War is hell. But sometimes the view is spectacular. One of the most memorable things about Rogue Trooper first time round, on PS2 and Xbox in 2006, was its beautifully realised prog-rock skybox, a gorgeous, pulsing black hole haloed by sparkling particles that lazily waltzed in slow, chromatic eddies. The new Redux version again drops players directly into the action, firing you down into the toxic battlefields of Nu-Earth from low orbit in a screaming and fairly rickety-looking deployment pod. And again, it's all too easy to stop and gaze up that awe-inspiring sky, ignoring the blood, muck, sizzling laser fire and whopping great quartz crystals all around you.
A decade on and the rest of the graphics have caught up with that view, mostly. With his striking, iris-free stare and He-Man musculature in deep, gorgeous blue, Rogue himself was always an impressive central character. His supporting cast - a motley collection of gas-masked grunts and preening generals, like a rubbery, slapstick spin on the grimdark Killzone franchise - has been upgraded to almost match their lead. This reupholstering of art assets cannot quite mask the slight shonkiness at the heart of Rogue Trooper's chunky run-and-gunning - a studiously linear assault course of firefights, ambushes and unavoidable choke points that actually feels rather charming now - but Redux at least feels like a repackaging put together with lashings of love, like an unexpected Blu-ray re-release of a disreputable 1980s action movie.
The storytelling is similarly robust and streamlined. Lifted from the splatterpunk pages of 2000AD, Rogue Trooper takes place on Nu-Earth but, like a lot of sci-fi, is really set in the Allegory Dimension. The reason for the endless conflict between the comically evil Norts and the slightly more sympathetic but still pathologically self-interested Southers seems to have been lost in the mists of whatever horrible chemical haze has choked the entire planet. The plot plays out like a propulsive Commando comic resprayed with rayguns, a satirical and enjoyably lurid swipe at the futility of war so heightened that it seems entirely appropriate that the main antagonist channels the sinister cadences of Werner Herzog.
0 comments:
Post a Comment