Coming as it does from Digital Extremes, makers of the first-person hits such as Unreal Tournament and Unreal Championship, we were rightly expecting something special from Pariah, maybe even something to match Bungie’s all-conquering Halos.
Pariah sees you playing as Jack Mason, a burned-out doctor with no will to live, that is, until he nearly dies in a transport ship crash. Now he and his infected patient (the mysterious and beautiful Karina) are left high and dry smack bang in the middle of the most vicious prison sectors of a wasteland planet called 'Earth'. In sixteen hours an orbital platform will initiate a total biohazard containment procedure: 50-megaton yield, detonated above sea level, to cleanse the contamination. Jack needs to escape, or find the contaminant and isolate it…
Right, so far so good on the checklist; engaging plot… reason for being there… female with body-hugging suit for eye candy… now all we need is some cool guns and explosions. And Pariah soon delivers these with bells on; the first weapon you get your hands on (the Bulldog assault rifle) is really chunky and satisfy to use, and the second, a grenade launcher is even more fun, thanks to Pariah’s Havok physics and ragdoll effects. Jack being a doctor means you also have a surgical laser ‘bone saw’, which you can use for melee attacks, should you run out of ammo (unlikely as there always seems to be plenty). Whatever the situation, Pariah’s shootouts are always entertaining (even the boss battles), and the weapons have a satisfying amount of punch, allied to the all-important fun element – you can also use discarded weapon energy cores to upgrade each weapon up to three times (the Bulldog rifle gets armour-piercing capability for instance) – even your portable health tool (which acts as a portable medikit) is upgradeable.
The enemy AI is pleasingly aggressive and intelligent (depending on the difficulty setting), and you’ll even come across rival factions fighting to the death a la Halo/Halo 2, but although they’re all well animated they move a bit too suddenly to be as believable a foe as the Covenant or the Flood.
Pariah’s level maps are huge, and sprawl, meander, wind and wander seemingly for miles. The game looks really nice, with trees, bushes, rock textures, lighting and particle effects that many games would die for – some set pieces are spectacular to behold, even something like a smoky crash site. Explosions ripple and distort the air and there’s a surprising amount of destructible scenery too – it’s often easier to collapse a concrete watch tower rather than take out the guards or sentry turret that are in it. Many levels have vehicles and disappointingly although often massive in area, these seem to be a little under-designed compared to the ones with more interiors, like you’re just supposed to drive from A to B and then on to C. The vehicles are a pretty ugly bunch (they’re supposed to have been built by scavengers out of junk, and look like it) that handle well enough, each has a weapon and some allow you to carry a passenger in multiplayer games.
Multiplayer modes include Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Capture the Flag and Frontline Assault (capture most territory and control the bases), and they’re all playable offline with definable bots so you can learn the ins and outs of the maps before you go online. Sadly, and I may be alone in thinking this, but unsurprisingly the online game (like Halo 2) is heaving with loudmouths who like to use gutter language more than even I can bear, so Pariah’s multiplayer modes are likely to remain system linked or Live with friends only for me, or until Optimatch settings are improved so that you can specify that you want either a PAL server only, or at least one that is free of the seemingly endless queue of crap-talking teenage morons – they really should have their own special (needs) areas. But once you’re in with a good crowd (it seems to be picking up a strong following in the US in particular), the game plays well, even if it's a noticeably less slick experience than the benchmark by which all online console FPS must now measure themselves, Halo 2.
Pariah’s best feature for me is its map editor, a toy set so far in advance of anything else I’ve seen on a console as to make them laughable, Timesplitters’ now looks like a small-scale tacked on afterthought, as Pariah’s allows you to mould and form a landscape that must be at least mile across into hills, valleys, ponds, rivers, add buildings and other structures, rocks, trees and even a couple of vehicles to zoom around in. You can change the weather, add fog, change the sky, grass/rock textures and fiddle till your heart's content (or you fill up the map's memory allocation). You can then save them and play on them in the split screen ‘practice’ mode or share them via a system link cable or Xbox Live (although I haven’t managed to get anyone to play on one of my maps via Xbox Live yet). It’s truly an amazing feature and I’ve probably spent more time making maps and then playing on them (when modelling one you can ‘jump’ straight into it and test it out instantly) than playing the actual campaign mode, which incidentally was disappointingly brief and finished in 8 hours or so.
Pariah slips comfortably in behind Halo and Halo 2 and is amongst the best multiplayer FPSs on the Xbox, and as I said, the map editor is a game in itself if you’re that way inclined. But Pariah’s story although interesting enough, isn’t actually told all that well, and the solo game needed more flesh on its bones in order to be considered as essential as Bungie’s games.
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