A poor man's Splinter Cell, Rogue Ops could have used a little more time in basic training.
It's Lara Croft meets Sam Fisher in Rogue Ops, where you play as one of the most well endowed stereotyped video game action babes this side of Core's fallen franchise. Unlike Lara Croft, however, Nikki Conners knows how to move around without causing too much frustration to the player – although someone should have taught the girl how to quickly change running direction without needing to slowly strafe, most of the controls in Rogue Ops are standard operating procedure for the genre.
Graphically, you can tell that the game's no slouch, but never takes advantage of what it is fully capable of. It's clean and crisp, if not overly detailed, though the game does have some fairly impressive lighting. The sound falls strictly in the take-it-or-leave-it department, as Nikki and crew are one of the worst voice over casts assembled since the original Resident Evil.
Most of your time in Rogue Ops is spent trying to evade cameras and enemies as you get to point B from point A. However, this will quickly highlight the extreme spottiness of the AI – In the first mission after training; I was sneaking under a blue field of light. I raised from under it with no problem on one platform, but when I went for the other platform in the same exact fashion, I was caught. There is also the inclusion of a timed button-press minigame for stealth kills, which actually may be remembered as this otherwise ordinary game's contribution to the genre – other than its unique take on the silent takedown, you've seen most of this before, done better.
Although the game's basic design is similar to Splinter Cell, almost everything about it is simpler than Ubisoft's masterpiece. The level design. The voice acting. Graphic quality. You name it, and it's been done better in some other stealth game. The reason Rogue Ops remains worth playing for fans of the genre, is because it manages not to make a debacle of itself at a time when no high-profile games in the genre are being released.
-George
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