Bytes & Flops 02.02.12: Rogue Warrior

Posted by Vince Osorio on 02.02.2012

Inspired by the NY Times Best-Seller, Rogue Warrior was Bethesda & Rebellion's attempt to bring the espionage of the Cold War to the masses. Only no one bought it.



The man above is Richard "Demo Dick" Marcinko, my choice for the baddest man on the planet. Marcinko is a retired Navy Seal commander who is credited as the first Commanding Officer and founder of both the SEAL Team Six and Red Cell, both prolific counter-terrorist units. The memoir Rogue Warrior gives the official account of Marcinko's tenure in the United States Navy from the man himself. The non-fiction title eventually became a New York Times Best Seller and gave the world Richard Marcinko, the military author and the Rogue Warrior franchise of novels, some fiction, some non-fiction, some in-between. I've never read any of his books, but there's obviously an audience satiated by possibly embellished accounts of counter-terrorism. It was inevitable that the series would grow beyond its roots and invade other forms of entertainment. Barring a big-screen adaptation of the original novel, there was only one other way that Richard Marcinko could bring his stories to a whole new audience- a video game.

Now the original Rogue Warrior book hit shelves in 1993, but the rights to the title weren't optioned off until 2006, when Bethesda Softworks (yes, that Bethesda Softworks, the people who brought you the recent Fallout and Elder Scrolls games) teamed up with Zombie Studios (the people who developed the Saw video games, and most recently, the Kinect-enabled Blackwater) to publish Rogue Warrior: Black Razor, a tactical first-person shooter set for release the following year. That game was supposedly going to take place in modern-day North Korea as Marcinko & his team attempted to take down Korean forces before weapons of mass destruction were launched, dooming the world to nuclear warfare. If generic, Black Razor at least hit the requisite boxes on the "first-person modern warfare shooter" checklist, as it was to run on the Unreal Engine 3, have significant tactical commands & puzzles, and feature drop-in co-op play and 24 player multiplayer. After a period of silence on the game, Bethesda announced that they were not satisfied with Zombie Studios' work on Black Razor and commissioned Rebellion Developments to start the game from scratch. With the developer swap, much of the game's mechanics had changed entirely. Rogue Warrior (without the Black Razor subtitle) would instead run on a proprietary game engine, would be stripped of its tactical elements and was set in a Cold War era North Korea & USSR featuring Marcinko stopping an alliance between the two nations before the U.S. would become a casualty of war. The game prominently featured the Rogue Warrior himself, and hired Mickey Rourke (yes, that Mickey Rourke) to voice Marcinko in game. And so, that's the tale of how Rogue Warrior became a video game.

A lot of work and good intentions were probably wasted on what's one of the most broken, shoddy, unintentionally hilarious and unapolegetically offensive games I have ever laid my eyes on. I warned you earlier about the content of the review, so but in case you missed it, you can look away now if you're sensitive to offensive language, over-the-top violence and vulgar epithets. There's no way I can properly convey the experience of the game without this language, mind you. With that said, let's move on.



Rogue Warrior is a god damn f***ing first-person shooter featuring that cocky son of a b**** himself, Demo Dick Marcinko, killing some f***ing commie bastards and laying waste in the name of the greatest god damn country on Earth, The United States of America. Dick, as voiced by Mickey Rourke, is one of the toughest SOBs on this planet and will stop at nothing to give these commies what they truly deserve- f***ing vengence.



You control Dick in a f***ing first-person mode and can hold up to two guns at one f***ing time. Your silenced pistol has some great accuracy and unlimited ammo, but the rest of the guns that you can pick up cause a s***load of damage to those commie bastards. You can shoot your gun at one of those a**holes like you would in any other first-person shooter, but sometimes you can go into a "snap to cover" mode, seen in other first-person shooters like Quantum of Solace, except it looks like a piece of s***. In all honesty, this game looks like a crappy PS2 game. The framerate is absolute garbage, running at less than 20 FPS (even during in-engine cutscenes!) unless you run into a large amount of enemies, which'll make that framerate run into single digits. The environments look extremely bland, and the animations are horrendous. Terrible. Completely awful. The "slide down a pole" animation is literally just one frame of animation, and the "aim from cover" animation is maybe 3 frames total. What a clusterf***.



The gunplay is mediocre at best, with even the most powerful weapons lacking reverb and strength. But why the f*** would you use a gun when you can, quite literally, run up to the damn commies and knife them in the face? These actions, called "kill moves" are just that- insta-kill animations that trigger if you get close enough to an enemy and press the A button. These actually look respectable compared to the other animations in the game and quite brutal, to boot. My favorites involve Dick stabbing a Korean officer in the face, or perhaps Dick using a soldier's gun to shoot themselves in the head. Either or. But still, the game is so unbalanced that you can run throughout the level, press A, watch the animation, and continue on for every single enemy. Not an embellishment, I've actually done that.


You should get your eye checked out, bro.

The god damn campaign mode only lasts about 8 missions with an average of 30 minutes or so per mission. You'll be done in 4 f***ing hours if you play on hard mode, like I did. There's a multiplayer mode, where you can play deathmatch, or, in an ironic twist of events, team deathmatch. No one is playing online, for good reason- because the game is a piece of s***.



So you might have noticed the vile f***ing language that I've used in this review, right? That's because Dick Marcinko has the filthiest mouth that I've ever heard in a game. He makes Quentin Tarentino characters blush. It's ridiculous that the developers would go to the trouble to just add this dialogue to the game, but I applaud them for it because it supplies the game with most of its personality and humor, albeit unintentionally.

Everything is vulgar. The title screens are vulgar. The option screen is vulgar. Even the damn difficulty is vulgar, with the easy mode described as "if you're a p****, select this one", and the hard difficulty accompanied with the text "Think you're f***ing special, huh?". Even the credits are vulgar, featuring the most profane outtakes from Rourke's voice sessions with a groovy backtrack. It's quite possibly the best part of the game, and might be worth the price of admission.

With that said, here are some of my favorite uncensored quotes taken out of context from the game:

" God damn cockbreath commie motherfuckers! "
" Jesus Christ, god damn it, Jesus!"
" Fucking wind is so cold, it would freeze the balls off a fucking polar bear."
" Drop dead motherfuckers, you fucking amateurs!"
" Suck my balls, my big hairy balls, wrap them around your fucking throat."

These are things that are actually said in the game, constantly. It's hilarious. Almost brilliant. As is the story, which plays out as if an especially arrogant Steven Seagal character re-wrote history and single-handedly won the Cold War. I know that sounds kind of amazing, but the game sucks. Seriously. Don't play it. You can't even get an easy achievement points out of a playthrough, because roughly half of the achievments are multiplayer-based. Come on, Rogue Warrior.

And this game failed because?

Rogue Warrior's relevance to pop culture had diminished considerably since the time of the novel's release and the time the video game was found in store shelves, but it's not like Rogue Warrior the game was aiming to please the military non-fiction crowd. The game came out after a deluge of military shooters (only a few weeks after Modern Warfare 2 saw release) and ironically enough came out around the same time as Rebellion's other "Rogue" title, Rogue Trooper for the Wii. The heinous reviews (it currently sports a 28 Metacritic score- compare that to the 37 Metacritic for the infamous Hour of Victory and the 34 score that Bomberman: Act Zero has) did the game no favors, and I'm not so sure that the $60 price point commanded much attention.

All kidding aside, Rogue Warrior is just about inept as a video game. Everything it could possibly do wrong, it does. It's ugly as sin, broken, short, buggy, repetitive, but it does happen to be unintentionally hilarious. That's not enough for me to ever recommend Rogue Warrior but it's something.

Play it or Skip it?- Skip it!

(Oh and here's that credits song I mentioned earlier. I just shared with you the absolute best part of Rogue Warrior: You're welcome.)