Pariah is a first person shooter with mixed results. It looks great, but the weapons sounds and campaign aren't
Pariah's story is pretty confusing. It starts off with something like this. You play as Jack Mason, a doctor who is taking this women who's been frozen along the Pacific Northwest, which in this game is enemy turf. You get shot down, the mysterious women escapes and it's up to you to track her down. Just like in Killzone the game has you pretty much fighting for your life against some cool looking soldiers that have pretty bad AI.
The game doesn't really take off from there. It never really says much more abou the story but early on you do catch up with her and apparently she was going to be put under some experiments, or something like that. The story is pretty convoluted and your not going to keep up with it. I even got lost with it at times.
The gameplay of the game is pretty simple. You shoot stuff, sometimes drive a vehicle that is so hard to control that I actually went on foot instead of the vehicle that took me like 10 times longer but it was worth it. Sometimes you have to find documents and such to brake up the action, but you pretty much just shoot a bunch of soldiers while trying to find this girl.
The game isn't to long and shouldn't take you more than 9 hours to complete and there's not much reason to go back. For what it's worth though, Pariah has a lot of unique weaponry. Really. You have lots of different stuff, from grenade launchers, machine guns, shotguns, rocket launchers, all of them sound seriously underpowered, but there all really useful and you can upgrade them using these nifty pickups that make your weapons better. For instance, the grenade launcher can hold more grenades, it can do more damage, and it can have more range, upgrades like this can be found on every weapon including your healing tool you have. Each weapon has 3 upgrades to it.
The healing tool you have is pretty useful. The game starts off with 4 life bars and as you lose one life bar you use up one energy cell. Pretty simple. But when you lose just a little bit of that life bar, if you get out of line of fire, you can recharge it a lot like Halo's life bar. You can upgrade this too, to extend your life bar, hold more energy cell's and more.
The RPG elements of picking up upgrades is pretty cool, but falls flat since all you will really use is the machine gun and the healing tool. The rocket launcher is tough to use, grenade launcher is frustrating, and the plasma gun is wildy inaccurate. The sniper rifle is somewhat needed, but most of the combat can be done with the machine gun you start off with.
Most of the game takes place on grassland and in rural terrain, rarely you will see complexes and go inside them, but when you do, it mostly focuses on shooting a bunch of enemies and finding switches to move on. Now, think about that for a good 9 hours.
The grpahics in Pariah are fantastic. Everything is heavily detailed and the character models are great. This is one of the best looking Xbox games.
The real downfall to Pariah though is the sound department. Which is terrible. Every weapon sounds so underfired that it makes it seem like every weapon has a silencer on it. It's annoying and shooting the gun isn't to much fun because your enemies don't react to shots. Just like in Killzone, they just stand there but blood comes out, still the pacing is fun and there's lot of variety to choose from. The RPG elements to upgrading your weapons are fun too.
In the end Pariah is a lot of things. Disappointing, frustrating, somewhat easy with all of the pickups you can find, frustrating with the vehicles, boring, but it could be worth a purchase for shooter fans if you plan to go online, the offline part isn't to much fun and leaves a lot to be desired.