Rogue Warrior Review (Xbox 360)

A few years ago Rogue Warrior was announced with impressive plans. Drop-in-and-out co-op with procedural multiplayer maps. Yet whatever the original development studio had done, Bethesda wasn’t happy and pushed the game onto Rebellion. This was probably a bad move, as an ambitious and interesting sounding title became a generic and extremely low-budget interactive movie. Not a very good one, either.

Based on a series of fictional novels that were a spin-off of Richard Marcinko’s autobiography, Rogue Warrior straps you into the boots of Navy SEAL officer Dick Marcinko. You drop into 1980’s North Korea with two men that happen to be so well-trained they merely look at each other after a dying North Korean pulls the pin on a grenade. While their leader leaps for cover they stand there and wait for the thing to explode, joining the Korean Communists in the after life. Dick does an excellent job covering this up by telling his superiors the North Koreans were waiting and that it was an ambush, even though the SEALs had clearly taken the patrol by surprise.

From there the player goes through a series of levels consisting of two general sections. The first allows the player to test his stealth mettle, and halfway through is a cut-scene resulting in all the foes to become alert to your presence. It’s pretty formulaic and simplified compared to other stealth or shooter games.

When foes are not aware of Dick’s presence they are easy to sneak past. Make as much noise as you want, they won’t see or hear. You can be in their peripheral vision and they won’t see you. You literally have to be in front of them to be spotted. Patrols are never very complex and it’s pretty easy to kill each Communist without alerting anyone else. Yet somehow, stealth kills are pretty satisfying. It could be the variety of death animations that Dick goes through, the most brutal of which had him jamming his knife into the ’taint’ of some poor Russian before sticking it repeatedly under the man’s arm.

These kill abilities are available as long as you are within range, though this happens a lot less frequently in the more gun-based sections of the game. The weapon selections are very limited with a few variants of machine guns, a couple of shotguns, a couple of pistols, a Dragunov sniper rifle and a grenade launcher making up the entire arsenal available. You can aim down the sights of a gun to try and shoot down enemies Call of Duty style, but this proves difficult due to the response of the controls.