Rogue Warrior
(
2009
)
All critics are supposed to go into works their reviewing free from expectations, but I'm only human and I will confess, I really wanted Rogue Warrior to be good. Not just for the fun of having a contrarian opinion (though that is always enjoyable in-and-of-itself) but because I saw the seed of something great in Rogue Warrior's premise. I am, among other things, a cold war history nut, and there aren't nearly enough games set in that time period for my tastes. Sure, I could replay Call of Duty: Black Ops [2010] for the millionth time, but that game's campaign is one very particular type of Cold War story. Black Ops is all about paranoia and war crimes, which makes it more than a bit depressing (and realistic, for like most conflicts in human history The Cold War is one devoid of clear heroes and villains). But video games are under no obligation to be realistic, and I longed for a Cold War game that captured the hokey spirit of Rocky IV (1985); a game that was all machismo and spitting in the commie's eyes. That Rogue Warrior was based on the literary works of one Dick Marcinko, a less subtle version of Tom Clancy, whose main character is a literal authorial avatar, gave me some reason to hope.
Rogue Warrior unquestionably has the right attitude and lets you know right from the difficulty select screen. It doesn't matter whether you select recruit (easy), Regulars (medium), or Elites (hard) the game will greet you with some manner of profanity-laced sarcasm. This is clearly a game that does not take itself too seriously, which given the grimdark state of realistic shooters of its age is something to celebrate in-and-of-itself. Then there's the narration, which is so laden with four-letter words that you will swear that the main character, Dick Marcinko, has a terminal case of tourettes. Seriously, every-time you kill somebody in this game, Dick will intone “Drop dead motherfucker!” or “You fucking amateur” or “Godamn cockbreath motherfuckers!” or (my personal favorite) “Fucking retard, you dead piece of shit.” Hell, when Dick doesn't swear it's more surprising than when he does, I remember being stunned about half-way through the game when he killed a Russian soldier and managed the half-way civil exclamation: “President Reagan sends his regards.” The script is a bit bluer than I would prefer, but it does manage to evoke memories of a ten-year-old S.C. looking up “ass” and “poop” in the dictionary for giggles. There's nothing wrong with being juvenile, and low humor is perhaps the most enduring form of comedy despite the pretensions of the allegedly high-brow critics.
I can tolerate a game written by a 12-year-old, but I'm far less forgiving of one that has been programmed by one. Sadly, Rogue Warrior falls painfully short on the technical front. Indeed, had a High School classmate given me this game and told me it was his latest mod for Half Life 2 [2004], I would tell him that it needs a lot of work. To catalog all the glitches would be a waste of time, so I will just regale you with some of the more interesting ones I ran into:
1). At one point I managed to shoot an enemy soldier on the far side of a pane of glass, without breaking the glass.
2). When I started a pre-animated take-down sequence on an enemy soldier his friend noticed me and opened fire. The whole pre-animated sequence played out with the remaining soldier shooting at me, but my character took no damage.
3). My character got stuck on an invisible wall and refused to move to the right even as I insistently pressed the command.
It suffices to say that Rogue Warrior is a fucking mess of a game. Occasionally, it gets so glitchy and chaotic that it rises to the level of unintentional comedy but mostly it's just at the baseline level of annoying.
It seems like the technical limitations even inform the story to a certain extent. In the opening cinematic, Dick Machiko flies into North Korea with two unnamed squad-mates. They die in the opening sequence and are never mentioned again, until the game's ending where they are brought up out of nowhere. I get the feeling that these two were supposed to be tag-along squad-mates throughout the entire game with unique personalities and quips al la Battlefield: Bad Company [2008], but that the developers just couldn't get the friendly AI to work correctly in time to reach the deadline. There's no reason for them to be introduced and killed off like that, other than as a concession to realism which seems ridiculous in a game that is so consistently absurd. Just have Dick Marcinko sent in as a lone operative, Rambo: First Blood Part 2 (1985) style, it would fit better with the game's general feel anyway.
After losing his two comrades, Marcinko presses on and discovers that the North Koreans are building nukes for the Russians. This plot twist is really fucking dumb because the game is set in 1986, a full decade after the Chinese communists opened a relationship with the West and became the most immediate threat to the USSR. Hell even before Nixon's diplomatic coup, Chinese and Russian relations were hardly rosy, just look at the famous (and hilarious) incident of Chairman Mao meeting with Khrushchev in the swimming pool for evidence of this. I seriously doubt that the magnates in the Kremlin would entrust anything of any importance to a regime as buddy-buddy with China as North Korea was. From there, Marcinko discovers that the commies have managed to develop a working missile defense system (think Reagan's Star Wars but fully functional) meaning they can launch a first strike on America with no fear of retaliation. It's up to Marcinko to sabotage the missiles and save the free world.
The story is blasé, but I was prepared to forgive its shortcomings if the game delivered with the action, sadly it does not. Most levels open with a stealth segment where the enemy soldiers stand with their backs to your approach, waiting for Dick to sneak up behind them and kill them with one of his interminable preanimated take-downs. These were so long that I quickly abandoned them altogether, as a headshot from the pistol was less annoying and disruptive to the game's flow. It's damn near impossible to accidentally alert these idiots, as I discovered at the game's start when I tried to jump only to realize there was no jump key and that spacebar was mapped to “throw grenade.” A literal bomb detonating a few feet away isn't enough to snap these guys out of their stupor, so no need to worry about your footsteps. Apparently, there are keys to sneak, but I never needed them as I found sprinting full tilt at an unaware enemy would never alert him to your presence. A bad stealth game that is obnoxiously easy is certainly preferable to one that is obnoxiously hard but is it too much to ask that it not be obnoxious at all.
The scenery and enemies are so painfully generic that I wouldn't have been surprised to learn that this game was an asset flip. Most of the levels are dull grayish brown offices, military installations or industrial areas, though to be fair the game does spice things up with a palace and a submarine pen at the end. While these areas are more interesting, they are loaded with some truly shoddy details if you stop and take notice; the windows in the palace study, in particular, look straight out of a kindergartner's crayon drawing! There is, however, at least one notable exception to this otherwise uninspired design a propaganda poster early on in the game depicting a female Korean soldier kicking up her legs in the classic communist-style march. The poster is a genuinely subtle and humorous jab at communist propaganda and feels completely out of place in a game that is otherwise devoid of wit. I can say with some confidence, that at least one artist working on this game had a pretty fun week creating that.
The real kicker though, is that this piece of shit had the unbridled, ball-busting audacity to sell for full price at launch. I bought this game about 9 years after its release when it was on sale, for a price roughly equal to what I would spend on a candy bar, and even I feel a bit ripped-off. I can only imagine how the poor saps that shelled out 50-60 dollars on it must have felt! The campaign is so pitifully brief that I plowed through it in two after-work sessions. Had I played this game on a Saturday, I would have still had time to make lunch, do the laundry, clean my apartment, and watch a movie. To be fair, I did play it on medium difficulty, but after running through the first couple of levels again on hard, I doubt that that would have stretched out the experience much either. The enemy AI is no smarter on hard than on easy, the only difference is that their bullets kill you faster. This is seldom a problem as even the elite enemies are loath to attempt flanking maneuvers or even do something as complex as toss a grenade at you. Most of them just stand in predetermined places and wait for you to come and kill them. To keep myself from falling asleep, I started to give myself arbitrary challenges: Clear this stage using only the handgun, beat this level with just the shotgun, etc. This, along with the absurd dialogue constitutes the game's sole point of interest for me, which is a damn shame because there definitely is room in the FPS genre for a cheesy 80s action movie game masquerading as historical fiction. Rogue Warrior just ain't it.