the typical stealth-action formula, which will result in inevitable comparisons that, in its current state, could well reduce the game to sub-par fare. It’s a bit of a shame, as the aggressive and brutal style works, with the prolific melee instant kills standing out. In the end, though, the good ideas risk being far out weighed by the apparent abundance of recycled concepts from other similar titles, ones which are neither surpassed nor even matched. Unless something strong can blanket these flaws, there’s a chance Rouge Warrior could slip by into obscurity when it’s released near the end of November this year.

We played a short night mission at this week’s Eurogamer Expo, and it turned out not to be the most ideal setup to showcase the game, as the night-time setting unfortunately failed to show off the visual presentation. The dark exterior and building interiors are hugely lacking in detail, muzzle flashes look quite frankly awful, and the animation for enemies is a little stiff. Add to that weapon balancing issues, with pistols and submachine guns sometimes failing to cause any noticeable damage to enemies, and screaming enemies failing to alert nearby guards… well, it’s safe to say the questionable quality of the current build, both mechanically and visually, raises some concerns.

//Stripped down to the gears
The mechanics aren’t completely broken, but still fail to shine. The controls feel somewhat slow and heavy at times, but this could have been due to the setup rather than the game itself, and it will be interesting to see how this translates to the final build. The variety of different melee instant kills, which can be triggered with a button press when in close quarters, are admittedly impressive, mainly due to the brutality and clever use of the environment. These executions seemed to be Rouge Warrior’s saving grace, until it become apparent that they could be used in every encounter, regardless of whether you’ve been spotted or not, encouraging a charge mentality that entirely eliminates any form of tactical play.

Across the occasions on which you can use weapons, a few different tactical options become available. A cover system can be used during firefights, and shooting lights out allows you to sneak up on enemies in a fashion almost identical to Splinter Cell, but justifying the effort is tricky when a charge and instant melee kill proves just as effective. Once again, it’s a system that feels unoriginal, a sort of hybridised version of Rainbow 6 and Gears of War, but it works well enough, and the main character’s detailing and animations are shown off by the switch to third-person view. If only the enemies’ presentation were as well taken care of as Marcinko’s.

While it would be unfair to draw a concrete conclusion based on such as short play session, nothing yet stands out as at all special. And while everything is certainly functional on all accounts, there’s a chance that the abundance of older, similar and seemingly better titles will mean Rouge Warrior fails to impress. Although the possibility remains that the narrative may be strong enough to redeem the experience, Rouge Warrior is looking too dated and lacking in individuality to compete against the stronger titles due for release in the near future.