Tiny Diggers – An iPad Construction Truck Game for Kids Age 2-5

How many times have you read about a movie not being screened for critics?  In the industry, this is a normal practice, because it means that the movie is probably no good, and the studio does not want to hurt initial weekend ticket sales.  Yeah, I had a feeling that Bethesda was going to take this route with Rogue Warrior, which has had little to no press since E3, and most sites had written the game off as a shallow FPS, with little to no value for the consumer.  However, Bethesda was nice enough to send over a copy of Rogue Warrior to review, but it wasn’t sent until after the release date, prompting the above comparison.  And while the Rogue Warrior is bad, it will expand your use of “creative metaphors”.

In Rogue Warrior, you play as special operative Richard “Demo Dick” Marcinko, who has been charged with a expeditionary force into North Korea, to find some stray nukes.  At least that is the best of what I could gather was happening in the story.  I know the game starts with a great cut scene where your two team members are killed by a North Korean officer who detonates a grenade as he dies.  Your character survives, and proceeds to track down the rogue missiles through North Korea and into Mother Russia.  Yes, this story does take place during the cold war period of the 1980’s, including a few references to Reagan.  There is a good framework and idea for the story, but the execution of the story is flawed, mostly because it feels so disjointed.

Gameplay is fairly straight forward, with you taking a standard first person shooter interface.  You do get access to some authentic military hardware while you are playing, and the addition of some pretty cool stealth kills adds to idea of sneaking around, instead of hitting things head on.  Of course, this is tempered with the fact that the AI is flat out broken.  Every enemy you encounter will follow a set attack program, never deviating from his course.  If you see an enemy walk across the screen and hide behind cover, he will do that every time.  Even if you run right up on him, he will not move from that area.  If two soldiers are next to each other, I was able to shoot one, without garnering a response from the other, allowing me to sneak up and kill him as well.  You would think an enemy would notice his buddy slump to the floor, with a hole in his head, but nope, it’s just business as usual.

Much was made of the fact that Mickey Rourke provided voice work in the game for the lead character, and again, it is the tale of two voice over works.  Rourke’s gravely tones add a sense of gritty realism to the character.  I could totally believe that this was the voice for Dick Marcinko.  It totally fit the character.  The flipside to this is that the character swears at a pace not seen since the movie Scarface.  There were whole combinations of swearing that I had no idea could be put together, but Rourke does it in style.  No, I am not a prude, but a fair amount of swearing goes a long way, and here it is just way overdone.  It really kills, what I would consider, one of the better voice over jobs that I have heard this year.

So as I played through Rogue Warrior, I really started to realize why there was no advertising, marketing and just nothing from anyone.  Not even developer Rebellion was chatting this title up recently.  Rogue Warrior is flat out broken at points on the PC.  The game is centered on Steamworks, and has Steam achievements, but half of my achievements never showed up.  My Steam card shows I finished the game, but I am missing half of the level completion achievements.  Also, the game crashes, routinely, while loading a level, opening a door, shooting an enemy, just about any action could bring about a crash.  I tried to figure out what could be causing the issue, but the crashes happened everywhere.  I probably added 30 minutes to my play time with the crashes.  And I mention that timeframe because the game is woefully short.  For a $50 price tag, you are getting a game that can be finished in less than 3 hours.  Yes, that is no joke; I finished the game with a total time of 3.2 hours invested.  Some of that time includes me waiting in an empty multiplayer lobby for at least two more people so I could play a match.  Things do not bode well for a title where the first person on the leaderboard has two wins, and there are a total of 37 people on said leaderboard.

Rogue Warrior ends up being a sad disappointment and a shameful mark for developer Rebellion.  It is also a solid black eye for Bethesda’s publishing arm.  After playing this, I am scared as hell at what will happen to Aliens vs. Predator because I wonder what Rebellion will do to destroy that game.  You have a great character, and some great voice work, that is destroyed by numerous crashes and bad game design.  Rogue Warrior should be avoided like a plague of locusts, or a pissed off mother-in-law, as the hassle is not worth your hard earned $50.  Rogue Warrior gets 1.5 out of 5 Aeropausonauts.
Check out Rogue Warrior and other PC reviews at Test Freaks.