Rogue Warrior: Stay away!

Erik Kubik tries to blast his way through Rogue Warrior and this is what he thought.

There are good games and there are so-so games. Most of the average or so-so games move to the budget-game price very quickly. Once in awhile, gamers come across a truly bad game that eventually makes its way to one of the gaming sites’ lists for the top-20 worst games. Rogue Warrior will be on that list.
Rogue Warrior is not a good game. The lackluster plot is based on the life of Richard Marcink, a Navy Seal who in the 1980’s infiltrated a few communist countries such as North Korea to kill some guys all in the name of the “U.S.A.!”

Plain and simple, Rogue Warrior is easily one of the worst games I have played in the last five years. There is a lot wrong with this game, but to start, I’ll focus on the few things that keep me from throwing my ps3 through a window.

To some, the swearing in GTA IV is a little much! If that’s you, then stay away from Rogue Warrior: Richard, whose voice is handled by Mickey Rourke, swears far more then Niko in GTA IV. In fact, I think its at least 80% of his dialogue After awhile, the swearing grows on you, making this amusement one of the game’s few selling points.

Initially, the melee kills are fun. Then, they rapidly become repetitive. To add to the fun, Richard can run into a room guns blazing and still melee kill the guy around the next corner who must be deaf because he didn’t hear the alarms, the gunshots, swearing, or painful gasps of his dying comrades. Most of the melee kills involve something with your knife or hands and the occasional push-over-the-rail. I actually spent more time in the game melee killing people than shooting them. For those gamers who love blood, melee kills do produce a nice spray of blood.

There are also tons of “easy-to-get” trophies. Gamers receive trophies at every level of completion. For those who have to go and track down every trophy, going Platinum will be quick and easy, but not painless.

That said, the graphics are bad; they are very last gen. There is little facial animation or character detail. For the most part, all the levels look the same and are sparsely detailed. The gun details are about as well done as the fire arms in Goldeneye.

The controls are terrible. I feel like I am trying to steer a drunken elephant in a pool of tar. Everything is stiff and sluggish. Too bad Richard cannot swear at his own game. The A.I. is terrible. The enemies have no idea where the cover is. They stand there looking stupidly in your direction or run past you to the end of the hall before turning around and shooting. There are countless bugs and glitches. Enemies have clipping issues and get stuck in walls. I melee killed someone and the game showed his death animation surrounded by a shower of blood, only to also show me and the enemy still standing, caught in limbo. Enemies keep running after I empty an entire clip of bullets into their chests. Yet their bullets always hit me in the head. Furthermore, on multiple occasions I got stuck in doors.

I was hoping the multiplayer might redeem the game a little. I tried to play three different times, once on Saturday evening, once on Sunday midday, and once on a Tuesday early evening. All three times, no one was on. Big surprise there! Team Deathmatch and Deathmatch are the only two game modes that limit your choices. Modern Warfare 2 offers a much better multiplayer experience and it doesn’t look like it was made 10 years ago.

Even if you are a trophy-whore, wait until this game hits $10. I could recommend 5 different $10 ps3 games that are well worth their money instead of this game. This POS game is worth about as much as a wooden nickel. Do yourself a favor and stay away.