Rogue Warrior features Richard Marcinko, the real life creator and commander of the U.S. Navy’s SEAL Team Six, which is the Counter-Terrorism squad. His Wikipedia page reads like the real life adventures of John Rambo. In the game he is voiced by Academy Award nominee, Mickey Rourke.

The story sees our hero, Marcinko, taking out commies, 80′s action movie style, in North Korea and the Soviet Union. All the ingredients are there for some fun times, so why does the game come up short on the thrills?

A quick warning: this is one seriously foul mouthed game. I would keep any children out of the room while you are playing. I would repeat some of the lines here, but our WingDamage lawyers simply won’t allow it. So to appease our lawyers, I have replaced all those naughty swear words with the word, “rainbow”. Keep in mind, these sort of lines are thrown out approximately every eleven seconds, which makes for a lot of rainbows.

“This mission is a total goat rainbow.”

“Take that, you rainbowin’ mother rainbower.”

“Does the Pope rainbow in the forest?”

And that is really just a taste. There are phrases in this game so foul that even the power of rainbows is insufficient to dull the obscenity.

As you make your way through the game commie killing, you have two ways of approaching each objective. You can go in loud, guns a-blazin’, or you can sneak around with your silenced pistol and knife, quietly taking out guards before they are alerted to your presence. Some of the sneak kills are impressively brutal and over the top. You are not just choking people out, you are slicing their throats multiple times or stabbing them repeatedly. I am just sadistic enough to take a small amount of pleasure in these brutal killings. In fact, if this was the sort of place where one could give out smiley face stickers, I would be forced to give Rogue Warrior a big orange smiley face sticker for including a sneak kill where you stab your enemy in the taint. I have long been a vocal supporter of taint stabbings, so seeing my dream come to life was a thrill.

Other than that, the game completely falls flat at everything it is trying to do. The stealth doesn’t really work. Most enemies seem to be going out of their way to have you stab them in the back, since they don’t even bother to turn around as you sprint towards them at full speed.

Remember those over the top brutal stabbings I was telling you about earlier? Well, when you trigger one, you are invincible. You can literally run from enemy to enemy absorbing bullets, cursing up a storm, and stabbing people without much fear of death. If you do manage to die, you are greeted with the single most unimpressive death animation ever. People laughed at the death scene when I showed them. It consists entirely of the camera tipping sideways slightly and the screen getting darker and is over in less than a second.

The multiplayer is boring. The maps are way too large for the five people in the world that bought this game. It is hard to make it as an online shooter these days, since everyone seems to play one of three at any time. I doubt anyone is setting aside Call of Duty, Halo 3, or Killzone 2 for this game. It took me about fifteen minutes to find a game. If I didn’t feel that I had to play the multiplayer for the review, I would have given up and played something else.

The game also completely crashed on three separate occasions mid-face stab. Everything completely froze and I couldn’t even bring up the XMB. I had to turn my PS3 off with the switch in the back. There were also four times where the game completely glitched out and played like I was trying to run Crysis on a Commodore 64.

I imagine at some point in the development process, Bethesda looked at Rogue Warrior and thought, “Well, Brink looks really good. Maybe we should focus on that.” Rebellion, the developers, thought, “Well, Aliens versus Predator should be good,” and decided to focus on that. It feels as though someone somewhere up the chain of command realized that things were not working out, and instead of throwing a pile of money at improving things, they just pushed the game out the door.

I really can’t imagine why anyone would spend $60 on this game. Do you know how much pizza you could buy with $60? A whole lot. When the best thing about your game is the end credits and taint stabbing, it’s pretty clear that something in the development process went awry. Someday real soon, you are going to see this game in a bargain bin somewhere and you will think to yourself, “Huh. I wonder if I should buy Rogue Warrior.” The answer is no. In fact, if someone buys you Rogue Warrior as a gift, you should seriously consider whether or not that person is really your friend.

(A quick note about the end credits, which feature soundbytes from the game over a hip hop beat: WingDamage has a strict family-friendly policy, but if you are over the age of 18 and don’t mind foul language, I hear the internet is a good place to find it.)

This review is based on a copy of Rogue Warrior for the PS3 provided to us by Bethesda.

Tags: Bethesda, First Person Shooter, FPS, Mickey Rourke, ps3, Rebellion, Rogue Warrior, Xbox 360

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 9th, 2009 at 5:00 am and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.