Sometimes it’s best to deliver bad news straight up – Pariah is a really mediocre first person shooter. Courtesy of the folks at Digital Extremes, Pariah is the developer’s first real solo foray into the games market, having lived in the murky volumetric shadow of Epic’s Unreal series for almost a decade. Perhaps then it’s understandable that Pariah isn’t at all ambitious, providing a reasonably engaging story accompanied by 10 to 15 hours of gameplay – and not much else.
 
And it is the story that, admittedly barely, carries Pariah. Set in the far future, the player controls Dr Jack Mason, a physician with a patient suffering from a mysterious ailment.
 
The ship carrying Mason and his human cargo is shot down during its trip from a prison facility to a medical station, leaving both stranded in the surrounding wastelands. It is from these humble beginnings that the plot sprouts various insipid buds – ones that flower at predictable moments over the course of the game.
 
Along with the usual assortment of guns, including a machinegun, rocket launcher and shotgun, the player can obtain ‘weapon cores’. These cores allow you to upgrade your arsenal by increasing magazine capacities and damage or lowering recoil and reload times.
 
A few upgrades add new features to your weapons, but a lack of instruction makes it hard to discover their uses. There’s also a strong vehicular component to the game, however, it doesn’t feature hugely in the single player.
 
It should be noted that Pariah is an Xbox port, so many of the customary FPS frills you find on a PC title are missing. Such frills include the option to save anywhere and advanced PC-centric video, control and audio toggles. For example, auto-aim is enabled by default – while great for taming the inherent inaccuracy of a console controller, it trivialises combat with a keyboard and mouse.
 
DE uses the Unreal engine to power Pariah, and because of this the game has competent visuals. Unfortunately the console heritage hurts level and texture complexity even though the engine is more than capable.
 
What makes the game particularly average is the pacing. Some levels leave you to fend for yourself in a mash of activity while others are painfully linear and, thanks to the checkpoint save system and the impossible-to-skip cut-scenes, Pariah requires a great deal of patience to complete.
 
Pariah is a decent diversion and a playable FPS, but it brings little if anything to the current selection of shooter titles – in the PC arena at least.