Dick Marcinko: Rogue Warrior

The Good
Interesting background and setup, fatality moves if you can get close enough to do a silent kill

The Bad
Generic cover shooter otherwise in rat-run levels and generic weapons

The Bottom Line
Rogue Warrior is best described as a "cover shooter" set in the latter days of Cold War. Basically, you travel from location to location, in search of ever larger objectives and unravel a conspiracy across the world. In the first mission, you are sent into North Korea to retrieve a defector who has important information. That only leads to further missions in North Korea, than to yet other countries, and all the way north into an enemy base...

The premise is intriguing enough, and the Marcinko does know what he's talking about as the background material is excellent. However, shooter itself is about as generic as generic can be. It's a basic "cover" shooter where you can lean against walls and cover, pop out to shoot or blindfire around the cover. You have a few grenades, and variety of weapons, but you can only carry two: usually assault rifle and SMG, but there are also pistol, shotgun, and some minor surprises.

The game's primary feature is a series of "fatality moves". According to the game, there are over 30 different ones, depending on how you approached the enemy before triggering the "kill move". And they are quite bloody and visceral that should not be described. Let's just say they belong in a Rambo film.

The levels are generic "rat runs" where there is a single way through the level that you have to fight through. Occasionally there are wider areas that allow slightly different approaches, but generally your approach is hide in cover, shoot to kill a few enemies, wait for reinforcements to show up, shoot them too, gather ammo, advance to next segment. And this repeats ad infinitum. Occasionally you can sneak up on a patrolling guard to do a fatality, but it's not always possible. Indeed, there's no bonus for doing so.

There is multiplayer, but that was not tested.

Graphics are average for a shooter of this vintage. The levels look detailed, albeit not very useful tactically.

Enemy AI is dumb, and relies on placement and spawning (often they do spawn to the sides of you) and their numbers to pose any threat.

This is one of those games with "wait to heal" health that as long as you can find some cover and don't get hit you'll heal automatically, and it's kinda lame that way.

There are many impossible plots, such as Marcinko taking a dive into arctic waters while wearing short sleeves, then swam underwater a few hundred meters for infiltration into enemy base.

All in all, this game is a generic cover shooter. Marcinko's name got it a better backstory and some fatality moves, but the end result is still a generic cover shooter.