Rogue Warrior

The issues with the single-player game, while it lasts, are many and varied. It's tempting to lay into the enemy AI, but that would involve calling it "AI", which would be excessive for the blanket incompetence of these identikit soldiers. Stealth elements could also have been so much more. One of the game's few positive points is its use of light and shadow, but this is squandered in a game design that telegraphs the action and stealth divide so blatantly.

Stealth kills are a piece of cake because, in the areas of the game the level designers have set aside for this sort of behaviour, virtually all of the enemies have their backs turned to you by default. Not only that, but they remain blissfully unaware of your approach even when your thundering footsteps all but give the game away. Even the screaming deaths of their comrades do nothing to alert other soldiers, despite their being just metres away from the kill.

Rogue Warrior does at least have brutal close-quarters kills - simply move up close to an opponent and press the A button, and you're shown a set-piece animation involving fists, knives or the murderous use of scenery - but these get very old very, very quickly. It's also interesting to note that being blasted by another enemy soldier while the sequence takes place doesn't seem to break your stride. Must be all that SEAL training.

Overall, the single-player campaign is best described as disastrous, and the game's credentials are not boosted by the inclusion of what is a mostly awful multiplayer mode. This too is basic and lacking any kind of originality whatsoever, taking the form of bog-standard deathmatch and team deathmatch. It's like going back in time to the launch of online console gaming, and, actually, it's like going back there graphically as well.

Tech-wise, the game is a bit of a nightmare. Rebellion has rolled out its "Asura" engine (a new one on me, but Google says it's derived from idTech4) and aside from the odd well-lit environment or nice dynamic shadow, the visuals look low-poly with a bizarre mishmash of different levels of texture detail.

V-sync is enabled on the Xbox 360 version we reviewed, but frame-rate is abysmal. If you get anything above 20FPS you should count yourself lucky. Thanks to the poor update rate, there's also some pretty horrible input lag from the controller, to the point where aiming the weapon in the direction of your assailant is often a challenge simply due to the lack of visual feedback from the game itself.