Rogue Trooper was a great sleeper hit back in the day and could be a great bargain bin pick up!
The Bad: No manual reload?, looking kinda ugly there soldier!, useless weapons, really short, ho-hum story, iffy voice acting, no replay value
I remember back when this came out but all of the blockbuster hits back then got me side tracked. Rogue Trooper is actually a fun game with fun mechanics, but it DOES feels low budget and there are lots of annoying flaws. First off the story's premise is really interesting, but it is badly laid out and pretty cliche and predictable.
You play a GI (Genetic Infantry) soldier named Rogue, and you are all fighting a war against an evil organization that is never really talked about. Rogue takes the brain chips out of his comrades in his squad and uses them on his equipment. The game mechanics are neat, but they are extremely annoying and his comrades play into this. Bagman is you backpack and he will reload your gun for you and manufacture ammo, new weapons, and upgrades for you out of salvaged crap metal. You pick this up off dead enemies and piles you see hidden. The problem is you get so little off dead enemies and the piles are so hard to find. You're always scrounging for all the little scrap you can since this IS your ammo. Bagman will also reload your gun for you and I found this extremely annoying since there's no manual way to reload your gun. You just have to wait for him to do it and this can lead to some cheap deaths.
There are some pretty neat weapons though, I'll have to admit. You're main weapon is Gunnar (one of your comrades has his cheap in here) and it's a machine gun that has a sniper rifle attachment. YES! Someone finally listened so we have two in one now. Next you have Helm who can hack into consoles, and that's he's really used for. Back to the weapons you have the shotgun, your pistol, a mortar launcher, a Sammy launcher (rockets), a Beam Rifle (electric beam rifle). While all those sound cool you'll probably never use the pistol, the Beam Rifle feels very ineffective, since the environments are very large the shotgun is almost useless, you'll only use the Mortar Rifle towards the end when you have swarms of enemies, and the Sammy is only good against Hoppas (airships).
Most of the game I was using Gunnar since it was just powerful and accurate enough I didn't need anything else. You also have three different grenade types: Scrambler, Sticky, and Explosive. Scrambler grenades are ONLY needed for two different enemies and those are the flying little orb things and the mechs. You use them on the mechs to temporarily shut them down and then go behind them and execute them. You have a cover system, but its a little flawed because of the way they have it set up. You can get behind cover by pressing SHIFT yes you can't just back out of cover like most games you have to hit SHIFT again THEN CTRL to stand up.
I also found that Rogue tends to stick TOO well to cover sometimes or he'll get hung up on corners or invisible corners as I like to call them. You can't jump, but you do a roll button and you use the same button to climb on ledges. You have four different little "powers" that you can use and those are: A silencer for Gunnar, a decoy, and the other two are just completely useless. I never even used the decoy since it was so difficult to set up. I found I just used the silencer through the whole game. While all this sounds ok it really is just OK.
The game is fun since the shooting mechanics feel satisfying, but other than that there's nothing special. There are other sections of the game that are kind of exciting such as when you get into the back of a Hoppa and are using the turret to shoot down enemies, there's a train section that has you hopping between three different guns to stay off foes. The graphics are ho-hum at best I mean the water is just absolutely UGLY looking (just a flat blue texture), the character models have very low polys, flat one tone textures, but the environments look half way decent. The voice acting is iffy, but the chatter between Rogue and his comrades is interesting. The sound is pretty good, but nothing special at all. If you feel the incentive to play again there are cheats you can unlock, but that's about it. I'm sure RT will be a great cheap weekend play (only about 6 hours of gameplay anyways).