Gameplay
But it’s not just the game’s scripting that has had a lot of effort put into it. Watching Manny run around blasting away, it soon became clear that the AI has had some work go into it too. For some reason, Manny wasn’t playing on the hardest setting, so I didn’t get to see the AI ramp up to the full level, but even on the setting we were on, you could still see enemies taking cover, firing from behind cover, retreating when hit and so on. Manny assured me that at higher difficulty levels, the AI really kicks in with situational awareness of each other as well as you and all the frills of making use of terrain, selecting the best weapon for the job etc etc.
So while Meridith filled me in on the storyline, Manny carefully flanked a fixed turret position and took it out from behind. Then, for some reason, Manny’s eyes glazed over and he went off on a shooting spree that’d put the NRA to shame. Just as I was getting ready to reach for the Mace, Meridith chipped in that Manny was showing off the implementation of the Havok physics engine. So I chilled out a bit and watched as he shot off a grenade and sent enemies pin wheeling through the air in convincing fashion. At this stage, watching the gameplay, it didn’t look as though the game had the same level of physics as Half Life 2, but it may just be that Pariah has a more subtle integration of Havok, with the game not being quite such a showcase for it as HL2 was.
As you’d rightly expect from the makers of Unreal, Pariah puts vehicles to good use with a wide variety available from fairly early on in the game. A nice touch is that some of them, in multiplayer mode, can take a second player as gunner, making them even more formidable. While we’re on weapons, again, you’ve got plenty to choose from an up close and personal bone-saw (you are a doctor, after all) through to plasma rifles and the like. Every weapon is upgradeable by picking up WECs (Weapon Energy Cores) as you move through the levels. A nice little twist is that you choose which weapon to upgrade as you go along… so do you build the assault rifle into an uber weapon now, or save the upgrades for the grenade launcher later?
Graphically, Pariah is looking very nice indeed. On the X-Box version I was playing, visual effects were very much in evidence, with misting, fogging, a superb heat shimmer after explosions and plenty more besides. The terrain looked fairly smooth on the whole and character animation was great. Facial animation in-game is superb, with characters looking a lot less wooden by far than previous efforts in other games. The heavily modified Unreal engine handles indoor and outdoor scenes with ease, looking at the game running on Manny’s laptop, it was ticking over very smoothly, so I doubt that this is going to be another ‘upgrade time’ game, which suits cash strapped gamers like me down to the ground.
