The following is a transcript of a video review which can be viewed here: https://youtu.be/2P43GaA--9w

Every so often Microsoft will announce a bundle of games that will be added to the ever growing list of backward compatible games on their Xbox One and Xbox Series X consoles. The most recent announcement features a number of movie licence games and a few other games from the deepest recesses of Xbox’s back catalog, including the Otogi games and a few other curios. How these games are selected may have something to do with engine compatibility or licensing availability, or even user request, but some games won’t make it onto this list. Perhaps Microsoft has grown apart from the licence holders and cannot renew their relationships, or maybe that older game used an engine that doesn’t work so well on the modern hardware. For one reason or another, I highly suspect that Digital Extremes’ 2005 game Pariah will be one of the games that will not be revived onto current Xbox hardware, despite its exclusivity at release. While it might compare favourably with the likes of FEAR 3, 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand, and even Operation Racoon City, Pariah did not make the cut as these games have. Despite Warframe’s continued popularity, Digital Extremes’ older games have been effectively buried and interest in the developer’s previous works has not surfaced in the same manner as the likes of From Software and Arkane. Dark Sector was perfectly serviceable, it wasn’t spectacular but it was good enough to earn a cult following and yet Pariah lingers in obscurity. I played the game and I’ll share why I think Pariah has been left to rot by Digital Extremes and Microsoft.

Previously backward compatible consoles like the Wii and Playstation 2 achieved their backward compatibility by including enough of the old hardware to be able to switch to that hardware mode. Whenever a GameCube disc is inserted into a Wii console, the Wii menu displays a GameCube icon and the system switches to become a GameCube. Nowadays, things aren’t quite as simple. As games consoles become more like computers, space within the cases becomes more limited, so loading up the new consoles with all of the old components has become very impractical. Fortunately, the new consoles having greater capability means that those older systems can be emulated instead. That comes with its own complications, though. Emulation isn’t a perfected art, and especially so when using a customised operating system on your bespoke, patented hardware. Getting the emulation software working as intended, and then getting the game to function as intended requires a decent number of variables to line up favourably. Ultimately, this means that the emulated game has to be as good or better played on the new hardware else the multi-billion dollar company loses favour with their customer base. Nintendo has been failing to deliver quality emulation, even recently, so Microsoft has chosen which games and when they will become available very carefully.

With Halo: Combat Evolved’s arrival in 2001, first-person shooters would move their focus entirely away from mimicking Doom and instead became slower, more linear experiences. Despite this industry-wide shift, Epic Games and Digital Extremes saw great success with Unreal Tournament 2004 but for Epic, that success wasn’t enough. They could see that the market was losing interest in the older style of shooter and were more engaged with Capcom’s reinvention of third-person mechanics within Resident Evil 4. So while Epic pursued their new Gears of War property, Digital Extremes were left to figure out their own path forward. The Canadian developer was not prepared for what was to come in November of 2004. Halo 2’s release was unlike anything that had come before it, and the game’s first week would go on to be the highest-grossing entertainment launch ever at the time. Millions of copies were sold in that week, grossing $125 million and immediately drawing the entire games industry’s attention. This was huge and the desire to tap into that gargantuan market led to a healthy population of imitators. Less than 6 months later, Digital Extremes’ Pariah would release and while some found the game interesting enough, many noticed that the game had more in common with Combat Evolved than similarities it shared with Halo 2. Movement was slower, the weapons were less refined, and the level design didn’t feature iconic landmarks and skylines. The presentation is quite poor for the time, so I think we should get that out of the way first.

Developers working in the early 2000’s had a visible understanding of the limitations of the hardware they were developing for, and as a result many games featured a visual style outside of aiming for realism. Some did try for realistic styles and their characters, hero assets, and external environments suffered especially. Pariah’s characters are generally good models, but the animations are stiff and don’t transition into each other well. It’s like Digital Extremes used the premade animations from The Movies to create the cutscenes for Pariah. The enemies seem very robotic as a result, they almost always face toward the player and their legs seem to move independently from their torsos. The game’s lighting also leaves a lot to be desired. Everything is evenly lit throughout the entire game, even when the skybox is gloomy or the player enters an interior environment. There are so many objects that could be emitting some kind of light that just aren’t used that way. Occasionally a room will be tinted green but there’s never any shadow or extreme brightness so the environments are all extremely flat. The soundscape is similarly flat. There is very little music and most of the sound effects are stock sounds. Beeps and alarms and weapon sounds we’ve all heard a thousand times before. But the combat callouts are incredible. All of the enemies will yell the same handful of lines over and over throughout the entire game. Even when it doesn’t make sense for them to be yelling about the topic. Do Warframe enemies do that? I don’t remember the Dark Sector enemies doing that.

Pariah’s controls are effective and have aged rather well, but not in every aspect. The movement works as anticipated and there’s no awkwardness to it on foot, but things take a turn whenever vehicles get involved. While infrequent, the driving sections are steered by pointing the mouse which feels awfully unnatural. Additionally, the turret sections, either on the back of a car or on the back of a train, allow the player to aim in directions the guns cannot fire. The player will routinely be informed that their shots aren’t working when they simply shouldn’t have been allowed to turn in that direction. The weapon reticle is deceptive across the rest of the game too. The large circle reticle is so big that most weapons seem absurdly inaccurate. Human sized enemies are smaller than the reticle so the player will often see their shots fly by and not deal damage. Even weapons like the sniper rifle seem wildly unpredictable and it can make a lot of enemy encounters quite tedious.

There are very few enemy types within Pariah, but I only noticed during the final hours where a new enemy type is introduced. Just like Shadow Ops: Red Mercury, the enemies are mostly regular soldiers with occasional outfit changes, although there are some armoured enemies on occasion and flying robotic enemies in a couple of levels. Unfortunately, the similarities to Shadow Ops enemies aren’t just surface level as Pariah enemies utilise very weak scripting that leaves a lot to be desired. Enemies will frequently move to some strategically disadvantageous position and then stand still and shoot, and that isn’t overly exciting to deal with. The Shroud enemies in the last areas of the game, who are supposed to be super elite warriors use the same scripting so their advanced warfare strategies are the same as the disorganised prisoner faction. Even the enemies that should exhibit unique behaviours will simply cycle through a handful of positions that the player can eventually intuit. This goes for the bosses too, whose methods of defeat are badly conveyed, but if they were improved the bosses would be a total waste of time engaging with. I spent over an hour trying to defeat Stockton by shooting him because shooting the big machines in the room never seemed to do anything to the boss or the machines. While these are generally negative, being able to predict the actions of the rocket launcher enemies is quite funny. They have no self-preservation mechanic so they will blow themselves up consistently. And the level design frequently seems set up to introduce these kinds of mutual-destruction scenarios.

Levels in Pariah are generally very enjoyable, winding through a variety of environments with some optional places to explore and a few different gameplay types to break things up. Some of the levels are a little underwhelming, but there’s a fantastic verticality to the game that creates surprising combat scenarios where enemies can appear from any angle or the terrain can be used to the player’s advantage. The level design is certainly the most proficient component of Pariah, but the problems are tragic. The Anvil is a strange circular series of arenas that all look exactly the same and each is filled with the same enemy arrangements repeated over and over. And it isn’t as though this environment is fun to wander through. Gaining entry to the Anvil involves rambling over some very unfriendly terrain under incredibly lethal turret fire. This region also has a large contingent of enemies that make navigation more trial and error than strategic advances through a rocky hillside. And so much of the game seems disjointed, with the adventure meandering through a lot of exterior spaces and even into a prison for reasons that the narrative doesn’t really make apparent.

Pariah’s narrative suffers from a refusal to divulge important information to the player until it’s absolutely necessary that the information is shared. I had no concept of who the Shroud were until they appeared on screen, and there’s a virus transmitted through blood that gives people superpowers and they store infected people in cryostasis for whatever reason. The narrative opens as one of these cryostasis pods is loaded onto an aircraft and manifested by Dr Jack Mason for some form of transportation. The craft is shot out of the sky and only three survive the wreckage, the stasis pod is opened in the crash and a gang of escaped prisoners appears to sift through the wreckage. Mason is able to fight the gang off but only he and the female cryo patient survive. Mason seems to have a destination in mind, but Karina keeps running ahead to achieve whatever her own goals are. After some miscellaneous hijinks and the revelation of an inconsequential betrayal, the pair make their way back to the Anvil where Commander Stockton intervenes. Mason defeats Stockton and hands Karina over to the Shroud, a non-human species who created the superpower virus and intend to use Karina as a power source for their machines. After the Shroud refuse to uphold their end of the bargain, Mason goes on a rampage and annihilates a large portion of the Shroud’s military before finally locating Karina. She had been hooked into the harvesting machine already and, seeing no means to escape the facility with Karina, it is implied that Mason shoots himself. Karina’s grief causes her to explode and take down the rest of the Shroud with her, ending the game in a bleak anti-climax. The player is told about the Shroud a few times, but without any context to what they actually are, so they could be Greys, or goatmen, or living pieces of cloth with Jesus’ face on them. And Mason’s surrender of his friend to the Shroud comes out of nowhere. Fitting that nowhere and Pariah go hand in hand.

Microsoft and Digital Extremes have no desire to revive Pariah onto Xbox backward compatibility because the game just isn’t overly unique or important to anyone involved. There aren’t the same progenitor models like in Dark Sector, and the spirit of the Unreal series isn’t present within Pariah. The greater install base was happily shooting each other with Brute Shots and Needlers and the Master Chief collection has granted the Xbox players a broader multiplayer environment than Digital Extremes’ game could have ever provided. Perhaps the ideas within Pariah could be retried, with bespoke sound effects and a more fleshed out narrative. Or the game can stay where it belongs; in obscurity.

Next time, a game I’ve waited twenty years to play.