Thankfully, the control in Pariah is one of its strongest features and arguably only second to Halo in terms of smoothness in movement and aiming. While in Halo weapon selection was made easy due to the fact you could only hold 2 weapons at the same time, Pariah lets you hold far more. While you can scroll manually through then, thankfully weapon selection is made easy with a simple press of the Y button which brings up an onscreen wheel icon showing your weaponry. Here you just need to press the stick in the direction associated to the weapon you want on the wheel. The only downside is you can’t move and change weapon at the same time which can be annoying during the heat of the battle, but overall it’s a good way of swapping between a large selection of weapons.
The vehicles in Pariah are really quite terrible.
The weapons themselves are a mixed bag. While the Sniper Rifle is satisfyingly accurate, and the remote controlled Grenade Launcher is a great way to play around with your enemies; bouncing grenades off walls and clicking the remote to blow them 30ft in the air never gets old, the other weapons are quite tame in comparison. The standard machine gun lacks power, the shotgun lacks punch and the plasma rifle doesn’t even look like it is even hurting your enemies upon contact. If you shoot someone with a shotgun in Half-Life 2 or get a head shot with a Battle Rifle in Halo 2 you can feel it. The weapons feel powerful, they visually make contact and more often than not they’ll send the enemy flying backwards like they have actually been shot with some velocity. In Pariah, enemies will more often than not simply fall to the ground in a heap, which means combat is less rewarding as a result. Oh, and don’t even get me started on the useless melee attack, which is too slow and cumbersome to be of any use whatsoever.
One thing that certainly doesn’t help either is the lack of a mid range weapon. Considering a lot of the game is set outside, the fact you always have to get close to do damage unless you use a Sniper Rifle restricts enjoyment too. Only the Bulldog machine gun, with very light bursts, offers any kind of ranged combat. Again, games like Halo, and more suitably, Far Cry has their fair share of scoped weapons to use, and were better games for it. One thing I did like about the weapons system was the ability to upgrade them throughout the game. By finding weapon energy cores scattered throughout the games 18 levels you be able to gain use of a thermal scope for the Sniper Rifle, heat seeking abilities for the Rocket Launcher and armor-piercing ammo for the Bulldog.
Weapons aren’t the only thing these energy cores can be used on. The Healing Tool plays a big part in Pariah. It not only allows you to recover lost energy with injections, but upgrading allows for a larger life bar (along with quicker healing times). Rechargeable cells can be found either lying sporadically on the ground, in nooks and crannies, or on enemy corpses. The health meter itself works much like in The Chronicles of Riddick in that as long as an entire block of health isn't taken away, it will fill back up Halo-style with time.
What FPS would be complete without the customary exploding barrels?
Level design in Pariah is of variable quality throughout. While most of the very best FPS titles try to keep things moving at an exciting pace, the action in Pariah comes in random spurts. Although the outdoor stages are the most enjoyable, you'll often spend a long time running through large areas needlessly with little to no enemy interaction whatsoever. You’ll find the odd vehicle sitting around to make long journeys slightly quicker, but the vehicles themselves are quite awful. The control feels unnatural while most of the onboard weaponry generally lacks accuracy. The indoor areas play second fiddle to Pariah’s outdoor mission, but they are better than I imagined they would be. Admittedly, they’re a bit repetitive in design, but given the close combat nature of the weapons, the game is reasonably well suited to indoor combat. Sure, there isn’t that same freedom of movement or choice of tactics to use that the outdoor levels provide (especially with some of the destructible lookout towers throughout each map), but weapons such as the Grenade Launcher are a lot of fun to shoot around bouncing off of walls and even the shotgun-like Frag Rifle becomes useful at times.
The enemies certainly lack in visual variety, but the AI is decent enough to make up for it and actually go some way to save this game from mediocrity. They’re not afraid of doing you damage, they rarely stand still and they’re quite happy to attack in groups if they have the numbers to do so. Pariah relies quite a lot on its AI so it is best played on the harder difficulty setting, anything less than the default difficulty and you’d probably struggle to find any sort of enjoyment here, but when you inject some decent AI, the minor flaws littered throughout the game aren’t so bad. With solid controls, decent AI and a well judged checkpoint system Pariah is a fairly enjoyable FPS, despite of what seems like an endless list of faults so far.
The multiplayer isn’t too bad either. As well as a split screen co-op mode, Xbox Live play is supported. Before you join a game you get to pick a class of character which determines what weapons you spawn with. Energy cores litter each level and allow you to upgrade your guns in multiplayer much like you do in the campaign mode. All the usual modes such as deathmatch, team deathmatch, capture the flag, siege, and assault are there too so there is something to suit everyone here. While there are only a small handful of maps, Pariah features a map maker meaning you can create your own. It’s fairly easy to use once you get the hang of it and you can make pretty much whatever design of map you’d want. The only downside to this, and the multiplayer on the whole, is the lack of people playing it. There’s very little point in making maps only for there to be no one online to play on it with. There are bots, both online and offline, you can play around with if you so wish, but they’re not exactly overflowing with intelligence and you’ll soon be able to win most games with ease. With the likes of Halo 2 and the Tom Clancy games on Xbox Live, you’ve got to be something pretty special to retain a faithful fan base of players. Unfortunately, the multiplayer in Pariah isn’t one of these special games.
The delightful Grenade Launcher….
Graphically, Pariah is certainly a strange one. At times it looks stunning with huge environments packed with trees and foliage - all beautifully textured and running smoothly. Then there are other times where some incredibly low resolution textures appear, especially on some of the indoor levels where things look like a muddy mess at times. Then there’s the slowdown. For most of the game the framerate is fine, but for a few of the later levels it becomes practically unplayable at times. One level in particular had the framerate crawl to about 5fps which is unacceptable, especially for a FPS. Enemy design and animation isn’t particularly interesting or varied, but it gets the job done. Widescreen isn’t supported either which is a real shame, especially when playing split screen co-op. The music and general sound effects are functional it best. Some of the weapons have a satisfying sound to them, the Sniper Rifle and Grenade Launcher in particular but the soundtrack isn’t in the least bit memorable and the voice acting pales in comparison to the kind of quality we see in gaming these days.
It’s hard what to say about Pariah in an overall summary. Despite the fact half of the weapons are unexciting to use, the levels are poorly paced, enemies lack variety, the vehicles are horrible to use, the story weakly presented and the framerate kills some parts of the later levels, Pariah isn’t actually a bad game. It controls well, the AI is fairly intelligent and blowing the Remote Grenade Launcher on top of a group of enemies never gets boring. The multiplayer is actually half decent too, it’s just a shame there’s nobody playing it. While Pariah will never come close to say Halo, Half-Life or even Far Cry, there’s something about it that lifts it above the average FPS’s like the Medal of Honor games or Doom 3. Given its faults and rather short length (it’s only about 6-7 hours long) I wouldn’t suggest picking this up at full price. A highly recommended FPS if you can get it at a budget price, but steer clear until then.
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