Once upon a time there was this dude, Richard Marcinko. He was what I’d call a real hard-ass. I say hard-ass because he has a list of medals, merits, and honors longer than my arm. He was a leader of men during times of war, and the founder of a SEAL team. He went on to change how security is handled for the Armed Forces and laid a lot of the ground work for today’s Armed Forces response to terrorism.

Like I said, a real hard-ass.

After his career in the Navy he went on to write some books. The first one was an autobiography called Rogue Warrior. It was followed by a series of fictionalized stories loosely based on his life entitled the Rogue Warrior series. And now there’s a video game. You can probably guess the title. It is also loosely based on some of the events of Marcinko’s life. Very loosely. Like his name, that he rode in a helicopter and was in Korea based on his life. It was produced by Rebellion Games.

And I would like to take this moment to congratulate Rebellion for making the worlds first Generic First Person Shooter or GFPS for short.

I say generic because it is incredibly generic. Generic in the very real sense of the word generic. And for the home schooled- Generic: relating to or characteristic of a whole group or class b: having no particularly distinctive quality or application.

It is very stunning how generic this game really is, on all levels.

Case in point: Rogue Warrior has a highly motivated soldier that gets the job done no matter the incredible odds arrayed against him. There are a lot of guns, a lot of swearing, bland game levels, stupefyingly moronic enemy AI, and a wildly over-powered melee attack. EVERYTHING in this game has been done in other FPS games, and done much better.

I’ll start with the guns. From the first you start of with some standard US Military weapons, all correctly named, and then you start killing North Koreans.

Oh, yeah, I forgot, this is about you invading North Korea to track down some “strange missiles”. Which has got to be the most generic plot I have ever seen. No, seriously, it’s something I would expect to read in a Matt Helm book or something less “high end” in the spy fiction genre. And you’re supposed to meet your contact who will take you to the “factory” where the missiles are being made.

See? It’s more bland than a chicken sandwich with mayonnaise and iceberg lettuce. There isn’t a plot beyond that, so I am not going to bother to comment on it.

Where was I?

Guns! Okay, yeah, after you start whacking every North Korean you meet you’ll notice the endless amounts of real-world correct guns and ammo they start dropping. You’ll be shocked at the guns they drop- AK-47’s. I know! Shocking! The most generic game ever has some of the most generic weapons, the AK! There’s even a sniper gun just laying about just before you get to a spot that’s perfect for sniping! The sniping area you ask?

It’s literally a walled-in area filled with waist high walls where guards walk back and forth. No, I’m not joking. All you need is the “ding” sound effects and some stuffed animals and you’d be in a summer carnival. It’s that pathetic.

Which brings me to my next point, the wildly stupid AI. It’s not that they’re only triggered by geographical points. It’s that they’re, well, retarded. Let’s say a door is set to open when you cross a certain point. And then the guards are supposed to run to a specific point and open fire.

Now, a high end game with custom scripting will react to where you are on the map. So, let’s say you trip the wire that opens the door and then take cover by the far wall to open fire. The custom script game will have the guards change enroute to their start location to get better cover or the designers have setup the board so their minions can’t be flanked.

In the Generic FPS world of Rogue Warrior that won’t happen. What will actually happen is you trip the wire and go run up to the door, the guards will heedlessly run past you to their start locations somewhere behind you. So all you need to do is turn around and casually gun them down because they stay at their start locations and don’t find better cover.

However, they will react to a grenade. Well, by react I mean predictably run the opposite way of a grenade. On one board I was able to herd the entire group of guards around in en masse by throwing grenades in front of and behind them. I felt like a Border Collie herding sheep. It was pathetic.

The voice acting, despite the horridly generic lines, is, well, generic. They brought in some A-list talent (for voice acting anyway,) Mickey Rourke. But he’s forced to utter wildly uninteresting lines like, “I got the @#$%ing intellegence, but there’s bad news. They’re building missiles. Possible nukes.” “Say goodnight, you sorry commie bastard!” “commie scum!!” “@#$%ing commies!” and he says it all in this gravely low voice.

There are a lot of F-bombs, no where near the amount in House of the Dead, but in this game they’re rather generically placed and don’t really do anything to reveal character or depth or anything. The f-bombs are just there, like the ketchup packets you get from fast food restaurants in the drive through. I mean, if I’m taking this home why would I need ketchup in little tiny packets?!?

I’ve never understood that!

Anyway, the enemies are Communists. Well, they are in North Korea so it’s sort of appropriate but really? We have to make communists the bad guys? We don’t have a whole new part of the world we can vilify we have to go back to Commies?

And, that brings me to the wildly over-powered melee attack. It is literally one button/one kill. All you have to do is run up to an enemy, regardless if he knows your there, is actively firing at you, or is totally unaware of you and press X (actually, on the Xbox controller is A so I don’t want any freakin’ emails about it, okay!). Then he’s dead.

Now, I know what you’re thinking, “Abraxas, what’s so bad about that? The over-powered melee attack has been done in a lot of game…ooohhh, I get it! It’s a generic over-powered melee attack!”

You got it in one.

Although I will give Rebellion this, there are 25 separate kill animations that were based on real-life methods to kill people. Not like cutting people in half with a chain saw gun but like stabbing someone with a 7 inch knife just inside the arm pit, or at the base of the neck pointing up through the atlas bone.

Although, interestingly enough you become invincible while the animation plays out. So, you can literally run from enemy to enemy, knife them to death in 1 of 25 ways, in the middle of a fire fight and never get touched.

In my Un-Humble Opinion©, Rogue Warrior is as bland as it gets. There is not one facet of the game that hasn’t been done somewhere else by someone else better. It offers nothing original, interesting, or memorable.

You have been warned.