If you base a game solely on its name (example, Rogue Warrior), you may think it sounds like it has the elements to be an entertaining game: rogue; clever stealth mechanics, with perhaps some heart in your mouth moments, and warrior; being a one-man army providing great satisfaction from killing all your enemies. Sadly, as I’m sure your detective skills have established, none of these assumptions are even remotely true, making Rogue Warrior for PS3, Xbox 360, and PC a worthy next entry in our ‘worst games you have never played’ list.
Let’s take stealth to begin with. It’s actually hard to call this stealth. Your enemies are more like cardboard cutouts than intelligent NPCs: They will stand still, with almost all of them open to being easily stabbed in the back simply by running up to them with no fear of being spotted. There is little need for crouching either as the enemies don’t react to your footsteps; therefore, you can sprint towards them, get behind them and get an instant kill. A final note with stealth is that when you are in your instant kill animation, you are immune to any bullet or explosion damage that may be occurring around you, allowing you to run into the middle of a group of enemies and stab and kill away with little or no health taken off you.
If ‘stealth’ isn’t the approach you want to take, how about going in guns blazing? See, you can go in with bullets flying; however, even if your reticle is perfectly aimed at your enemy’s head, you’re likely to still find him standing there completely unharmed with all your shots completely missing their mark. The stealth mechanics are broken, yet the gunplay mechanics are equally as bad. One of the issues is that the hit detection is very hard to predict; you may be picking off multiple enemies with no problems, but the next time you’re looking to kill some bad dudes, you’re spraying bullets without ever connecting. An explosive barrel or a thrown grenade could detonate and hit an enemy directly, and you’ll see him completely unaffected by the flying shrapnel; this same enemy could then end up launching a grenade at their comrades or shooting at another explosive barrel, finally meeting their inevitable end.
The broken mechanics are not saved in any way by the game’s performance or visuals either. If, for whatever bizarre reason, you want to give this game a try, you will have such “treats” as screen and texture tearing, PS2 or Xbox standard graphics, bland environments and character animations, and game freezing to look forward to. Rogue Warrior will only take 2 hours to complete, so not only did Rebellion Development and, surprisingly, Bethesda Softworks release this horrendous game, they had the nerve to charge the consumers full price back in 2009.
2009 is seen as one of the pinnacle years in video gaming history, and we saw some all time greats: Red Dead Redemption, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, Assassin’s Creed II, Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, and Dragon Age: Origins, to name just a few. Rogue Warrior shouldn’t even be written next to these titles in a list, there is almost nothing positive to say about it aside from your misery is only short-lived; it’s broken and ugly, and it’s a game that should never have been released and certainly should never be bought or played.