Pariah has a few nice features, but it's just not a great game. Also, it's story is completely incoherent nonsense.
Pariah uses the Unreal engine, and right away, you can recognize this. The outdoor areas look almost exactly like they do in Tribes: Vengeance and Unreal 2: The Awakening. Overall, Pariah sports some nice visuals, both indoor and outdoor. Character models look pretty good, and the game’s textures and environments sport high details. There are some nice visual effects as well, like the brief green flash and shock wave from a grenade explosion, and the way that a vehicle blows apart when it is hit by a grenade. The only major flow with the graphics is that the cut scenes look terrible.
Like Unreal 2, Pariah also has some cool, powerful-sounding weapons. Each of the weapons has a visceral punch to it. This is especially true of the shotgun, which makes a loud boom for the gunshot and then makes this weird sucking sound when you pump it. The grenade launcher, however, is by far the best part of the game. You launch grenades and then detonate them with the left mouse button. It sounds ordinary, but when you combine the cool explosions with the game’s rag doll effects, it makes for some wonderful moments. Pariah also has some destructible elements in its environments. Numerous times in the game, you launch a well-placed grenade, detonate it, and blow three guys and a bunch of debris halfway across the screen. You can do this repeatedly, and it never gets old.
A nice musical score accompanies the audio and adds to the game’s atmosphere. The theme song that plays when the game starts up is particularly impressive. It’s too bad that it didn’t accompany a more memorable game.
Unfortunately, also like Unreal 2, the gameplay for Pariah is uninspired in many areas. The game has a horrible lack of variety in both its enemies and its level design. You fight the same two or three enemies the entire game, and all that changes is the weapons that they carry. The same can be said of the level design, which is vanilla as it gets and contains no memorable areas whatsoever. The game’s AI is also average, at best, and brain-dead at its worst. Sometimes guards will chase you down over areas and attack you from behind cover. Other times, they will stand there motionless as you gun them down. It’s as if you are supposed to cross some invisible line before you activate the AI. The bad AI in some places contributes to Pariah being a pretty easy game. Given that the game has the checkpoint save system that we all love to hate though, being easy isn’t such a bad thing.
The implementation of a lot of the weapons in this game is also disappointing. The weapons look and sound cool, but a lot of them are just minor repeats of each other in practice. The shotgun, assault rifle, and plasma rifle all accomplish essentially the same function. Part of the problem here is that they are all highly accurate, even at long distances. You can kill somebody from 50 feet away with a few shotgun blasts, which negates the shotgun’s normal use as a close-range weapon. The guns have this big fat targeting reticule (a leftover from the X-Box version, of course), and all you have to do is place it over your enemies, and you’ll hit 100% of the time. You can practically use the assault rifle as a sniper rifle in this game. This is a big flaw in an action game like this.
The worst part about Pariah though, is that its story is a complete letdown. The intial cutscene of the game is interesting, but after that, the story becomes a bunch of incoherent nonsense. None of the mission objectives or the reasons behind them make a lot of sense. You are trapped on some foreign planet with a woman who is carrying some disease, and you keep chasing her down, losing her, and then chasing her down again. Why? Who knows? You're also in the middle of some war. Or something like that. How anybody could release a story in this state is beyond me. Pariah smacks of a game that is incomplete, as if the story was half-written before the team ran out of funding.
As you might expect, the story takes paramount importance, because the gameplay isn’t enough to carry it on its own. The weakness of the story is even more disappointing, for this reason. Despite its mundane levels, poorly balanced weapons, and hit-or-miss AI, Pariah could have been a compelling game if the story had panned out. That’s not to say that this is a bad game, because it isn’t. The action is at least solid, and the game is generally free of glitches or bugs. It’s a mostly mediocre game with a couple of bright areas that stand out.
Pariah is short, and you can finish it in about 6 or 7 hours. After that, there is little reason to go back and play it again. Pariah has a nice presentation and has a few nice additions, but overall, it’s not a very good game. There were some good ideas here, but uninspired gameplay and poor storytelling overcome them. The game is at least worth a look in the bargain bin if you are a first person shooter fan though.