Pariah is an all around mediocre first person shooter that just cannot stand up under the weight of its own ego. The graphical complexity of many of the environments was certainly beautifully painted, the puzzles seemed interesting enough, and the foes—while not that bright—did perish with satisfying cries of pain; but it seemed to lack that spark that makes a video game worth playing. It is a straightforward nothing-special-here first person shooter and nothing more.
Pariah really did not live up to our snobbish standards where it comes to well written and compelling plots. It fell down so badly in that area that it’s hard for us to give this game a good score. Don’t come to this game expecting a plot or characters that make that much sense. It sets itself up with a lot of very interesting elements of intrigue and ideas: the Shard—a strange biotechnological race who seem to have plagued mankind, literally; a Typhoid Mary passenger—who inexplicably goes from hating the main character to falling in love with him; a main character with inexplicably shiftless allegiances; and a plague—a technoarcane virus so amazing that it changes ordinary men into weapons…
Except that the totally boring world, lack of reason reason for living, and inane weaponry that get handed to the dear doctor main character don’t leave a lot of fun or fantasy to the world. The plot did play a major role in compelling us forward to see where things were going to go. It was just waves after waves of foes to mow down, turrets to turn off, areas to sneak into and murder all who oppose.
A truly tedious experience that culminated in a WTF!? moment near the end when the plot took an unseen twist and fell off a cliff. Glitches at unwanted moments ended in repeating entire sequences, trying to determine how exactly to properly leap between two floating battleships… It took a patience that was not distilled into our spirits at birth.
If we voces were in the habit of posting spoilers we would ruin the end of the game right here; but we don’t need to: the end of this game ruins itself.
Recent Comments