Dick Marcinko: Rogue Warrior

The Good
It's not terribly ugly, but you can't call that beautiful. Just don't look too much around. The levels are not too long and the game in general can be completed fairly fast.

The Bad
Too limited controls. Repetitive gameplay, one straight line levels, unfair fights. Left with a feeling of a too sparse background story. Worst than most games of the same era.

The Bottom Line
You might be tempted to buy this game one day because you can see it in pretty much any store for a ridiculous price. Well, don't.

The game is bad. There is no redeeming quality, except maybe the attempt to do a "more adult oriented" game in an not so known era (the end of the cold war). But in the end, it comes off as something a fan of Marcinko would have tried to make to promote his wikipedia's page... Not exactly the good kind of fan game. The only thing that helps you power through it is the numerous executions you can make, but even there it's hard to trigger more than the same 3 ones. Basically you end up running to your enemies and pressing A to finish the fight and move on. There were a 3rd person cover mode but... it's really too boring to use. No really, use your pistol for far away targets and melee everyone you can.

I should have seen it coming when the first cutscenes were lagging. I wanted to give it a shot but it's really not that great.

The AI is dumb but their aimbot is on point and they will shoot you from across the map. Sometimes they're blind, sometimes they'll see you through the 7th sense. You cannot jump in this game so you're stuck moving from one cover to another until you've reached your opponent.

I've played this in normal mode by default and even though you die a couple of times, it ain't too hard. Just take your time to heal up and you'll be fine. But the game is empty, there is nothing to collect, there is no score to make, and the arsenal is quite limited (1 sniper, 2 pistols, 1 shotgun, a few more,...) Odds are you'll finish the first level and then put it back away and never touch it again.

If for some forsaken reason you MUST play the game, make your life easier and take it on PC. Who knows maybe they are mods for it ?

I believe the change of developers might have deal a vicious blow to what this game could have been like. They must had a decent budget to be so wildly released and featuring Rourke in it, yet the game is bad. And if Marcinko is still active I wouldn't like to be one of the devs who have worked on this...

Turns out only swearings is not enough to make a good game. But special mention for the end song !

The Good
The funny one-liners that's pretty much it.

The Bad
Everything else such as the guns and how limited they have in the game, gameplay, crappy story (if you want to call it a story).

The Bottom Line
Please don't buy this game, even if it's cheap don't get it I beg you!!!!

The Good
Interesting background and setup, fatality moves if you can get close enough to do a silent kill

The Bad
Generic cover shooter otherwise in rat-run levels and generic weapons

The Bottom Line
Rogue Warrior is best described as a "cover shooter" set in the latter days of Cold War. Basically, you travel from location to location, in search of ever larger objectives and unravel a conspiracy across the world. In the first mission, you are sent into North Korea to retrieve a defector who has important information. That only leads to further missions in North Korea, than to yet other countries, and all the way north into an enemy base...

The premise is intriguing enough, and the Marcinko does know what he's talking about as the background material is excellent. However, shooter itself is about as generic as generic can be. It's a basic "cover" shooter where you can lean against walls and cover, pop out to shoot or blindfire around the cover. You have a few grenades, and variety of weapons, but you can only carry two: usually assault rifle and SMG, but there are also pistol, shotgun, and some minor surprises.

The game's primary feature is a series of "fatality moves". According to the game, there are over 30 different ones, depending on how you approached the enemy before triggering the "kill move". And they are quite bloody and visceral that should not be described. Let's just say they belong in a Rambo film.

The levels are generic "rat runs" where there is a single way through the level that you have to fight through. Occasionally there are wider areas that allow slightly different approaches, but generally your approach is hide in cover, shoot to kill a few enemies, wait for reinforcements to show up, shoot them too, gather ammo, advance to next segment. And this repeats ad infinitum. Occasionally you can sneak up on a patrolling guard to do a fatality, but it's not always possible. Indeed, there's no bonus for doing so.

There is multiplayer, but that was not tested.

Graphics are average for a shooter of this vintage. The levels look detailed, albeit not very useful tactically.

Enemy AI is dumb, and relies on placement and spawning (often they do spawn to the sides of you) and their numbers to pose any threat.

This is one of those games with "wait to heal" health that as long as you can find some cover and don't get hit you'll heal automatically, and it's kinda lame that way.

There are many impossible plots, such as Marcinko taking a dive into arctic waters while wearing short sleeves, then swam underwater a few hundred meters for infiltration into enemy base.

All in all, this game is a generic cover shooter. Marcinko's name got it a better backstory and some fatality moves, but the end result is still a generic cover shooter.