Pariah PC Game Review – A ‘Halo’ Wannabe First Person Shooter

Pariah plays just like any other first-person shooter – find gun, shoot enemies, heal, flick a switch, shoot enemies, advance. Repeat ad finitum. It gets quite repetitive after a while, especially as there’s little variation in the enemies you’ll face.

There are a wide array of weapons available in the game and each can be upgraded with extra features to make them more powerful, which is just as well as the weapons are on the whole pretty weedy in terms of clout. The guns are generally underpowered and it isn’t uncommon to take a full clip to down a solitary enemy, so forget any notions of headshot kills.

There are some drivable vehicles interspersed in the game, which, while fun to drive and handle pretty well – better than those in Farcry, for instance – are rather weak in defence, and easily destroyed by enemy fire.

For healing, there’s no med-pack available. Instead you carry a tool which you have to equip and use like a weapon if you want to heal yourself. The device uses ‘ammo’ and each charge heals one bar of health. It can be recharged by finding other such tools scattered across the level and also by retrieving those dropped by enemies. This is a neat idea, although the health system is rather Halo-like in that your health is represented by 4 bars which can regenerate during periods of inactivity. Overall it’s a little unbalanced as healing-tool refills are plentiful in the game and it’s generally difficult to run out of the ability to heal.

The game is built on the Havoc physics engine and scenery interaction is one facet of gameplay that Pariah does well, allowing the character to roll explosive barrels towards enemies before detonating them with a well-placed shot, while pipes can be pierced with bullets to release clouds of steam which can act as cover. Bullet-fire and explosions rip out the scenery, and chunks of masonry can be shot out of pillars making gunfights a little more realistic.

Enemy AI is also lacking somewhat, as enemies will either try to rush you or keep their distance and seem to be caught in a loop; if they rush they might suddenly drop into cover and try to down you with gunfire or equally could begin to run away before rushing and then running away again. Overall, it seems that the AI doesn’t quite know what it wants to do.

Pariah is punctuated by cutscenes – a lot of cutscenes – which are unfortunately rendered in low-res and look quite bad, although to be fair they aren’t indicative of the graphics in game which are both fluid and pretty, but can occasionally appear blocky – even at a resolution of 1680x1050 – than expected.

While there is a clear Halo influence about the way the game displays, it is let down somewhat by a poor selection of textures for enemies and death animations and you’ll feel like you keep downing the same poor guy time after time.

Sound in the game is somewhat weak which gives further rise to the feeling of the weapons being underpowered although the soundtrack and voice acting in the cut-scenes is on a par with the best in the genre and seamlessly fits the game environment.