Pariah [PC]

Picture this. You're a doctor, recently booted down to a lousy security detail. While babysitting the transport of a woman in suspended animation, your ship is blasted out of the sky. On the ground, soldiers in impersonal body armor carrying machine guns surround the wreckage. Most of us would play dead or try to negotiate. But not Jack Mason, hero of Pariah. This guy picks up some weapons and dashes into a perfectly average first-person shooter.

It's not that Pariah doesn't try to rise above the limiting constraints of the FPS, but the story often takes a back seat and the action which fills the void isn't much distinguished from the genre's template. A handful of vehicles and railed levels break up the pace somewhat, but none of the extra touches add much excitement.

After a few minutes with the game, it shouldn't surprise many shooter fans to learn that Digital Extremes is responsible. Pariah feels much like their work on the Unreal franchise. In other words, huge outdoor environments provide the basis for plenty of gunfights. Lush vegetation and rocky outcroppings provide plenty of cover, and each area definitely conveys the sense of outdoor space while constantly prodding players along a specified path.

The problem is, if the environments recall past episodes of Unreal, so too does the behavior of the enemy. The soldiers are definitely aggressive, which often stands in for smarts. But they have a tendency to clump up, use cover only in specific situations, and even commit suicide.

That problem can be overcome, but few of the level designs are clever enough to minimize the AI's limitations. You'll find the same enemy squads around each corner, or hiding behind every upcoming piece of cover, and progression becomes rather routine. Interior areas sometimes come out on top by providing slightly more dense geometry for the AI to hide in. The downside while indoors is that the visual design lapses into old-school walkways and corridors.

Many shooters try to hook players with an ever more exotic collection of weapons, but Pariah doesn't feature a blaster which fires sheep, a lava gun, or any such absurd armament. Instead, it relies on the "classic" shooter collection: a machinegun, shotgun, grenade launcher, sniper rifle, and so on. Each can be upgraded several times by applying power cores found throughout the game. Upgrades typically add speed and stability to each weapon.

Instead of rationing ammo, Pariah dispenses it liberally, allowing players to use weapons at whim once acquired. The grenade launcher becomes the weapon of choice, as it can decimate an enemy squad in a single blast. The ammo can even be controlled remotely after an upgrade. But with the limited AI, this readily available tactic tips the balance too far in the player's favor. It's just too easy, and may lose the interest of players looking for a challenge.

With the relatively short single-player game receding into the background, many players will look to Xbox Live to rejuvenate Pariah. It's capable of doing so, as long as modes like deathmatch, capture the flag, and derivations of Unreal's Assault seem palatable. No matter the setting, the action is very fast and quite customizable. Bots can be added to swell player numbers and players even get to choose a weapon to spawn with. But grenades and other powerful ammo is as plentiful as in the solo game. We kept flashing back to ignominious Unreal Tournament deaths at the hands of the frag gun as grenade launchers and sniper fire cut our average play time to shreds.

But there's a nugget of gold in here. Pariah features one of the better map editors to hit a console game. With it, players can very easily create highly customized outdoor maps and play them online. Comparisons will obviously be made to the similar capabilities of TimeSplitters, and the functions here are almost as good. On a dedicated server, up to 16 players can frag away on a custom map.

While our assessment of the single-player game may seem harsh, it's not meant to be entirely dismissive. Pariah is a solid shooter, but one that does very little we haven't seen in many other titles. And while we don't need innovation at every step, this experience would have been more compelling if the story kicked into gear before the middle of the game. Still, if the idea of a lone gunman taking on an industrialized collective sounds good, and Half-Life 2 seems too far away, Pariah isn't a bad way to go.