When not hard at work, slogging away in the salt mines of Gamehelper, I spend my free time dabbling in prognostication. Allow me to don my pointy wizard's hat and gaze into my freshly-polished crystal ball and make a prediction: Rogue Trooper ain't gonna sell. It's based on an obscure comic that few folks this side of the Atlantic have read, the box art is woefully generic (though not as generic as the name…ugh), and the copy on the back is apparently the result of a focus group study on exactly how not to entice people into playing your game. Add to all of that poorly done marketing the fact that the game is for a console that is sadly being ignored by fickle gamers getting all gooey over their shiny 360s, and you have a sure-fire formula for fading into obscurity. It's a fate that Rogue Trooper doesn't deserve; sure, it may suffer from a wee touch of beentheredonethat, but it provides more than enough twists on formulaic gameplay to make it worth your while.

Super Troopers
Nu Earth may sound like a haven of shopping malls and faux angry bands like Disturbed ("can't you see how tortured I am?"), but it's really just a planet that's been rendered poisonous and toxic by countless chemical assaults during a long and bitter war. Why bother fighting over such an inhospitable and lifeless rock? Location, location, location. Nu Earth is within spitting distance of a vital wormhole, driving the Norts and the Southers into an endless and pointless tug of war. The Norts comb the surface of the planet encased in their clunky biosuits, but the Southers had a better idea and bio-engineered soldiers specifically designed for Nu Earth's hellish conditions. The Genetic Infantry (GIs…clever, no?) is the result: blue skinned supersoldiers immune to the deadly surface conditions, whose minds and souls can be downloaded onto a bio-chip. If the soldier ever suffers a mortal wound, the chip can be removed from the back of his noggin and re-implanted into a freshly-grown GI body. Creepy. Or neato. I'm honestly not sure which.

Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something Blue
Virtually all of the gameplay in Rogue Trooper is going to seem at least somewhat familiar to fans of the run and gun genre. You'll follow markers on a HUD to move from objective to objective, sniping, strafing, and sneaking as necessary. You'll use mines to blow open doors and lay traps for unwary enemies, you'll man machine guns to shoot down enemy planes, you'll chuck grenades of various flavors and you'll use medi-paks when you come up on the wrong end of shrapnel. Even the evil Norts suffer from a disappointing predictability, right down to the jackboot wearing, top heavy, thickly accented uber-bitch that wants to experiment on the GIs. It's gameplay that's so familiar it's starting to fray around the edges, but like a comfy pair of shoes, it's incredibly easy to slip into.

The biggest twist in the game comes when your friends begin dying in rapid succession. As Gunner, Bagman, and Helm shuffle off their mortal coils, you dutifully dig out their bio-chips and plant them in chip slots located in your gun, backpack, and helmet. Not only does this mean your friends will live to shoot another day, it keeps them around to supply you with all means of support. Helm, for example, provides tactical advice while Bagman can take the scrap you harvest from fallen enemies and the battlefield and turn it into ammo or weapon upgrades. Think of it as being in a squad-based shooter without the squad.

The problem with setting your story on a war-ravaged planet is that the scenery is bound to be a bit on the dull side. The environments are the usual sort of militaristic claptrap that you might expect from this scenario, with gun emplacements dotting the landscape between barbed wire barriers. I realize that something like flowers or trees would've been horribly out of place, but if you've seen one apocalyptic future, you've seen them all. There isn't a lot of variety to either army's soldiers, either, so while shooting down the bad guys is still fun, it's not what you'd call a feast for the eyes.

See you in the funny pages
Rogue Trooper is, at heart, a fairly standard 3^rd person action title with some goofily named weapons (you try taking a Lazooka seriously, I dare you), average AI, and decent graphics. What it lacks in innovation, it makes up for in quirk and style, however, as the story does its source material proud and should keep most players interested enough to see it through to its conclusion. Your disembodied buddies make chores like picking up ammo or setting up an autogun different and fun, and scavenging raw materials from fallen foes is ghoulishly satisfying. My wizard hat says this one will be (unjustifiably) hitting the bargain bin in record time, so be sure to snag it when the price drops down to sawbuck territory.

-Maj1013