Rogue Trooper [Review]

admin · Rich Joined: 01 Dec 2005 Posts: 249 Location: Teesside

Game type: 3rd person shooter.

Plot: You're a genetically cloned super GI and on a mission that was supposed to be a walk over, but the whole lot of them get ambushed and slaughtered with only you surviving. So the aim of the game is to find out who the spy leader is, and then wipe him out and his army pretty much by yourself.

When it started I was expecting it to be a pretty basic shooter like any other 3rd person, but as the game progressed you find out that your trooper can do loads of stuff, mainly to do with the chips from your GI mates you find (by digging out their chips from their corpses) once you find all 3 it gives you a lot of options that are useful for combat situations.

The first chip you find clips onto your main Gun. From this point on he talks to you through the gun and can reload for you as well as do some other nifty things such as you can put the gun on a tripod and let him hold off a section while you flank an area and use a different weapon. Another chip from a GI plugs into your helmet so you can attach your helmet to doors and control panels so he can have time to unlock them while u defend a section, and another GI chip plugs into your back pack, and he can give you health boosts and mod weapons etc.

You have two main inventory menu screens, one lets you update lots of weapons and make new weapons from kit you find on the battlefields (all put together by back pack GI). And you other menu lets you plant your weapon, leave a hologram of yourself to trick enemies, add a silencer and more.

As well as all this you have a whole range of grenades you can use and micro mines. So a lot more than your average FPS/3rd person of just scrolling through weapons. And some of the weapons have a few shot type functions, including of course a handy sniper mode.

Gameplay
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It plays really well, usually I'm not to keen on 3rd person shooters, but this game works similar to Sniper Elite in the way if you get too close to a wall and the camera is behind you, you become transparent, and even closer still it goes to an FPS mode. So that works very well and cuts out the main problem 3rd person games have.

The guns feel pretty good, and a single head shot takes out enemies with 1 shot whether in sniper mode or not. Also the main enemy troopers have air tanks on their backs, so one shot on there see's them blowing up after they run round frantically for a couple of seconds. Nice and satisfying Very Happy

As well as the main soldier enemies there's various ED209 robot things that can only be taken down with heavy fire or disabled for a few moments with scrambler grenades.

There are snipers all over the place given a way by a beam of red light, so a quick dive then you can fire back. There’s EMP armed soldiers that fire electro magnetic pulses that mess with your GI chips, and there's heavy armoured soldiers. There's a whole range of flying enemies in hang glider type machines as well as larger drop ship there’s tanks and drillers (a machine that ploughs through the earth as a soldier carrier) and so on.

The AI
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The enemies run for cover and attack quite well, and they seem to communicate verbally ok with each other, but like a lot of games it suffers from the same problem of when someone gets shot nearby they still stand there unaware. This isn't always the case, but mainly when snipering from a distance. The AI is still nothing compared to FEAR but it's not too bad.

Visuals
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Well it's based on a 2000AD comic but I’ve never heard of it, but a lot of land scape / buildings etc have been covered many times before, imagine sandy rocky landscapes with military structures made from metal and that's pretty much the settings. Obviously there’s a bit more to it than that, and being on alien planets the colours are slightly different, and the sky most of the time are quite a stunning piece of vortexing black holes with all wonderfully coloured stars and atmosphere, lots of blues and greens, very pretty Very Happy

Your main character is a pretty cool doode, a genetically made Blue GI with white eyes and a Mohawk, wearing combat pants and a gun. The enemy and other combat troops don't look so cool, they are in space suits that look a little dull, I think more imagination could have been made to make these look cooler, though maybe that was their intention so it makes you look even better. There are some good ones though like the elite sniper guy (who sounds like Bobba fett and is the rogue troopers game equivalent).

Overall
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Overall it's a very entertaining game, mainly to do with all the gun options and inventory you have, usually too much of this puts me off, but this just has the right amount to make it versatile and not too over the top. If this game was limited to just a few weapons in the normal way and with no communication interactivity with your GI chips that you rescued then it would of gotten more tiresome, as generally most of the game is like this:

Follow the points on your radar to get to the main station, and on the way take out enemies, when at the main base activate console or destroy large weapon etc. Of course there's a bit more to each, and in between various levels like this there's other missions like defending a train on the move using large cannons, and another where your helmet GI chip flies a drop ship and you use cannons to shoot down enemy drop ships etc. So in a way just like any other game of this genre.

The best level is the end level section, usually this part of the game is a let down, often it’ll be: a powerful end enemy that takes a lot of shooting to kill. In this one there's your typical bad guy who is in a orb shell that has a force field around him, and you have o deactivate this shield by shutting down 4 points, i.e. you plug in your helmet to crack the codes while you shoot down all the enemies. This section has you use various amount of weapons and skills from your menus and is quite a battle, thankfully there’s a few checkpoint saves in this section!

So to sum up: A typical FPS/3rd person style game with not many new settings or objectives. But this is saved with a unique inventory system, option menus and character type, this makes the whole experience a refreshing change to your usual character set up you find in this genre.

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