Pariah, (Xbox) 16+

Pariah is set in lawless territory in the American Northwest infested with scavangers and mercenaries.

Herald rating: * * 

I had high hopes for Pariah. It's made by Digital Extremes, the company behind the fantastic Unreal series of games. I liked the title, the idea of a social outcast as our hero. But Pariah fails because it neglects to take first person shooting anywhere we haven't been before. Pariah looks like it's patched together from off-cuts of the superior Halo games.

It has the same futuristic feel to it and the landscape is similar in parts. But $100 is too much for a Halo imitation. Gamers deserve more. There isn't even an earth-shattering opening animation to get us hooked. The premise for Pariah starts out simply enough but grows ever more complicated, which is as you'd expect from a game written by professional Hollywood scriptwriters.

You are Dr James Mason and the air transport you are travelling in, with a prisoner who is carrying a lethal virus, goes down in a lawless area somewhere in the Northwest.

A number of people survive the crash which threatens to become an episode of Lost until your comrade Stubbs shoots the infected prisoner Karina, splattering you with her blood in the process.

Cue a nice little animation that goes inside your body and shows the virus entering your blood cells. Your task now is to hunt down Karina - who escapes into the bush - before the army arrive with a bomb to nuke the area and contain the virus. The problem is that you are now seen by society in the same light as Karina.

As soon as you hit the ground, Mad Max-type scavengers and mercenaries are trying to kill you and later you'll come up against well-armed security guards as you reach the prison your flight was bound for. There is plenty of shooting and explosions but it's pretty pedestrian and has been done far better elsewhere.

The game skimps on weaponry which consists of a bonesaw through to plasma guns, sniper rifles and my favourite, the grenade launcher.

A major feature of the game is a map maker, which allows you to design landscapes to play in. This is no doubt tremendously useful for the Xbox Live multiplayer version of the game. Will Dr Mason and Karina survive? Who really cares? The game-play was sufficiently bland for me to abandon my mission halfway.

* $100