Wow, another sci-fi first person
shooter. Having just completed Rogue Trooper
and talking about how similar it is to every
other sci-fi shooter from Halo to Unreal 2,
Pariah is identical again.
According to the story you're
transporting an infected prisoner when your
shot down by scavengers into a wasteland that
was once Earth. If this game is supposed to
take place in wastelands, then the designers
failed miserably. Instead we have a mix of outdoor
terrain and enemy bases. The Unreal Engine 2.5
looks like it's starting to date in Pariah;
there are other games with much better graphics.
The level design is a real mix; the indoor areas
are often nicely detailed, high-tech and look
quite good. The terrain is also fairly decent
looking, but doesn't have anywhere near the
crisp detail of Far Cry. However some of the
bigger buildings can feel quite blocky, especially
from the outside.
The gameplay is a little weaker
than the design. Unfortunately it's another
checkpoint system game so no quicksaves. I didn't
have to replay too much of the game because
of this, but it does force me to play very carefully.
The two end battles were too difficult and long
considering you have no quicksave. As were the
on-rails sections which included a couple of
vehicle levels and train levels; all of which
were terrible. Perhaps it was my configuration,
but the vehicles were steered using the mouselook
instead of left/right keys. So if you want to
go left, move your mouse left. This meant trying
to shoot enemies from the vehicle was extremely
difficult, and forget about attempting reverse.
The first train level just
seemed to go on forever; repetitive wouldn't
be a strong enough word. While the other had
you completing a massive jump, which I failed
the first two times because I didn't use the
quickrun key, only to find the game didn't bother
to add a checkpoint before this jump so I ended
up playing half of this level 3-4 times over.
Once was already too much.
Your enemies aren't too bad,
they do provide a bit of challenge and fun.
They are, naturally, all the same humans. Little
variation apart from a slightly different human
model/skin and different weapons and health.
What spoilt the gameplay a little were the poor
weapons. The shotgun was useless, the machine
gun seemed to spray bullets all over the place
and lacked power. Your also have a plasma gun
which you're forced to use quite a lot since
most of the ammo pickups are for this gun. It's
not a fun gun... the firing is slow and at an
annoying angle which takes some getting used
to.
I guess it should be said that
I liked this game enough to play it almost all
in one sitting (just one coffee and cake break).
That being said, it must have only been a 5-6
hour game. Overall, average gameplay and design/environments
that we've all seen before; only pick up this
game if you really love the sci-fi/base theme.
Digital Extremes' next release,
Warpath, was originally a sequel to Pariah hence
many similarities. But due to Pariah being a
commercial flop, it was turned into a different
game. However it was an even bigger flop than
Pariah.
