In my scoring system, anything 5 or less means I regret involving myself with the subject of the review. The 6/10 I have given Pariah reflects the fact that I don't regret playing the game, but just barely.
Pariah is a decent FPS game, with a few interesting weapons, a few decent features, and not much else.
The health system is pretty good, apparently a take off from Halo. You have a certain number of “cells“ of health, as you take damage, they tick down. So long as a cell has any health left in it, it will regenerate back to full if given a couple seconds. This means that small, plinking damage is irrelevant, and you only die if you really get yourself in the middle of some heavy fire. A nice system for a frantic FPS like this one.
There is a weapon upgrade system, driven by pickups found throughout the game. All weapons can be improved via these pickups, to gain new features, better accuracy, bigger clips, or more damage. The grenade launcher is fun, as its first upgrade puts the shells on a remote detonator, allowing you to arc them over cover, and blast the enemy with a well timed airburst. The sniper rifle is fun, with the heat sensing vision mode.
The plot is utterly, completely, totally incoherant. There are cutscenes between levels, and it's as if half of them were removed before the game shipped. One second you're chasing some girl, the next second you're sharing a close bond with her, then they're talking about “Shroud” which is never explained, then some big black guy is taunting you, then something about your daughter, and none of it makes any sense at all. You just run around shooting everything. Sometimes everything shoots you, sometimes it seems to be divided into teams that are shooting each other, and you. There's never anything that doesn't want to kill you. It's just completely incoherant.
There's a few boss fights which are sorta puzzle-y and bizzare, and not at all hard, there's a few vehicle or turret sequences which are either irritatingly hard, or too easy.
All in all, it's a fast paced shooter, with ragdoll physics, which is almost always fun to play, at least for a while. The game did a decent job entertaining me, and then ended right as I started getting sick of it. All in all, a decent experience, but not worth going out and getting.