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Reader review by ghostyghost
August 01, 2007 Pariah is a bad first-person shooter that no one should be forced to play. It starts out boring and only manages to get mindless, repetitive, dull, and tedious. Between complex controls, an unexplained story, flat characters, poor graphics, a sloppy frame-rate, buggy sounds, and boring gameplay there is no enjoyment found in this tepid and monotonous adventure. It manages to hit every shooter cliché and never creates any uniqueness or memorable moments. By the time you end the second level or finish any multi-player battle, you’re left wondering why you wasted any money on this pathetic excuse for a first-person shooter.The story in Pariah opens with you riding on a plane guarding a woman who is in an induced coma because she is infected with some sort of virus. Naturally your plane is shot down and only you and the patient survive. Of course, you don’t learn about the patient, the virus, why you’re being shot at, and why the patient is being escorted across a battlefield. You’re not even informed about the war that’s apparently raging around you. After only a few minutes of footage you’re thrown into battle and you don’t know who you’re fighting, why you’re fighting, who the girl you’re chasing is, or what the purpose of anything is. By the time the story finally reveals itself it makes no sense and gets so convoluted that it harder to understand then Boomhauer from King of the Hill.
As for the gameplay, it’s less fun then smacking your head against a wall. When you’re first thrown into battle you immediately realize you’re fighting a bunch of mindless, repetitive, generic, cookie-cutter clones for enemies. They’re visually boring and with their accuracy you can sleep through fighting them. Occasionally an enemy will carry a shield, but otherwise you shoot the exact same enemies for the entire game. You get no sense of satisfaction killing the same enemy thousands of times and are left yawning at the sight of any villains, craving even the slightest variety or challenge.
After a few levels Pariah begins to include every lame shooter cliché in a quick and boring fashion. First there is a vehicle sequence, complete with hard an impossible to control dune buggy, a shaky camera style turret gun, and no path to follow whatsoever. Following this is a lame shooting sequence where you’re the gunman shooting done mindless vehicles with missiles while the girl drives you in circles randomly. This is overly simplistic because the missiles auto-aim and take out everything in one shot. This is topped off by a gigantic stationary turret sequence where you have to shoot down enemy ships that for unknown reasons are attacking their own train, another plot-hole that gets skipped over.
The shooting in Pariah is decent, but does nothing to differentiate itself from every other sci-fi shooter. You aim with the analog sticks pointing the reticle at targets, anytime it turns red pull the trigger and fire. It has your standard array of weapons including the machine gun, rocket launcher, plasma gun, etc. The only gun missing from the arsenal is a pistol, which is replaced by a lousy sword that only leaves you vulnerable to damage and nearly kills you very time you try to use it. The weapons look good and stand out against the blandly textured environments, but they sound flat and dull. The fact that the reload sounds like a keyboard command only adds to the monotony and the dullness of every shooting sequence.
Thankfully, the monotony ends at four- six hours depending how much garbage you can put up with and how fast you finish the campaign. It tries to add on value with a multiplayer component, but the same dreary gameplay drags down the experience. It doesn’t help that there are only two different game modes, which add no variety to the experience. This is especially shameful after you get a chance to play around with the outstanding map editor. It’s easy to use and gives you tons of control over the maps and making your own custom looks. However, it does to waste putting such a great tool is in such a terrible game.
Outside of the aforementioned Map editor, Pariah is boring, dreary, dull, monotonous, and more like a chore then any form of entertainment. You never feel any sense of excitement or attachment to anything throughout your experience. And it would seem the cut-scenes exist to further confuse you about the plot then to make sense. Unexciting enemies, unsatisfying combat, and nothing unique besides a map editor combine to create a terrible experience that no one should be force to play through.
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