Military Video Games, computer games - Air Force Times

‘Rogue Warrior’ misfires

“Rogue Warrior” is an oddly conventional first-person shooter for this holiday season of exceptional ones, but it makes its mark in two distinctive ways: It includes the foulest language of any video game I’ve ever played, and it proves conclusively that celebrity-vanity video games cannot be good.

The star of “Rogue Warrior,” Richard “Demo Dick” Marcinko, the former SEAL-turned-adventure-writer-cum-watch-pitchman, isn’t a celebrity on the same level as rapper 50 Cent, who has already released two terrible first-person shooters. But, by focusing on its protagonist at the expense of drawing in players, as Fiddy’s games did, Marcinko’s “Rogue Warrior” proves you don’t need to be a megastar to make a disappointing video game.

Although Fiddy is a well-known thug, I wonder how many people in a general audience today will realize “Rogue Warrior” depicts a real guy — sure, a fictionalized version of a guy — who helped create Naval Special Warfare as we know it today. If you’ve read Marcinko’s books and wanted to pretend to be him killing North Korean soldiers while listening to Mickey Rourke growl Marcinko’s catchphrases, order “Rogue Warrior” immediately.

However, players who are not members of the Demo Dick fan club probably will get confused and impatient playing “Rogue Warrior,” which spends its time and energy being about Marcinko, even though most players want a first-person shooter to be about guns and killing, in that order.

“Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2” is successful because the main characters are the weapons you unlock and augment with thermal scopes, laser sights, etc. In “Rogue Warrior,” weapons are almost an afterthought; you can get precise shots at long distances without sighting down the barrel, and the heavy Soviet machine gun seemed just as accurate as the sniper rifle.

Bad guys pop into sight like ducks in a shooting gallery, or run to their marks like extras in a play — in fact, if you advance too quickly, sometimes they even run past you because the game assumes you’re at an earlier point in the level.

The campaign mode takes you through digital versions of all the sets from Chuck Norris movies in the 1980s — alleys, factories, supervillain-style lairs — like a train following its rails, with seldom any way to complete an objective other than how the game wants you to.

It does, however, give the option for a “kill move” any time Marcinko gets close to a bad guy, even one shooting at him, or even in the midst of five guys shooting at him. Clicking “kill move” stops the gameplay for a few moments so you can watch a brief movie of Marcinko delivering horrific justice with a knife, or throwing a guy off a ledge, or bashing a guy with his own Kalashnikov.

Even if you’re taking fire from all directions, the game considers those rounds null and void, and when the mini-cutscene ends, you’re back in the battle, unhurt, free to shoot back or deliver more “kill moves” to any nearby suckers. This has the effect of not only letting you cheat in a firefight, but also of unlocking achievements for the most faces crushed into walls or the most bodies ventilated with your knife. But you don’t control which “kill move” Marcinko delivers, and what would’ve been a time-saving, convenient melee attack in another game becomes yet another showcase for Marcinko’s badassery.

Although “Rogue Warrior’s” sets and story were generic, I enjoyed hearing Rourke saying all the phrases we recognize from Marcinko’s books, none of which I can repeat here. I appreciated that designers kept Marcinko’s narration as anatomically explicit as it is in his stories, although if you play this game with other people around, be warned that they could be shocked at what they overhear.

I also liked the way programmers rendered the light and shadow in this game, although the total effect of the graphics and detail reminded me of 2002’s “Medal of Honor: Frontline,” not a title built for today’s next-generation consoles.

Overall, I wanted to like “Rogue Warrior” because I enjoyed Marcinko’s books about espionage, combat and butting heads with Navy bureaucrats, something I identify with in my day job as a reporter for Navy Times. “Rogue Warrior” the video game, however, will appeal only to the hardest-core fans of the Shark Man of the Delta, and even then probably only as something to complete their collections, not to spend time playing.

For Xbox360, PlayStation 3 and Windows PC. $59.99. Rated M for “Mature.” www.roguewarrior.com.

Buy? Rent? Skip? Our verdict: Skip