Rogue Ops

Right on the heels of kill.switch comes another tactical 3rd person, single
player shooter. Rogue Ops takes elements from Splinter Cell and kill.switch
and mixes them up into a totally new game. You play the role of a female agent
tasked with the job of conducting covert operations around the globe. Not a
very original story but most games these days don’t seem to have one anyway.
So lets dig right into this shooter shall we.

Rogue Ops features some nice moves for its ex-Green Beret heroine, Nikki Connors.
Our spy has a very nice assortment of attacks and stealth maneuvers. For moments
that call for being secretive, she can place her back to a wall and peak out
as well as pop out to take shots at unsuspecting targets, additionally when
running toward a location and pressing the crouch button she will do a small
leap and roll toward her destination and stay in the crouched position in an
effort to stay out of sight. This leads to some impressive displays of killing
as you tuck and roll and pop up firing.

The assortment of moves grows as you are introduced to other stealth elements
such as pick pocketing and striking the enemies from behind in close combat.
The way in which this works is by sneaking up behind your intended target either
in the crouched position or standing. When in the crouch position you are ready
to pick pocket, noted by the eye icon and can simply press the action button
to search through the targets’ goods. When standing behind an enemy unnoticed
you are ready to attack, represented by the fist icon, by pressing the action
button you begin the attack sequence where a counter begins to tick down and
a series of directional arrows appear on screen, successfully pressing the directional
arrows before the counter runs out leads to an attack sequence that often leaves
your target dead.

So what do we do with dead bodies after searching them? We hide them
of course… in lockers, dark corners, or wherever you feel another lurking
guard will not stumble upon them and blow your cover. Just as enemies can be
hidden in lockers and other concealed areas, you can also hide yourself in them
to get out of the view of patrolling guards. This works similar to how it did
in Metal Gear where you can simply stare out of the grating and look in directions
to see if the coast is clear before proceeding. Other objects she can interact
with are poles and ladders that allow her to scale to higher locations without
needing to take the stairs, which may be heavily guarded. Her varying methods
of sneaking around levels expands as she begins to hang from ledges and shimmy
across, often out of view from guards. She also has a grappling hook that she
can fire at special locations that allow for it to grab hold, once the grappling
hook is locked in she can then scale up the rope to her destination.

The approach taken to the level design is where this game scores big, the levels
are pretty open ended and, at parts allow multiple ways to accomplish the goals,
and you are often not limited in the order in which you do them. The levels
frequently contain grates to hide in that help you get around the level easily
and undetected, to ledges that help you silently pass or sneak up behind unsuspecting
guards. The designers did a good job of allowing you to use your full assortment
of moves and techniques at your own discretion to accomplish the goals at your
own pace; this includes the thorough tutorial that begins the game. Unfortunately
the objectives are pretty basic, you often find yourself eliminating person
A, recovering object B or blowing up location C. How many things can you really
ask an operative to do after all?

The enemies in Rogue Ops work on a good premise but fail to deliver. If alerted
to a disturbance the enemy AI is to never return to standard patrol and instead
set to seek out the cause of the disturbance. While a good idea and it was nicely
implemented, the AI is seriously lacking in the intelligence part, once spotted
they often fire and then pause as if they are waiting for you to shoot them
or run and hide. Sadly, the less than clever AI brings down the enjoyment of
the game greatly.

Further dragging it down from its pretty impressive features are the controls
themselves. They are often unresponsive and need proper aligning in order to
do simply tasks, for instance to scale a ladder you must stand directly in front
of it and, even a slight angle the use icon will not turn green. I ran into
even more issues when I found myself running toward an object such as a wall
and wanting to place my back up against it quickly, in order to do so you must
let go of the analogue stick if it was being held down before you get to the
wall, then face directly at the wall and press forward again, once again making
sure you are directly facing your target. This sort of slowed down the game
for me as I am used to moving quickly through the game, especially after dying
and wanting to proceed back to my last location as quickly as possibly, or if
you simply want to sneak up on an enemy quickly or take cover.

My last and probably most annoying gripe about the controls; there is an auto
aim built into the control scheme that has a major flaw, your aiming device
will automatically jump to the nearest enemy. Well great you think? The problem
lies in the fact that the lock may be on them, but if they move too far from
the point where it first attached to them you lose targeting. This makes aiming
harder cause you may lose the lock that you just had suddenly and your aiming
device will return to its pre-locked location, often no longer near the enemy
you were just firing on.

The levels are not highly detailed nor are the characters in the game. I often
found myself picking up objects that I could not identify if it was not for
the manual as a reference. The character models are nicely done but are textured
in a basic fashion, and take away from the well done shape of the characters.
The movement is where this game started to fall apart, our super spy seems to
be tip toeing around the level at all times and it makes her appear a bit foolish.
To add insult to injury it seems they took more time trying to render her hip
movements to look realistic than the time dedicated to giving her more serious
animations.

Unfortunately one of the more entertaining things mentioned above, the sneak
attacks, is not quite under your full control. After going through the button
combinations on your analogue stick you are shown a canned animation of her
taking out her enemy. The animation seems to vary from time to time, but all
in all would have been better if you had control over it yourself. Other actions
such as jumping for a ledge or firing the grappling hook are not fully under
your control either, the game takes over once the grappling hooks has been lined
up and the trigger has been pulled, the game goes into wide screen and you see
her firing toward the target and the grappling hook connecting, after that you
regain control of your character holding onto the rope ready to head upward.
While the latter two examples are minor they do take away from your sense of
real control over the character and make everything seem almost scripted.

 

 

[ Additional Screenshots Temporarily Unavailable, Sorry. ]

There is not much to this category, the voice acting is decent and the guns
are silenced so they have a muffled sound to them, and this makes it hard to
determine how realistic it is. All together the sound effects and voice acting
are decent as a whole, nothing to help keep you attached to the game, yet nothing
horrible like the original Resident Evil voice acting. Can anyone say, “Jill
don’t open that door“, in a more robotic way?

Containing only one ending and no unlockable content it seems the game lacks
any real replay value to it. The story is not deep enough to draw you back in
later on for another crack at it. You may however find yourself however attempting
to play them again in a different way, such as killing fewer enemies, or trying
different paths to certain locations that you may have previously noticed. The
ability to save at any location, though useful, sort of removes the need to
be overly careful as there is no threat of having to repeat the level or objective
over again, simply save and proceed without worry. All in all once this game
is completed it doesn’t feel like it will bring you back to the table for seconds
and thirds.

The controls is what ruins this game unfortunately, they make a good game become
increasingly annoying. I found myself often aggravated about how I had to work
around the faults in the game to make it seem more fun. The need to line up
to the ladders and pipes to climb them, or lack of fluid motion the game has
when you must stop your activity and then press the action button, or directional
on the analogue stick to get up against a wall. The pauses in progression is
what hinders this game most. You picture a set of actions in your head to get
from point A to point B and you start to act them out only to be stopped by
bad controls and lack of fluidity. Unfortunately the wonderful game play elements
don’t compensate for the inherit flaws Rogue Ops has.

Overall Score: 6.3/10 [Not an Average]

• Official Site
• Kemco Games
• Bits Studios Limited
• Rogue
  Ops Screenshots (Temporarily Unavailable, Sorry.)
• Rogue Ops Cheats and Hints
• Buy
  Rogue Ops from Amazon.com
• Buy
  Rogue Ops from EB Games

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