Pariah Review

Unfortunately, this is not the end of the game's woes. The level design is very poor. All the environments look uninspiring in addition to being loaded with invisible walls and being very, very small. You totally feel like you're on rails throughout the game.

However, Pariah is not all bad. It does have its redeeming factors. If you don't set your standards too high, you'll enjoy the foot action. The enemy AI is fairly solid for this type of game; they have solid path finding and generally behave as you'd expect them to. I like how they sometimes try to flank your position and confuse you with zigzag movement. Again, this is nothing we haven't seen done in other games and often done better, but at least it's up to par. When things get going and you get the feel for the many ugradable weapons in the game, you'll really start enjoying the basic action that Pariah has to offer. I liked it. It made the time go by faster, but that feeling didn't last for long. While the upgradeable weapons are fun, and it's nice to be able to add stuff like a recoil stabilizer to your assault rifle and improved targeting to your sniper, the vehicular combat is so clumsy and poorly done that it totally ruined the flow for me. Not to mention that the driving skills of the enemy soldiers are slightly worse than those of an 80-year-old man with Alzheimer's disease. They'll often forget that to back up, they actually have to switch to reverse, or maybe the buggies in Pariah have stick shifts and the enemy didn't receive proper training for it.

The multiplayer aspect of the game can be fun, but if I were you, I'd stick to any other really good FPS that features vehicular combat... and there are quite a few of them out there (if you don't count Soldner). I like the usage of remotely detonated grenades on your grenade launcher and how it offers additional tactics in multiplayer, but because the vehicles just feel awkward when you drive and aim with them, I really couldn't get into the spirit of things. And I can't explain it to myself, because I was a big fan of UT 2004, and on paper, the two games should play fairly similarly.

Finally, the visuals and sound effects are nothing to write home about. DE has done a pretty good job on implementing some advanced shader and lighting effects, thus further modifying the UT 2004 Engine, but the artists have done a relatively poor job on the environments, nullifying the effect of the advanced Direct X 9 features. The voice-overs, though professionally done for the most part, have a tendency to fade off as the rest of the background sounds amplify, which on default game settings can get pretty annoying. If you bother at all to find out what happens next in the story.

Overall, I would advise any even slightly jaded gamer not to waste their money on this game. DE is a good development team, but it feels like they had no clear goal with Pariah. It just seems like this was an attempt to use the existing technology on some warn-out game concepts and hastily glue them all together into a video game that was supposed to take some of the spotlight away from games like Halo. Yes, that's right, I said Halo. The PC version is still selling like hotcakes you know.

Which reminds me; Have you ever seen a glorious white pigeon with golden brown feathers get drowned in the kitchen sink? No? Well, get those cameras ready cause the show is about to begin. If you get horny, don't worry about it. It's perfectly natural; pigeons are very sexy when in distress. And what do you mean there are no white pigeons with golden brown feathers? Sure there are! Look!

Oh...

Well, Cocker Spaniels in distress are just as sexy, so keep those cameras rolling.

(We would like to point at out at this point in the time that everyone here at ActionTrip.com loves animals and would never, ever, EVER do anything to cause harm to one. The Author was very tired when he wrote this article and when he does not get at least 13 hours of sleep each evening and a large bag of Cheetos, he gets a little goofy.

We apologize for his outburst and assure you no little birdies or doggies were harmed in the production of this...."article". -Ed.)