You're Sooo Cliché
Rogue Ops begins with a terribly clichéd story - ex-Green Beret Nikki Connors has settled down and started a family. On a vacation to Istanbul, Nikki's family is brutally murdered in an attack by the Omega 19 terrorist organisation. After the funerals, Nikki is approached by an anti-terrorist organisation who informs her that her husband has been working for them as a covert operative for many years, and was sent to Istanbul for an assassination of an Omega 19 operative. The organisation recruits Nikki, and puts her through a rigorous two year training program - the end of which being where the game begins.
After the initial poorly constructed and directed cutscene, it becomes apparent that Rogue Ops is mish-mash of three popular titles - Perfect Dark, Metal Gear Solid and Splinter Cell, though nowhere near as well executed as any of the above. The whole "mixing a few different popular games and hoping for the best" formula of UK development could well be the reason so many of the games from the region have been so inexplicably bland.
Rogue Ops employs all of the usual stealth based gaming bits and pieces, and a variety of much despised gaming clichés. Nikki has a variety of weapons, including the usual pistol and sniper rifle, but a few more interesting weapons such as shuriken, though you will find a lot of the newer weapons are absolutely useless outside of situations where you are forced to use them. There's also a variety of gadgets, including a very useful set of goggles that allow Nikki to see enemies and other potential threats through walls and ceilings. Nikki also has a few maneuvers up her sleeve - the old sneak kill and the ability to dispose of bodies being the most notable. If you have an Xbox Live Headset laying around, you can use a list of commands written in the manual to play the game (saying "gun" will select your gun, and so on). Nikki's sneak attack maneuver is probably the only original thing the game offers, as you are forced to input a series of stick movements in the correct order to initiate the attack. Pull everything off correctly and the game moves into a brutal cutscene which shows x-ray style footage of Nikki breaking the guard's bones. Interesting but annoying, sadly.
The use of gaming and story clichés and recycled ideas in Rogue Ops would be excusable if the game was enjoyable to play, but sadly, the play mechanics featured in Rogue Ops are highly flawed, and the missions on offer are too uninspired to offer a player any sort of significant enjoyment. Controlling Nikki is a chore - her movement is not the slightest bit fluid, she's constantly bumping into things, and the context sensitive actions are often difficult to line up. Stealthy activity in Rogue Ops is also poorly executed. Nikki has to hide in the darkness for a certain amount of time before guards will no longer see her, which can be a real pain in some instances. Often, security devices in the game will often spot you even when you are completely concealed, bringing into question the depth of quality assurance seen in the game's development. The game's missions are quite tedious, asking you to complete the usual stealth game tricks - set up bombs, kill certain people, capture specific documents and so on. Rogue Ops only offers up 9 missions, and despite the fact that these can be quite difficult at times (due to poor execution more often than not), it isn't foreseeable that players will want to go back for more.
Needs Beer Goggles
We're getting into the latter half of the cycle of the current consoles, and yet we still find a lot of games that feature low quality visuals. Rogue Ops is one such title, offering up visuals equivalent to that of a lower quality first generation title. It doesn't help that the visual style of the game is lacking in originality either. Nikki's design changed in the latter half of the design process - she looks like your typical generic video game heroine - mildly attractive and defying gravity. The player and enemy models feature low quality modeling and animation, which is disappointing. Rogue Ops level design isn't too different from Bits' last title, Die Hard Vendetta, which would suggest the company used the same technology. Level geometry is decent, but texturing and object placement leaves a lot to be desired. The framerate constantly struggles throughout the experience, making Rogue Ops even more of a chore to play. It does feature a 60 Hz mode however, giving us one less thing to bitch about.
Voice acting and dialog is another area where Rogue Ops falls in line with its UK brethren - by offering relatively cheesy dialog and a variety of jokes which fail to get a laugh. The actors which provide the voices for the main characters in the game couldn't appear more disinterested. The soundtrack features another mix of orchestral and techno music, but offers nothing memorable. There is no support for any surround sound format.
Never Again
Rogue Ops is another case of developers trying to mix existing games together and failing miserably. Perfect Dark, Splinter Cell and Metal Gear Solid are like pizza, cola and ice cream - great foods on their own, but not very good when you mix them all together. This failed mish-mash of games isn't helped by Rogue Ops various other flaws, namely a cliché story, stereotypical characters, poor graphics, bad acting, flawed gameplay mechanics and uninteresting design. The only thing Rogue Ops is good at is providing an example of how the UK games development industry has fallen from grace.
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