Pariah Review

Pariah, oh Pariah. Pariah, it rhymes with ... what the hell does Pariah rhyme with?(Mariah. Idiot. -Ed.) Honey? Yes, Pariah rhymes with honey. In fact, most words rhyme with honey... or steak. Check this out:

Kill, kill for money
Super hooker ninja honey.

Roger, Sir, will shoot the fake boobs.

My butt is on fire! My butt is on fire!!

That's a new techno beat I'm working on. It's this Japanese industrial fusion house beat with some ethnic influences from Armenia and Kazakhstan. Has absolutely nothing to do with Digital Extreme's sci-fi FPS, but neither does my brain at the moment. I think the little men have finally decided to close up shop there. They just weren't selling anything. And it's hard to sell bullshit to people every day anyway. One day, I climbed up into my brain and I saw a sign on the door. It said, "Due to bullshit fatigue, we're closing down shop." I stood there at the door, in the inner sphere of my mind, and I though, "wow, bullshit fatigue, that's a really nice term, I'll have to use it more often."

But wait, 2Lions!

What is it, 2Lions?

You're bullshitting now, man!

Ohh, right! The little gnomes are back up there working at full speed.

No man, they left.

So who the hell is producing all this bullshit?

I think it's your brain, man.

But how?!

I think your brain is like a wounded beast right now, they tried to shut it down, and that has made it even more vicious. Like a wounded African gazelle.

African gazelle are not vicious at all. They are very timid creatures.

Well not this gazelle, man. This gazelle has two bullshit chainguns where its horns used to be, and all the predators fear it.

Why?

It spits a lot when it talks. Defective DNA; they're afraid that if they eat it, some of the genes will mix with their own genes and their offspring will bullshit a lot and spit when they talk.

So this makes me, what, the most feared gazelle in the Universe?

Hell yeah.

Awesome.

Wait, though, wasn't this article supposed to be about something meaningful? Like Pariah?

Steak.

Rhymes perfectly.

I know.

Anyway...

Digital Extreme's new FPS is very average. Average in every possible way. Not only is it average, it is downright shallow in some regards. But mostly it's average.

So what's the deal?

Basically, the game was craved by many hardcore gamers for the fact that it was supposed to bring a thrilling single-player campaign and of course great multiplayer action. Seeing how DE was the team behind the very successful and downright fun Unreal Tournament 2004, gamers had every right to expect something as good (if not better) from Pariah.

The end product, however, didn't meet anyone's expectations. The main campaign's story is very shallow and rushed. Wait, those are not the correct terms... it feels familiar, as if many cliché events from every previous sci-fi game have been glued together without any sort of cohesion or explanation as to why things are developing the way they are.

You are a scientist transporting an important prisoner, who just happens to be infected with a mysterious virus. Seeing how prisoner transports in video games have a 120% probability of going horribly wrong, yours was no better, so you end up crashing on the surface of an alien world where various organizations are after your precious cargo. The 'cargo' carrying the deadly virus inside herself is this hot chick you see. I don't know what that virus does to people, but I'm pretty sure it makes them schizophrenic. Her relationship with you goes from homicidal to sympathetic, to romantic in the span of three cut-scenes. There's absolutely no easing into the generic storyline and DE shows here that they have no idea how to direct a movie. Which is a quality you should definitely posses if you want to make great single-player shooters these days. To put things in perspective, Half-Life 2's story progression is a masterpiece compared to how things unfold in Pariah (!!?? -Ed.). The story and character development in Pariah is slightly worse than what we've seen in Unreal 2.