It tries to be a Halo-killer, and falls far short of doing so. Redefines the term "disappointing."
The main story behind Pariah is promising. It tries to distance itself from other shooters by putting you in the shoes of somebody who isn't even a soldier. He's actually a medical kinda guy, known as Mason. As Pariah begins, he is transporting a patient, Katrina, across the galaxy. Katrina is the victim of a deadly virus which is swimming in her bloodstream, and Mason is bestowed with the responsibility of Katrina's welfare. I won't reveal any more of the intriguing narrative, but it eventually collapses under its own weight. As the game progresses, and as the plot develops, it eventually becomes too hard to follow that you won't even bother. The cut-scenes suck, too - most of them are painfully bad and all of them are hard to understand. Who are these characters? What are they doing? Why are they talking about things I haven't managed to grasp because of Pariah's twisting and loose storyline?
So, that's the foundation behind the campaign. Now I'll talk about the campaign itself. Most of it is high-octane gunfighting in wide-open environments. Which sounds good. But the expansive worlds simply don't offer much scope for exploration, and sometimes they can feel empty and barren. Especially when there's enemy fortifications around, you feel very exposed running across a generic plain. The gunfighting isn't that bad, but firing your weapon simply isn't satisfying. Even with the interesting physics, killing an enemy isn't as enjoyable as it should be.
And even with a core gameplay engine similar to Unreal Tournament 2004, Pariah's campaign isn't very good. There's some innovation behind it all in the form of upgradable weapons. If you find an energy core, you can apply it to a chosen weapon to imbue it with a better scope, or less recoil, or a better rate of fire. This system could have been a great addition to the game, and quite possibly could have raised the single-player above mediocre, but since the desire for exploration is always slow, you won't even bother. But the weapons themselves are pretty interesting. Pariah's weapons are all distinctly science-fiction, and at least they're not simply chucked in with names like "machinegun." At least you start off with a "Bulldog," even if the gun itself is a pathetic rapid-fire piece of junk. Pariah, to contradict all I've said about the wimpy weapons, features one of the best grenade launchers in gaming history. I'm not sure if its the over-exaggerated physics that make this a great gun, or the resulting explosion that whips the unfortunate receiver off of their feet. Other guns include the Frag Rifle, a bulky shotgun, the Rocket Launcher, a self-explanatory big one, and the Sniper Rifle, which can be turned into a real death-dealer with the appliable scopes and piercing bullets.
And to make the campaign worse, there's some annoying sections scattered at random intervals. The most irritating of these is the horrific vehicular sections. Pariah has the clunkiest vehicles ever to be featured in a FPS. Handling is awful, as these vehicles either need to get a new steering wheel or new tyres. In Pariah it's infuriating to go in a straight line, and it's even worse to go around a corner properly. And to cap it all, the jeep is a carbon copy of Halo's Warthog, and that almost justifies in itself how much Pariah wants to be Bungie's messiah. And somewhere in the middle of a game, a ship is firing missiles at your ship and you're forced to use your guns to blow them up before they impact on the fuselage of your ship. What a crappy inclusion.
There's no denying that Pariah is multiplayer-focused, just like most other FPS games. After the tacked-on disaster that Pariah calls a campaign, I was hoping that multiplayer would redeem the game, just like Halo 2's multiplayer did. Sadly, I was wrong. Just like the campaign, Pariah's multiplayer is a recycled, regurgitated mess. The weapons still lack the panache they should have, and even combined with the humiliation of your mates, Pariah's multiplayer experience still falls far short of almost every other social shoot-em-up on the Xbox. The arenas aren't too badly designed, with some nice, balanced environments, but still, the actual gameplay still sucks. And then you can make your own maps, so...
We move on to the map editor. If it weren't for the map editor, Pariah would truly be the worst game on the Xbox. But I see the map editor as the redeeming feature in Pariah. It's indeed a last hope, but it's also the area where Pariah rises above mediocre. The map editor is in the same vein of Xbox's amazing FPS Far Cry: Instincts, just nowhere near as customizable or accessible. There's far less features than Instincts, and far less personalization, but Pariah's map editor is nevertheless a decent feature to an otherwise poor game. You can do basic stuff like shape, bump and dig terrain, and you can add your own buildings, but there's not much to put inside the buildings, i.e. pickups or guns. Most of these are preset at the start of every match. And with the lack of objects you can add, your environments end up feeling empty, just like those of the campaign.
In terms of gameplay and experience, Pariah is definitely a failure. No aspect of the game even clambers above average with the exception of the half-decent map editor. So I move on to the graphics of Pariah, and I can tell you that they're nowhere near the standard of stalwarts such as Halo 2, and doesn't even register as a flicker on the radar of visual masterpiece Instincts. Pariah's character models aren't very good, and their animation is slightly robotic and clunky. It's as if each of them have rusted skeletons. Explosions are feeble puffs in this barren world, and gun effects seriously lack impact. Add some cookie-cutter textures and bland artistic design, and everything will be all right? Wrong. Pariah's visuals are simply below par. Not acceptable, given the usual standard of the Xbox.
The sound is also poor. The voice-overs in this game are laughable; they put no life or atmosphere into the game, and the music is also of a bland standard. There's nothing to reach the standards set in Halo 2; no stirring orchestrals, no haunting choirs, no goosebump-inducing guitar riffs. The Bulldog sounds like a broken popcorn machine, explosions lack the volume they need and end up feeling feeble, and the Frag Rifle's sound is labelled "Generic Shotgun Blast." With a sticky note. Even the sound effects manage to be annoying.
And before I start crying about how pitiful this game is, I'm going to wrap this review up. It's been an infernal rant on how much of a catastrophe this game is. It's an almost humorous effort to inject innovation into the genre, and as for being a Halo-killer, it's more likely that the worldly population will become vegetarian within the next three seconds. *stevenscott14 goes and plucks scraps of chicken out of refrigerator* So, as I end on this note, let me just put across that Pariah sucks. Feeble weaponry, crappy multiplayer, and a mind-bendindly tedious campaign really don't add up to being a Halo-beater. Pariah falls far short of doing so. Redefines the term "disappointing" in ways I never could have imagined beforehand. Pathetic.