Rogue Warrior is the story of Richard Marcinko based on his novels by the same name. Rogue Warrior really picked a bad time to make a crappy FPS game following closely behind Call of Duty, its blatantly obvious that Rogue Warrior flat out sucks.  Whether you compare the single player, multi-player, graphics, controls, sounds, or stories between Rogue Warrior and any of the other titles released in the last month, you gonna end up frowning on Rogue Warrior.  It feels like a very incomplete game, that could have been much better given a little more time in development.

The book was better than the video game

Rogue Warrior doesn’t detail much of a story in the ultra-short campaign mode.  As You are gearing up for a mission in North Korea,your seal team is killed in action, and you are trapped solo behind enemy lines.  Your character finds his way into Russia, discovers enemy technology and destroys it…The End. Seriously..

Most of the story is told by the protagonist, Marcinko.  Though its not as much a story as it is a drunken rant, as every other word out of Marcinko’s mouth is eff this, eff that, eff you, eat effing shit, etc etc. I guess it wouldn’t be so bad to hear, if the game didn’t effing suck.  But sadly it does, and though I have never read any of the books, I’m gonna have to go ahead and assume most of the books goodness is lost in translation because all story is lacking in this game.

0/5

Gameplay & Controls

There are plenty of FPS games that can survive on their multi-player merits and throw single player and story modes out the window in the process and still be a very enjoyable and fun game.  Rogue Warrior is not one of them.  I repeat so there is no confusion here.  Rogue Warrior gameplay and controls are broken, shoddy, and sub standard to nearly every game ever produced for the Xbox 360, second only to Darkest of Days.

The gameplay of Rogue Warrior is basically a run and gun.  Trying to do anything else in the game will be nothing more than a trying of your patience and a quick road to frustration as the controls are also piss poor.  The core of the game is FPS, and is broken.  It is unknown whether it is the aiming or the collision but either one or the other is severely flawed in Rogue Warrior. The controls are very janky, as lining an enemy up in your sites is a trying task.  But even when you do get one lined up there is no telling if you will hit them or not.  Your best bet in most case was rush enemies and no scope at close range.  Once within arms reach of an enemy, you can also pull out a knife to take them out which was not bad the first 10 times or so, but the gun play is so flawed you will be doing this often.  So, you will run out of cut-scenes, and likely be seeing the same ones over and over again.

The game is one of the shortest I have ever played.  With 8 short levels, I clocked in and out in just under two hours.  If you rented this and only got two hours out of it you would be disappointed, let alone buying the game.  But it is a gift and a curse, because by the end of Rogue Warrior you are glad its over.

The bottom line here is that the game is repetitive, and boring, it brings not one new thing to table and the things it has taken from other (better) FPS games they do not do well.  When the shooting is bad in FPS the game is usually bad, and Rogue Warrior is no exception.

1/5

Graphics & Sound

Graphically RW is not terrible, it is pretty standard, or at least standard for this generation.  I did see some promising uses of light, shadowing, and smoke elements in the game.  Some of the environments were not bad, but that is as far as I am willing to go with that statement because for every one nice shadowing effect there was a hundred bad character model, misplaced cut-scene, and bad physics effect.

In close range your character has the opportunity to kill by knife.  This sequence consists of pressing the A button and the cutscene launches.  The problem in Rogue Warrior is that the cutscenes rarely made sense as to what was going on on screen before you activated the sequence.  It gives the game a very dislocated feeling. The dislocation doesn’t stop there though, grenades blow up where you intend to thrown them before they arrive, explosions have little to no collision detection or graphical flair, character models seem to have no weight or realism when moving, as AI glides around like a ghost most of the game. There is not much good to say about the experience in total.

Equally unimpressive was the sound quality of Rogue Warrior.  Its not that the sound was over the top bad, but it did not lend to the experience in anyway at all.  Guns and explosives seemed pretty standard.  Voice acting was ok, but littered with profanity that just didn’t make sense.

1.5/5

Overall,

Rogue Warrior was a waste of time.  Don’t let the big name publisher fool you, Bethesda is probably for the worse for publishing this title.  There is so little done right if anything that it is hard to warrant even the 2 hours it will take you finish the single player campaign, and with controls as flawed and useless as those found in Rogue Warrior I would not recommend even turning on the multi-player component, unless for a good laugh of course.   The game lacks in nearly every department and unless you have Dick Marcinko bed sheets, t-shirts, and have a tattoo that reads I <3 Dick Marcinko on your ass, your gamer brain is not going to be stimulated by anything that Rogue Warrior has to offer.  It is a pass on a rental, but if you really wanted to give a memorably bad Christmas gift Rogue Warrior may be the answer to what you should get your mortal enemy this year.

Achievements (xbox360achievements.org)