Rogue Trooper: Quartz Zone Massacre review

Hurling grenades isn’t so good, because you’ve got to rely on the Nunchuk’s motion sensor. In fact we’d go as far as to say it’s so rubbish we simply abandoned explosives except in the instances where we were required to use them. You have to raise the Nunchuk to bring up a targeting marker and flick it down to throw, but it hardly ever worked for us. We threw the odd accidental grenade and very rarely managed to get the whole targeting thing going.

The cover system doesn’t always pick the best places to stick and sometimes leaves Rogue’s head exposed to the elements, but that’s true of pretty much every similar game. Ammo is plentiful enough to treat the experience as a run-and-gun effort anyway. You actually make ammo and other commodities using bits you’ve salvaged from the battlefield. Dead Norts drop weapons that can be melted down in the magic backpack and turned into bullets, health packs and upgrades, allowing for at least a small amount of customisation.

The Rogue Trooper universe is splendidly realised, with suitably toxic-looking locations and cartoon villains. It’s a shame that the action doesn’t vary a huge amount and the game is fairly brief – over the course of about eight hours you’ll have shot the same soldier a thousand times – but fans of the comics will appreciate the effort that’s gone into this.

We encountered the odd bug here and there, such as soldiers getting stuck in crates or frozen in suspended animation. One time Rogue clipped clean through the ceiling after climbing on a box, leaving him stranded in no man’s land, walking around outside the level. But there’s more than enough good stuff to compensate for the occasional rough edge.

One enhancement to the Xbox version is the addition of a four-player offline mode where you can team up to complete a handful of objective-based maps. Having never played it in its original guise, we were pleased at how smoothly it runs and how satisfying the gunfights could be, although we wish the noise of the main weapon was a little beefier. It sounds about as deadly as a spud gun. Good stuff, in all, and certainly one of the better shooters on Wii.

Mar 18, 2009