Review by: Tony Mitera

Dick Marcinko is a man of legends; stemming from his career as a Navy SEAL in Vietnam, his creation and command of the nation’s first counter-terrorism unit, and other numerous exploits. Rogue Warrior takes his gruff persona and brutal skills back into a fictional mission set during the height of the Cold War, putting him behind enemy lines and working against direct orders from his superiors. Unfortunately, the gameplay suffers from so many flaws and slap shod design that what could have been a great foul mouthed bloody romp turns out to be a broken shell of a game.

At the start of the game you are tasked with tracking down a shipment of missiles in North Korea, only to find that these missiles are headed north into Russia. This takes you through a variety of locales from North Korean train depots to Russian submarine bases, mercilessly gunning down and stabbing people in the neck as you go. The plot is shoe-string at best, but the storyline is about as passable as you would expect any action movie to be.

Enemies are usually unaware of your presence at the start of a level; letting you use crude stealth mechanics to run up and perform a kill move on them. These kill moves are brutal and include such methods as stabbing someone in the kidney five or six times, or stabbing them right under the chin. Once spotted, however, enemies become alerted to your presence, which means your best bet is to start flinging lead. While moving around you use a first-person viewpoint, though if you take cover the game switches to third-person to allow you to blind fire or aim around or over cover.

Unfortunately for a game that relies on it as its bread and butter, the gunplay in the game is incredibly shoddy. Aiming never feels right thanks to sluggish controls, how your aiming reticule changes position for no reason as you aim around cover, and how every weapon feels woefully inaccurate. Given that you can be dropped by just a few shots this makes combat more a matter of spray and praying from cover rather than popping off accurate shots at the enemy. It’s not that the enemies are hard to kill, as one shot to the head will make the keel over, but rather the sheer volume of ammunition you have to waste in order to try to do so. More often than not, since you can carry six grenades and find them all over the place you are better off simply trying to kill most people with grenades rather than frustrate yourself trying to draw a bead on someone.

Other issues plague the title, such as various issues with the cover system. When in cover around a corner or behind a box you have artificial restrictions on how far over or down you can aim, such as how you can only aim as far down as level with the floor. This means that if you are at the top of a set of stairs or on a catwalk above enemies you simply cannot aim at anyone a mere couple of feet lower than you without leaving cover. It is also far too easy to snap to the wrong cover than what you wanted, or find that you are for some reason unable to take cover behind things such as open doors or a corner that appears to have the ability to stop gunfire just fine.

There is a fairly wide selection of firearms to play with, but most of them suffer from either hideous recoil or are simply underpowered. Weapons like shotguns and pistols take far too many rounds to kill someone, whereas weapons like the machine gun or AR4 have so much recoil you’ll spend an entire clip trying to drop one guy. Funnily enough the best weapons to use are either the AK or the SMG that enemies love to tote around, leaving you with a large supply of ammo from the fallen. Given that you can carry two guns there is no reason to always carry anything but these two, regardless of the sniper rifles and other weapons you’ll find during your mission.