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Rogue Ops: Phoenix Unleashed

A stealth game with a saucy lady in the lead, you can almost hear the marketing guys at Bits Studios talking to each other:
“Hey I just got a great idea, how about we make a game with stealth in it!”
“Stealth? Hasn’t that been done before?”
“Yeah but we’ll use a female main character, you know, one with a great body so every teen boy’ll want to play our game!”
“Won’t that be a little too much like that Tomb Raider girl? Lara something?”
“Nah, don’t worry, we’ll dye her hair blonde, nobody will notice!”

It’s true that Rogue Ops’ female lead Nikki Conners resembles Lara Croft quite a bit, that Rogue Ops’ story is filled with cliches and that stealth based gameplay isn’t very original however Rogue Ops is pretty nice to play. Showing us that you don’t need anything but gameplay (not even originality!) to make a fun title. You guide Nikki through eight missions filled with sneaking around, hanging from ledges, cracking locks and ofcourse shooting down unsuspecting guards. The reason Nikki does all this is because a terrorist group has killed her family, she wants to get revenge by joining the anti-terrorist organisation her husband was working for when he got killed. Needless to say this organisation is ruthless and has no regard whatsoever for human live, so Nikki gets more than enough chances to argue with her superiors over her handy communications thingy. Combined with a more arcade-like aproach to stealth gameplay, this pretty cheesy story could make Rogue Ops the gaming equivalent of a spy B-movie. Find out how it works out in this review.

 

Graphics:

Graphically Rogue Ops wouldn’t stand a chance if you’d compare it to Splinter Cell or Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes, the two other big stealth games on the Cube. It has some nice lighting effects and details, but the framerate is far from solid and the textures are pretty bland in places. Rogue Ops does have a lot of variation, all of the game’s eight missions are set in a different environment. They’re not the most original surroundings for a spy to sneak around in (James Bond has been in places like these multiple times), but it’s nice to walk around in a different place every mission. It’s not that Rogue Ops looks bad, the character models are okay and the gadget effects are pretty nice, it just picked a genre where it has to compete with two great looking games. The darker areas don’t match up against Splinter Cell’s pitch blackness and the character models can’t beat Metal Gear’s incredibly detailed characters.

Sound:

Like you’d expect in a stealth game, the sound in Rogue Ops is very important. Luckily it’s more polished than the graphics. Most traps in the game make sounds so you can hear them before you set of any alarms, and guards often talk to each other. The bits where you hear your enemies talk are done very nicely, you often get hints about locked doors and holes in the security system. Sometimes they’re just talking about everyday human things like their wives cheating on them though, making you a little more hesitant to fire a bullet into the back of their head. Just a little ofcourse. Sadly the storyline voice bits are not as good, Nikki and her colleagues aren’t voiced by the best actors in the business. The cutscenes are filled with overacting and bad jokes, it’s not a big problem though, this fits the spy B-movie feel of the game quite well. The music also strengthens the experience, it makes the sneaking around more exciting and the shootouts more hectic. Good Job.