9-May-2005 I've enjoyed Pariah, I honestly have. But. I've completed it and I'm unsatisfied. Me and lead female character Karina had some good times and killed many people in exciting ways, but I've got some severe issues that aren't going away in a hurry. So, if you'll excuse the deviation from the expected 'Good stuff. Bad stuff. Score' game review template, here are my niggles. Or, more accurately, here's my main gigantic niggle.
JACKANORY Pariah has been selling itself on the basis of its story. Digital Extremes has bigged-up its Hollywood scriptwriters, told us how painstaking the casting of voice-actors was, told us how it's researched story-telling techniques to death... But I'm sorry to say that the story doesn't work.
You play as Dr Jack Mason, crash-landed in hostile territory with the aforementioned Karina, a woman infected with a virus that many men with guns want to get their hands on. Now all the right stuff is here for a damn good yarn, don't get me wrong: a balding and mysterious hero, twists and turns in the plot, occasional events and sightings that won't make sense until several levels later, a world living in the shadow of an often referenced but never fully explained war against an enemy known as the Shroud and an attractive (if contagious) lady for the good doctor to protect. All the ingredients are here. But it just doesn't work.
It's clear that the idea is to keep you in the dark, but whereas a good story would put you in as much darkness as, say, sitting at the bottom of a deep well, Pariah is content to sink you several levels of strata into the Earth's core. You just don't know what's going on: enemy characters appear from nowhere, the aims and origins of rival factions of enemy are never explained, information and back-story that should be underlined in red felt-tip and hammered home to you are daintily skipped around - pretending to be enticing, coy and mysterious, but ending up being simply bemusing. It's like filling in a dot-to-dot puzzle of a lovely bunny rabbit, but only being given five dots to play with. It's called exposition, but Pariah has none of it.
WHERE'S IT AT? Now, you may argue that Half-Life 2 does this too, relying, as it does, on a slow-drip feed of environmental and atmospheric detail to fill you in on what's been going on in your train-bound absence. What Valve succeeds in doing, though, is at least giving you the right information, whereas Digital Extremes is quite happy to feed you on random scraps. What's more, in Half-Life 2 (or Deus Ex, or Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, or Far Cry, or System Shock 2), the lead character knows diddly-squat about the world around him - he experiences and learns simultaneously with you, the gamer.
In Pariah, this doesn't happen. The guy you play knows everything - he knows more than you ever suspect he does - and as such there's an impenetrable distance between you. Furthermore, this means that you can never really connect with Karina either - although this is made pretty difficult anyway because the script is peppered with lazy ways to disinvolve her from the single-player action. Christ, she runs away more than the Littlest friggin' Hobo.
Having completed the game, I'm aware that there is some clever stuff at work in the plot, but none of it is of any help when you're playing the game through for the first time. It just feels like Digital Extremes has been playing around with so many 'higher' narrative devices that it's clean forgotten to ground you in the most basic of details. Stuff like 'this man is called x, he works for y, he is nice/nasty (delete as applicable), he is chasing after you for reasons #1 through to reason #4. Although there may well be further reasons. Reason #5 for example'. The plot the developer was aiming for is a very good one, and highly dramatic at its close, but its attempt to package a novel's worth of cleverness into two-minute post-level cut-scenes renders it almost unfathomable.
BUT WAIT Pariah is still a good game. If we ignore the narrative messiness, there's a lot to enjoy here. Take the first level, for example, the one that's partially included on this month's shiny cover discs.
For a start, it's beautiful - and 'artistic beautiful' rather than Far Cry 'realistic beautiful' to boot. Stylised lighting streams down through leafy boughs, trickling streams trickle, screaming men run at you with flamethrowers before running around on fire and exploding themselves - it's an idyllic scene. What's more, everything feels satisfying, chunky and interactive. Shoot a pipe and it spurts out steam; knock too many bullets into a decayed concrete look-out point and it tumbles - these are the sorts of things that Pariah does really well.
Unsurprisingly (seeing as the game comes from Unreal Tournament co-creator Digital Extremes and uses Unreal technology to the hilt), it has the same satisfying feel as the Unreal Tournament series.
The game follows Jack and Karina in a tale that involves a lot of crash-landing and flying-vehicle explosions (the main result of which being an intriguing lycra rip just above Karina's right breast). Plus, as I've mentioned, there's also a lot of Karina either running away or being captured. The tale mostly unravels in outdoor settings that veer from the expansive and tranquil to the expansive and heavily industrial. Think of a wider network of Halo valleys rather than the free-roaming of Far Cry or Tribes: Vengeance. The action, meanwhile, is big, loud and some of the most body-hurling intensive I've seen in ages.
The holy trinity of Pariah's greatest assets, y'see, are all intrinsically linked. These run as follows: a) the weapons b) the explosions caused by the weapons and c) the kinetic ways in which villains react to the explosions caused by the weapons. We will study these in the applicable order.
AMMO LOCKER The variety of Pariah's arsenal isn't ground-breaking - they all have sci-fi tags but essentially it runs machine gun, shotgun, sniper rifle, plasma gun, grenade launcher, rocket launcher, super-mega-last-level-look-at-it-go!-intenso-cannon. Plus a neat melee weapon in the form of a futuristic doctor's trusty laser bone-saw.
So far, so routine, but each one is a wonderfully meaty creation that out-strips the offerings of so many recent games that have been accused of weapon-floatiness. What's more, a nifty radial menu is present that can not only be summoned for ease of boom-stick access, but also for weapon upgrades. As you explore levels you come across weapon parts that allow you to modify your favoured guns with stuff like shielding, larger clips and armour piercing capabilities. This not only encourages you to explore levels with a bit of vigour, but also means you can tailor your armoury to your own playing style. It's a basic, yet clever system - and some upgrades are just peachy.
The introduction of a Duke Nukem-style trigger to the grenade launcher (enabling you to let an explosive emission fly over barren landscape and ignite it with a mere tap of the mouse) means that, with no hint of hyperbole, Pariah has the best bomb-chucker in the business. I'd go as far as putting that in caps and placing some 1s after it as well. And I will: BEST GRENADE LAUNCHER EVA! 1!11! A well-timed grenade triggered upon the approach of an enemy on a wasp hover-bike, or indeed on any enemy, is immensely satisfying. Which leads us neatly onto the second and third things that Pariah does best.
For years, explosions have been fairly consistent shades of yellow and orange, so it must have been an especially creative day at Digital Extremes gaff when someone suggested that their grenade flash should be green-tinged and shimmery. It works though, and builds on Pariah's stylistic look and feel. But what's a green, shimmery explosion without something for it to throw around? Eccentric physics and ragdolling on your enemies means that firefights are always spectacular and often chuckleworthy. The surrounding screenshots of mid-air hoodlums more than testify to that, while the inclusion of shields, helmets and other henchman flying around on-screen also adds to the chaotic mix.
PRETTY PRETTY AI is pretty competent as well. Pariah mixes up chasey-chasey-round-a-big-rock styled gunplay with the occasional surge of apparently overwhelming numbers of enemies (á la Halo). Because of this, it understands stuff like finding cover, picking up discarded weapons and the like. Nothing special, but there's nothing particularly broken either. Cracks do start to show when the script calls for them to do something autonomously though, as is shown by some remarkably stilted battles between NPCs. At one stage (although, for reasons that have become apparent, at the time I didn't quite grasp what was going on), you find yourself meandering through a battle between two opposing factions - a trick that shooters have been pulling off successfully ever since Half-Life. Here though, it's scripted to hell and back and as such is thoroughly flaccid and lifeless. It's like watching the bit in the Naked Gun where Leslie Nielsen is endlessly hiding behind a crate and failing to shoot a man hiding behind another crate that's 3ft away from him. One positive note on your enemies, however, is that every now and then one will say something that raises a smile. My favourite is the genuinely bizarre 'Doh-Re-Mi-Fa-So... Long sucker!' So singing lessons are obviously still popular in the 26th century.
FRESH AIR There's no doubt that the outdoor sections that make up a far greater proportion of the game with their swaying trees and tumbling leaves are markedly better than the interiors on offer - although mainly due to repetition. Pariah certainly suffers from the 'Halo Effect' (patent pending) that maintains that it's perfectly fine to have four rooms in a row that are fundamentally identical in everything bar the placement of enemy delinquents. Unfortunately, post Half-Life 2 and post Far Cry, you can't get away with this. You can't get away with autosave points that punish you with having to sit through long, arduous gun emplacement stages again and again either - another crime Pariah knocks up on its permanent record.
THERE'S STILL HOPE... It's important that I get across the fact that Pariah isn't a bad game, it's just that its potential was vast and its pedigree wonderful. It could have been marvellous, but instead it's simply highly competent. I feel a lot like the way I did when as a child I was told about the existence of Spider Monkeys and I assumed that they were some sort of amazing amalgam of spider and monkey. Clearly they weren't, so I was disappointed - but monkeys they remained, and monkeys are ace no matter which way you look at them. You can never be disappointed for long. With Pariah, I was expecting to go on a journey that was deep, visceral and narratively-bold, but I was disappointed. My disappointment was tempered though, by the fact the nuts and bolts of a good shooter remained, and good shooters (like monkeys) will always remain high in my estimation.
Pariah is a good, solid game that could have been so much more - although it was in deep, dark danger of having its score slashed due to its brevity (I clocked in at around the ten-hour mark). Thankfully though, the enjoyable multiplayer and (quite ingenious) level design program keep its head above water.
There were clearly some fundamentally good ideas being thrown about during the development of Pariah, but unfortunately a fair number of them have been lost in transit - not least the stuff they were aiming for with the story. The game can and will entertain, but both myself and its creator were clearly expecting better, brighter and more narratively-coherent things.
PC Zone Staff
// Overview
Verdict
Good. Not great
Uppers
Fun, solid gameplay Excellent weapons and upgrade system Some great environmental touches Ace level designer
Downers
Storyline is short and broken Some blatant gameplay flaws
Barrels. They're everywhere and always have been. But Digital Extremes has bravely brought barrel technology forward a few notches in pretty clever ways. First, they don't explode with one graze of a bullet, meaning that gunplay can roll them towards danger before you let rip and ignite it. Second, they come in different varieties - including some that leak poison gas and (amazingly enough) some that have no death-dealing qualities whatsoever. It's basic stuff, but it works a treat.
// WE DON'T NEED NO VENTILATION
I was all ready to praise Pariah for being the first ventilation system -free FPS in recorded history, when this little doozy appeared. Cuh. It's the worst example of the art-form I've seen in ages as well. Could fit a Ford Capri in here. And it's orange...
// ONE WAY TRAFFIC?
Pariah's vehicles fall short of the Halo model that the game so consciously tries to ape - control is iffy and weight and power is lacking. The levels they're showcased in are pretty short and rudimentary as well. That said, the vehicles do genuinely work well away from the solo campaign in multiplayer. In addition, fighting against enemies riding Wasp hover-bikes when you're hitting the dusty single-player trail is probably the best experience that Pariah has on offer...
Copyright 2006 - 2009 Future Publishing Limited, Beauford Court, 30 Monmouth Street, Bath, UK BA1 2BW England and Wales company registration number 2008885
Fun, solid gameplay
