It’s been a bit slow for us on the rage front.  Due to a combination of school work (for me), regular work (for Squid), and the flood of business for his gay escort business (Mack), as well as few games or scandals to get excited about, we haven’t had a great deal to provide you, our valued readers.  We feel bad about this.  Truly, we do.  So we decided to invent a project to cause each of us a bit of anger.  We developed a cycle in which each of us picked a truly horrendous game for one of the others to play, and then the experience would be written about.  So far, because of the difficulties involved with acquiring some of the terrible games we sought to punish each other with, I am the only that has actually played his “punishment” thus far.  That punishment was none other than the abomination that is Rogue Warrior.

Hey look, it's a big Dick!

I cannot begin to describe to you just how terrible this game is.  Alright, that’s a lie, I can, because I’m about to.  You play as Navy SEAL Richard “Dick” Marcinko.  Marcinko is a real person and in fact was not only a SEAL but a SEAL team leader, retiring from the Navy with the rank of Commander and a chest full of medals.  He also supposedly ran a unit called “Red Cell” that staged raids on friendly facilities to expose weaknesses in security.  He’s a rather controversial individual, but he did write a book on his experiences that is supposedly non-fiction, along with a number of follow up works of a fictional nature.  Not knowing much about him, it’s hard to tell if he’s a grandstanding blowhard or a true American patriot.  I’d imagine he lies somewhere in the middle, but after playing this game (which he was supposedly an advisor for) I’d tend to lean toward blowhard.

Apparently all North Korean workers are issued a hard hat and a submachine gun. I somehow think neither is true...

The game is set in the 1980s, and Marcinko and his team are inserted into North Korea to investigate some North Korean missiles.  It opens with you and two team members on a helicopter and Marcinko (voiced by Mickey Rourke) giving some forgettable voice over.  The only part I remember is that he hand-picked his team, which only became important because as soon as you get off the helicopter your team takes out some DPRK soldiers.  It turns out Marcinko is a terrible teacher, because his teammates fail to kill one of the guards outright (which one would assume highly trained SEALs would be capable of) and then compound this mistake by standing over him without either shooting him again or checking his body.  The Korean pulls out a grenade and kills your teammates, leaving you in North Korea all by your onesies.

At least with my teammates dead, no one will yell at me for staring at this sexy poster all day.

And so begins your epic journey.  If by epic, I mean a tale of bland textures, bad voice acting, a script that is 90% expletives, lousy game mechanics, artificial intelligence that isn’t intelligent, and a single player game that took me exactly 2 hours and 20 minutes to complete.  This game is so lousy that you can’t even use the mouse at the menu screen.  Arrow keys only, my friends.  In addition, the graphics settings are limited to Brightness, Motion Blur (on/off), Shadow Complexity, Texture Quality (I can’t imagine what it looks like on low), and Resolution.  And while this isn’t exactly a problem, I did find it somewhat odd that one could actually adjust the X and Y axes on the mouse independently for sensitivity.

As for the gameplay, when a game starts off with “A SpecWarrior.  One who gives a fuck.  That’s me” you just know it’s gonna be a good one.  You start every mission with an MP5 and a silenced pistol.  You get a full load of ammo for the MP5, but you never get to pick up more for it, so there’s no sense in carrying it for very long.  Swap it for an AK.  They seem to have about the same power and accuracy, so I saw little reason to stick with the MP5.  The pistol, which might as well be a laser for its absolutely insane accuracy, is really the only gun you actually need.  It never runs out of ammunition, and a few shots will kill most any opponent.  You can swap it out for another weapon, too, but there isn’t really a point.  The silencer seems to work against some opponents and not others, though, so you shouldn’t depend on it.  You only have two weapons slots, but you can only change weapons by rolling the mousewheel down, not up, which just seems silly since up isn’t bound to anything.  Weapons include an AK47, a Russian SMG, Dragunov sniper rifle, a Russian pistol (with no silencer, so I never used it), and an RPD light machine gun.  The M4 carbine and a 3 shot grenade launcher (with no reloads and no ammo drops) make cameos, but I’d imagine they’re only useful in multiplayer.  It’s a shame, because in single player the M4 was the best weapon going, but you only get to use it for about 3 minutes (if you even explore enough to find it).

This was my second Dragunov for this indoor level. The funny part is, I dropped the first one, but this one was missing the 6 rounds I had fired earlier.

Your health is managed COD-style.  As we all know, a few deep breaths are all any elite soldier needs to heal back up.  The game alerts you to your health status by going black and white, but with a color palate as lousy as this one you won’t always notice it.  If you actually manage to sneak up on your enemy, you can perform an insta-kill finishing move.  Supposedly there are about 25 of these, but I only saw about 6 of them myself, and some are highly dependent on the situation.  One that isn’t just involves Dick (that’s what I’m calling him from now on) stabbing some poor bastard in the side about six times.  And I thought these guys were more subtle than that…  The game does involve a Rainbow 6: Vegas-style cover system, but I found it to be more trouble than it was worth in most situations.  You also cancel your reload action when going into or out of cover.  Apparently guys in the Special Forces can headshot with a silenced pistol at 100 meters but can’t reload while backing up from a barricade.  I bet they can’t walk and chew gum at the same time, either.  There are also situations where you need to fast rope down to some other spot, so the North Koreans and Russians obligingly left fast rope anchors all over the place for you.

This sneaky Korean is hiding IN the bookshelf.

The level design is atrocious.  This is the most linear game I’ve played in a very long time.  You not only have but one route to follow to the end of the level, but you also only have one route to follow through each ROOM.  Rooms are usually clogged with 2 foot tall obstructions, but since SEALs are apparently like their aquatic brethren and can’t jump, they force you to take a very specific route through each battle space you encounter.  This makes sneaking up on opponents difficult in most situations.  You can shoot out lights and occasionally electrical boxes to plunge levels into darkness, but shooting out individual lights only make it harder for you to see, not your enemies.  So if you didn’t shoot out a box, forget about sneaking up on bad guys.  The level concepts themselves seem like they’d be better suited to the old N64 Golden-eye game: a factory, a dam, a train, a missile bunker.  Although RW’s new twist on the dam has your fast roping down the outside wall for about 5 minutes while it’s blowing up around you.  No one shoots at you during this time (though you’ll literally run into a few Russians.  Did I mention we rode a train to Russia?), but it’s not on a timer either, so the entire sequence is pointless and wastes time.  But I guess having the single player experience last 2 hours and 15 minutes just wasn’t acceptable…

No jumping allowed. You simply can't get over this hedge. You MUST go around.

I wish I could tell you Multiplayer was a better experience.  In fact, I wish I could tell you anything about it, but I was apparently the only person playing this game in the entire world.  I saw no active lobbies, and sat with my own lobby up for about 20 minutes before I gave up.  That being the case, I’m guessing it’s not very good.  Or at least not a significant enough improvement over singleplayer to warrant people buying the game for it.  It seems it can’t stand up to even Codename: Eagle on that score.

Tell me that's not the best fire effect you've ever seen.

What did I get out of all of this?  Well, for one, I absolutely hate Squid for making me play it.  For another, I lost a lot of respect for Mickey Rourke for voicing this steaming pile.  But mostly, I was just amazed that someone could utterly destroy the Unreal 3 engine this badly.  Its Metacritic rating of 29 is astounding to me.  I have no idea how they found that many reviewers that would give it more than a 10.   I guess since you can actually make it all the way through the game without it crashing out, it nets some sort of minimum score, but that doesn’t mean I have to be happy about it.  And now I leave you with some of the comments made by Dick during this horrendous experience.

  • “Drop dead, motherfuckers!  Fuckin’ amateurs!”
  • “That’s the factory.  The Great Leader must have a tiny dick.”
  • “I’m gonna gut you like a fish!”
  • “Looks like the douche bag convention’s in town.”
  • “Smells like dog shit and gunpowder in here.”
  • When throwing a grenade: “Special delivery, assholes!”
  • When blowing up a factory: “Happy fucking birthday, assholes!”
  • “Suck my balls, my mother fuckin’ hairy balls, wrap them around your big mouth.”  Yes, it says wrap them around your mouth, not wrap your mouth around them.  I realize it doesn’t make sense.
  • “Better dead than red, assholes!”
  • “What a shithole.  How the fuck did I end up in Jersey?”  Ok, that one was kinda funny.

One of the sneaky kill moves. Unfortunately, this one happens a lot, so it gets old fast.

This is one of the supply rooms. Seriously, that's all there is.

Pretty grandiose for a Russian command center. I didn't think they had enough money for that, considering the lack of supplies in the supply room.