Just another bland, uninteresting, and often broken shooter.
Through out the game, and even in the end, everything works out pretty stereotypically in the sarcastic sense of "God, it’s not like I didn't see that coming." This leaves you wondering why you spent that money on this "would have been" of a shooter, instead of something far tastier and more worthwhile like a gallon of ice cream.
The character models in the game are designed in every stereotypical futuristic way imaginable, minus the shoulder pads. They are bland and uninteresting to look at and fight, and to make matters worse don't even have any interesting death animations. The best you get is either a flop down dead animation when you shoot them to death or a fly up in the air spinning animation when you finally manage to hit them with an explosive. Combined with an AI that appears to be literally governed by the flip of a coin, the game play experience is about as delicious as cheap cat food and makes about as much sense as an episode of Family Guy or American Dad. Half the time the enemy will either move around erratically shooting everywhere in your general direction, or run right into you or another bad guy, get stuck, and then do nothing at all. Thanks to this feature nothing plays out the same way twice and each time makes about as little sense as the last. It’s fairly safe to say that most players will attribute somewhere to around 50% of their progress through this fiasco to pure luck, amid the constant confusion and frustration.
The weapon selection of Pariah is equally bland when compared to its models and story. You get everything that has ever been in a sci-fi game, except a pistol or weapon with decent accuracy, in grossly underpowered form. The one original weapon you will receive is the one that heals you. Instead of issuing med-packs like other and run and gun games do, Pariah gives you get a weapon called "The Healing Tool," which uses it's own ammo, generally med-packs that drop from guys you kill, and each shot restores one of the half dozen possible squares that make up your life (can you say Riddick). While this is something new, it needlessly wastes precious, time; not to mention blurs your vision to the point that you can’t see anything when you use it. All in all, it would have been much better if that med-pack the guy you just killed dropped simply restored your health, as opposed to acted as ammo for a seemingly useless weapon in my already over filled inventory. Pariah attempts to pay homage to Deus Ex with its weapon upgrade system, yet all upgrading dose is bring your weapons up to the level they should have started at. The upgrade tokens, hidden throughout the vast winding levels, that are needed to bring your guns up to snuff are by no means generally accessible, since most of them are in highly askew out of the way locals. Worse than this is the system from which you change your firearms. As opposed to cycling through your weapons, or pausing the game and allowing you to flip through a submenu, in Pariah you must bring up the submenu without pause to the constant combat you will find yourself in. To attempt to make up for the first error of not pausing the game and wanting to "keep you in the action", the weapons in the submenu are skewed around in a circular fashion, to get the weapon of your choice move the analogue stick to the prospective position and release the button that brought up the menu. This isn't that bad for those weapons located at the north, south, east, and west positions of the circle, since all it takes is a quick flip, and a few seconds lost with some practice, to use them. For everything else however, you will only be able to get the desired weapon with mild to moderate frustration, and a senselessly countless amount of play time wasted. This system really takes its toll and hits the hardest when you need that grenade or rocket launcher now, rather than in a few minutes, to take out the heavily armored trooper, or riot guard, who just spawned three feet from you in the middle of your current fire fight. Changing weapons during combat will result in your death an innumerable amount of times during the game, none of which are close to valid or necessary.
The environments of Pariah are massive and graphically gorgeous. Almost everything is interactive in the sense that you can blow it up should you acquire a big enough bomb. Unfortunately, due to a lack of interactive lighting and interfaces, these lushly painted canvases feel extremely shallow, and in most cases devoid of life. Also it should be noted that while there are inside and outside environments, they are nothing more than glorified corridor crawls. The only thing changing is the size of the corridor and amount of available cover. However, there are some wide open spaces in the game, and when you arrive at them you will most assuredly be looking for the corridors and ditches that run along their sides, because venturing into them is certain death.
The audio in Pariah is absolutely atrocious. Everything sounds low and underpowered save the frag rifle, which Pariahs take on the ever so classic shot gun. The dialogue is flat, uninspired, and spoken by voice actors who are equally so. On top of it all is the taunts you will hear from your enemy. The "constant we're coming for ya doc," which recycles and tries to sound like some underlying menace during the game, only serves to be extremely obnoxious. Also, the classic taunt of "doe ray me fah so la ti doe" that is shouted at you, primarily in the games beginning, can only make one wonder just what substances the writers were abusing when they wrote Pariah's script, and how little sleep they were running on.
Pariah has a multiplayer component to it so that you and up to three friends can each experience, and share in the pain of, on one console, or suffer with up to twelve other unfortunate souls online or through a lan. If that wasn’t enough punishment, there is a co-op mode for the story as well, which all your unsuspecting victim has to do join in is pick up his/her respective controller, press start to sign in, and then the torture can begin. The standard multiplayer supports a variety of game modes and is considerably better than the single player portion of the game. Sadly, it's also plagued by everything that is in the single player portion, and so is kept far from perfection. Following in the footsteps of Free Radicals Timesplitters franchise, Pariah comes complete with its own multiplayer map maker. The map maker allows you to create your own custom torture chambers, literally from the ground up, for what ever type of multiplayer action you feel like experiencing at the hands of this dominatrix. The map maker is by far the best feature of Pariah, because it allows you control the horrible devices that doing all these painful things to you, allowing you to mutilate yourself at your own speed at your leisure. It is incredibly simple and easy to use, and the amount of creativity it allows is endless. Now if only you could play those maps you've created with a good game, such as Unreal Tournament or Counter Strike, then this would have been a worth while feature.
There isn't much difference between the PC and Xbox versions of Pariah. The problems that plague the Xbox version are blatantly apparent on the PC, though thanks to the higher resolution of a computer monitor, Pariah looks quite a bit better on the PC than it dose on its console counter part, minus the scenes and cinemas, which have been compressed and actually look worse on the PC than they do on the Xbox. However, since the PC version comes with Starforce, it makes recommending Pariah to any PC FPS enthusiast impossible. The more accurate controls of the keyboard and mouse make combat and aiming not as hectic and frustrating on the PC as they are on the Xbox, though they aren't of such a higher caliber that you should write home about them anyway. All in all, it’s a shame Pariah is such a flop, especially given the amount of money that was invested into it and the potential it had, as well as the high reputation of the studio from which it came. However, in the end Pariah serves as a stunning example for what not to do when making a FPS and how graphics aren't everything in a game. Pariah also shows how there is no set formula for how to make a great game regardless of how many Hollywood professionals are hired and/or how much money is thrown at the project. Pariah’s story and script were done by Hollywood script writers. Unfortunately, it would seem that every bad sci-fi writer in the biz was on Pariah's payroll, since in the end all Pariah is nothing more than bad sci-fi story that comes off as half assed in most respects, which is best left forgotten if you played it and passed by if you haven't.