Pariah Review

Pariah has been released by Groove games and developed by Digital Extremes, well known for games such as Unreal, Unreal Tournament, Dark Sector, and Epic Pinball. With such a flowery portfolio, when Digital Extremes announced their new FPS named Pariah, it generated quite a hype among the fans, but alas. The story of Pariah is no different from almost every second FPS game being released. Even by comparing it to normal standards, Pariah falls short on many counts. It does not provide anything new for the gamers, not even in terms of a storyline. Pariah was released both for PC and XBOX and the only advantage the PC version has is that it has got more appealing graphics than its console version.

Find the Story

Pariah starts with you portraying the role of a Dr. John Mason. The game begins with a cut scene of Mason replacing one of the doctors aboard a ship that is transferring a female prisoner named Karina who is in cryogenic status. Then as cliché would have it, the ship crashes and you are somehow alive with the female prisoner who is out of the cryogenic state and is having amnesia. As your ship has crashed in enemy territory, you face death from those who want to capture the female, as she carries a deadly virus in her which also gets transferred to you. Now its up to you to find the girl, get her to safety, save your life and lastly save the world from a maniac. In doing all this, it seems as the developers could not put various types of human enemies, so toward the middle of the game, the futuristic machines in the game get aware of themselves and turn on humans. So now you have to fight both humans and machines. You also learn that the virus inside the female which got transferred to you is developed from the remains of an alien species which invaded earth long time ago and was tested on the female. The story which fails on both concept and execution is the first in a long list of pitfalls.

Weapons Loadout

If the weapons available in Pariah are futuristic then I hope no one tries to develop them in the real world. The weapons you get are: the Bulldog, which is you primary automatic rifle and is better than most of the other guns in the game in terms of damage done and range, a Plasma gun which has got more range than the bulldog but the ability to hit a moving enemy by using it is almost nil as the shots fired travel quite slowly. Then, you have a Frag rifle which is a substitute for a shotgun, but ineffective at most of the points in the game as it has neither the range nor the power. Tthe sniper gun featured is one of the decent guns of the game with a good range and damage rate, but somehow if you shoot you enemy while using the zoom feature you can kill him in one shot but if the enemy is near you and you shoot him without zooming, it takes 4 bullets to kill him, shouldn’t the bullets do the same damage no matter zoomed or not?. In the name of futuristic heavy damage weapons you also carry a rocket launcher, the rocket launcher of Pariah is absolutely pathetic, it takes a lot of time to reload and doesn’t do enough damage to be even termed as a rocket launcher. Lastly, there is the grenade launcher, which is the second best gun in your arsenal, just toss a grenade and watch the enemies fly, the grenade launcher packs the best power of all the weapons but one needs to be very accurate in tossing the grenade toward the enemy as it usually keeps bouncing ahead.

You also carry a melee weapon which you do not need to use at all during the single player mode. It is like a miniature light saber, the size of a knife and kills the enemy in 1 to 2 hits.

The weapons of the game are pretty pathetic in terms of power and damage. Although the developers have put in the concept of Energy cores which modify the weapons to make them more accurate and powerful, they still do not add much to the game. Each of your weapons can be upgraded to 3 times max depending upon the number of energy cores you find. I was expecting something much better from the developers who gave us the rocket launcher and the sniper rifle of Unreal Tournament.

Gameplay

The gameplay of Pariah is nothing new worth mentioning, the menus are simple and clear, and the setting of the controls is also quite easy. The game although takes around 2.5gb of the hard disk and around 5 minutes to complete installation and has little loading time. In the biggest levels it took not over 15 seconds for the game to load up. The movement of characters in Pariah would remind you instantly of Halo. Like Halo the movement is slow and methodical, both in terms of walking and vehicles.

The Vehicles of the game are sturdy and carry powerful weapons mounted on some of them which were quite accurate, are hard to control and navigate. Bu the chance to get to use the vehicles in the game is restricted to some levels only.

The AI of the game is also weak, the only good thing about them is that they move fast so they are not easy to hit, and their aiming is quite accurate. Other than that, they are nothing more than transitory meat balls.

As far as your characters health is concerned it is marked by 4 bars, each bar gets removed when you take a certain level of damage, however if you back off and take cover before you health bar is almost gone, it regenerates back. To get the health that is lost, you carry a healing tool which works like a syringe gun, and has to be reloaded with health packs dropped by enemies.

Graphics

The surroundings of Pariah are brilliantly made and are quite amazing in terms of details in certain level such as the “Avil” level. But unless you have a high end pc which meets or exceeds the system requirements of the game, Pariah will not provide a good frame rate. If played at low resolutions Pariah will not seem much different from the graphics used in Unreal Tournament, but with higher graphics, little things like water and explosion effects show the real graphics of the game. The details of the enemy characters, vehicles, gun turrets and the blurring effect when using the healing gun to sedate yourself is quite spectacular and detailed.

Was that an Explosion Maa

The worst part of the game is the audio. The dialogues are weak and the enemy taunts become repetitive in the first level itself. Although the music is well done but the effects for guns and explosion corrupt the experience. The weapons sound is incredibly low, even the rocket launcher does not give the effect of a rocket being fired. The sniper gun usually carries the highest decibel sound in games, but in Pariah it seems the sniper is being shot in a soundproof room. The explosion effect for rockets and the grenades is almost like a little cracker.

The only good sound effects that were those of the vehicles, the jeep sounded like a jeep and the transport shuttles gave the best effects as it zoomed through the skies.

Multiplayer Glory

For a game size of 2.5 GB, Pariah’s single player mode is quite short for a FPS. The multiplayer features the basic modes of FPS games namely Deathmatch, Capture the Flag and Assault. The action in the multiplayer mode is quite fast and entertaining in comparison to the singleplayer mode. The amusing feature about the multiplayer is that each player is limited to two weapons in the multiplayer mode. There are combinations of weapons out of which 1 has to be selected at the loadout by the player. Although some may find this irritating but it seems that the developers wanted to make gamers boost their skills and specialize in certain weapons so as to get better in team games.

The only bug that I encountered while playing the game was that when you start a new level and go through the cutscene, you cannot skip it. If you die during the level and the level restarts you have to go through the cut scene again, however if you load the game from a saved file, then you can skip the cutscenes for the level which you have loaded.

All in all Pariah is a great disappointment from the team of Digital Extremes. The FPS which also uses the Havok physics engine and Unreal technology could have lead to a great game. The developer it seems tried to get in the style of Halo and create a game better than it, but in doing so they have completely wrecked it. The lack of story, weak weapons and bad audio effects leaves a gamer unconvinced and most of the time unsure of who his enemy really is, ofcourse for a substitute doctor effected by a deadly virus, being so familiar with using guns without any training also leaves a player nonplussed. So unless and until you want to enjoy the multiplayer mode, there is nothing else commendable enough to play this game.