The Xbox 360 is definitely a contender for one of the best video game consoles ever made. A long list of exceptional games, the pique of social gaming (also known as, yelling swear words in Call of Duty lobbies) with Xbox Live, and it was a time where developers weren’t afraid to try something different. Game budgets hadn’t ballooned to the astronomical numbers we see today, so publishers were willing to take bets on smaller, grimy-er games; and Bethesda was all aboard with publishing some smut. One of these pieces of filth is Rogue Warrior, a truly terrible game that Bethesda wouldn’t be caught dead putting their name on nowadays. Banal shooting, horrible frame rate, and a boring story all culminate into Rogue Warrior being a completely forgettable experience, but there is one “saving” grace.
You play as Dick Marcinko - voiced by Mickey Rourke - a Navy SEAL who has been sent to Unggi, North Korea with two other SEALs to get classified information on ballistic missiles that the DPRK has been manufacturing. Things quickly turn into - in the words of Dick Marcinko - a “complete goat fuck” when the rest of your team gets taken out by the enemy. It is here that Dick Marcinko goes against his commanding officer’s orders to retreat, and continues on to complete the mission on his own, and stop whatever North Korea is currently planning.
Is it a good story? I’m going to be honest: I don’t know. I was playing this game whilst watching Hell’s Kitchen highlight clips, so my attention was drawn towards poor risotto and undercooked salmon instead of whatever tale that Rogue Warrior was trying to tell. In between beef wellingtons getting butchered, the parts of the story I would be paying attention to were fairly boring and completely bog-standard for a military first-person shooter story. Asides from Dick Marcinko and the people he’s talking to on the radio, there’s no other characters, there’s no “big bad evil guy” outside of the ambiguous threat of “North Koreans” and “Soviets,” and the writing for the story is simply boring. Do you know what’s not boring? When Raj got kicked out of Hell’s Kitchen, even though his team wasn’t even eligible for elimination that night. My jaw was on the FLOOR.
Now the writing for the story isn’t great, but the writing for the characters - specifically Dick Marcinko is stellar. Whenever Dick would open his mouth I was hooked onto whatever words would be coming out of his mouth. What words were coming out of Dick’s mouth, you ask? Every naughty word that you could possibly imagine, voiced beautifully by the one and only Mickey Rourke.
Rogue Warrior was either an exercise in creative writing for the game’s writers, or Mickey Rourke used his time in the recording booth to improv some brand new sentences. Years after playing this game for the first time, I can still hear some of the all-timers from this game ring through my head: “God damn cock-breath commie mother fucker!”; “Your quiet day at the office is about to get severely fucked up,” ; and my personal favourite, “Suck my balls, my hairy fucking big balls, wrap them around your mouth.”
The writing in Rogue Warrior is absolutely nuts. Dick Marcinko will be radioing his superior officer saying that the mission has become a “complete goat fuck,” he will tell every Soviet to suck their own little pencil dick, and these are things he’s saying to enemies shooting at him. It’s not like these are moments written specifically into cutscenes or mission briefings, he is yelling “suck my balls, my hairy fucking big balls, wrap them around your mouth,” as a response to getting shot. I’m usually not the type of person that thinks “haha, swear word loud man funny,” but in this case, the writing is so ridiculous that it wraps around on itself and becomes funny. Yes you can watch this stuff on YouTube, but it’s kind of worth playing the game to experience the writing for yourself.
I mean, the developers had to be in on the joke with this game, right? The writing might as well be the developers nodding at the player going “you see this shit you’re playing right now?” If it wasn’t clear through the gameplay, then it becomes abundantly clear come the end credits. Rogue Warrior’s end credit theme is a rap song comprised completely of the stupid shit Dick Marcinko says throughout the game. I’m not saying they recorded a rap song, I am saying that they just took the specific voice clips of Dick saying “god damn cock-breath commie mother fucker” and put it over a beat. Frankly, it’s worth playing through the game to hear the song alone.
Playing through Rogue Warrior certainly isn’t the easiest thing in the world. Not because it’s a hard game - it’s relatively easy, it’s just as banal as a mid-generation Xbox 360 game can possibly get.
Rogue Warrior is a barebones first-person shooter. Aim-down sights, right trigger fires, you get grenades and you can hold a total of two guns. I mean, it’s Rogue Warrior starring Mickey Rourke, maybe it’s on me for expecting a little more from the game; but it really is as basic and boring as you can get. I could comment on how aiming feels very heavy, or how enemies are fairly brain dead, or even how most all of the guns don’t feel accurate at all. But come on, it’s Rogue Warrior starring Mickey Rourke, were you expecting more from the game.
I mean I guess it has a cover system to it. It’s a mid-generation Xbox 360 game, of course it has a cover system; but the cover system sucks. Left bumper snaps to a piece of terrain for you to use as cover, and you can pop out to shoot yeah yeah yeah you’ve heard the story before. Everything just feels so clunky when you’re behind cover: moving never feels right, when you pop out to shoot you barely zoom into enemies making it hard to hit anyone, and you can’t just walk out of cover, you have to press left bumper again to move into it. Having to press a button to both enter and leave cover, with no other way to move out just feels terrible, and always felt like I was getting stuck somewhere. But I wasn’t getting stuck anywhere, I was just stuck inside of Dick Marcinko’s Rogue Warrior starring Mickey Rourke published by Bethesda.
Dick Marcinko was a part of SEAL Team Six, dude, so of course he knows how to be a sneaky little guy. A majority of the levels open with you sneaking into an area, allowing you to go through and stealth kill as much enemies as possible: either hitting them in the dome with a silenced pistol, or walking up behind them and choking them to death. The kill animations are fine I guess, you can tell that some care was put into them, but once an enemy spots you it’s near impossible to get back into stealth, so it’s only minutes at a time where stealth is a viable option in the game. I’m a sucker for stealth mechanics in games though, shitty or otherwise, so I had a little fun with this.
The physics in Rogue Warrior are wild. Simply shooting enemies with a pistol can sometimes cause them to do cartwheels throughout the air, or a shotgun to the face will send them flying across the map. I know it’s not necessarily a good thing for your physics to be going haywire, but it does make for a good laugh every once and a while.
Honestly, Rogue Warrior’s gameplay would be much more tolerable if it ran at a higher frame rate. At Rogue Warrior’s best it runs at about 20-30FPS, but it’s not consistent at all. The frame rate drops dramatically multiple times through your journey in the DPRK, almost to the point where it’s comically bad. Hopefully you never see an explosion happen when there are more than five enemies on screen, because you’re in for something that almost resembles a slide show. When I sat there are points that feel as if they average at around 12FPS, I’m not trying to sound funny - it’s a Nintendo Switch game almost a decade before the Nintendo Switch’s release. Just some straight-up power point stuff going on here, absolutely pitiful.
Audio design kind of sucks. Sound cuts out often enough, guns don’t sound great at all, enemies that are at the other end of a room can be heard clearly; you can tell that not a lot of love and care was put into the sound. The only part of the audio design that tender love and care was put into it? Dick Marcinko’s voice lines, and - of course - the end credits rap.
Visions of Duke Nukem Forever caress your brain s you play through Rogue Warrior. Both fit a similar space within the Xbox 360’s portfolio: they’re both shit. But there’s something about Rogue Warrior that stands out amongst the inevitable shit games found on the Xbox 360. It might have bad gameplay and a boring story, but it has this goofy sense of humour about itself. The developers feel like they’re in on the joke - they know this game is shit, but sometimes you need to take a wild project to have your studio survive. Sure the development studio - Rebellion - was certainly not known for its quality during the Xbox 360 era, but they’ve found their niche with their Sniper Elite series, and those games are pretty alright!
Sure Rogue Warrior might be bad, but it feels like a bad game for us - for the people. Sometimes you need to experience an awful game, only so you can truly appreciate the good ones; you need to form a barometer for the good an the bad to properly critique something. There are people playing games today, that will play something like Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League and call that one of the worst games ever made. No, it’s not. I haven’t even played it and I can tell you that’s not true. If you haven’t played a truly awful game before, and you want something to set your barometer that will at least give you a laugh, than Rogue Warrior is the game for you.
Plus the game’s only like two-hours long, you can easily beat it within four beers.
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Where does Rogue Warrior stand on the ever growing list of every game ever made? Probably very low, but still click to find out!
Subscribe and comment. I was working on writing a Silent Hill 2 (2024) review when I had the sudden urger to play Rogue Warrior. Probably a brain worm or something.