Pariah (video game)

Pariah is a First-Person Shooter developed by Digital Extremes, co-developers of the Unreal series. It was released by Groove Games on May 3, 2005 for PC and Xbox. A PlayStation 2 version was planned but never materialized. It used a modified version of the Unreal 2 Engine and the Havok physics engine.

It is the year 2520. Thirty years ago, the human Alliance fought a war against a sinister and mysterious foe, the Shroud. We won, though in the process, a large portion of the Earth's surface was turned into harsh wastelands: "The Zone." Most of humanity now lives in off-world colonies.

You play the role of Jack Mason, a medic in the Alliance military whose been demoted numerous times for insubordination and now gets stuck with all the crappy jobs. In this case, he's supposed to transport a woman named Karina off-world from a high-security prison called The Anvil. She's carrying a highly-classified transgenic virus that gives her bizarre and destructive powers.

Only on his way out, his ship gets shot down by The Scavengers, the inhabitants of the outlaw Zone. Karina is released from her stasis cell in the crash and runs off, leaving the player to go chase after her, which is where the game begins.

The game received mixed reviews and despite a small, dedicated fanbase pushing for the game to go pro, the Competitive Multiplayer never took off. A sequel was in development, though because Pariah was such a flop, the sequel became Warpath, an unrelated (story-wise) game that retained this iteration's few good elements: namely, the weapon upgrade system.

Tropes used in Pariah (video game) include:

Awesome but Impractical: The Rocket Launcher. Its ludicrous damage does not make up for the scarcity of its ammo, the lack of enemies that actually warrant its use, and the presence of equally good or better options when those enemies do appear.
Awesome Yet Practical: The Grenade Launcher. Useful for taking enemies out when they're hidden behind cover, comes with a decent ammo pool, and the damage it deals is pretty self explanatory. Upgrading it once grants you the ability to remote detonate the grenade in midair, adding to its flexibility.
- The Plasma Gun starts out as Awesome but Impractical, with very good damage, but a slow burst-fire rate, non-Hit Scan projectiles and Splash Damage that might kill you when used in close quarters. Upgraded, it gains a Secondary Fire Charge Attack that fires off any remaining ammo in your clip as an Energy Ball that zaps any enemy in its path, then latches onto the first surface it touches and continues doing the same until it explodes, making it an excellent area-denial weapon in addition to its use as a mid-range pseudo-assault rifle.
BFG: This being an Unreal engine game, all of them. First prize probably goes to the Shroud's "Titan's Fist" energy cannon, only usable by infected individuals.
Boring but Practical: The Bulldog PDW. It's the first real weapon you get, but you are likely to use it well into the later stages. When upgraded, it attains the fastest fire rate out of all your weapons, with some decent accuracy to back it up. Add to that its plentiful ammo supply and the fact that it deals good damage to virtually every enemy type, and you can see why it's Mason's Weapon of Choice in cutscenes and promo materials.
Collection Sidequest: The Weapon Energy Cores. Completely optional, they have no relevance to the plot other than a throwaway line from Jack connecting them to the Shroud.
Cool Bike: The Scavengers make use of a large, three-wheeled off-roader with gatling guns.
Deflector Shields: One of the powers granted by The Virus is a personal energy barrier.
Despair Event Horizon: Karina crosses it when she sees Mason shoot himself. She being what she is, that means everybody else dies too.
Disaster Scavengers: The Scavengers.
Downer Ending: Maybe the downest. Holy CRAP.
Driven to Suicide: Mason.
Earth-That-Was: A lot of it's still habitable, but the rest is outlaw wastes. It's not a total disaster area, but it's rough.
Eleventh-Hour Superpower: Mason finally exhibits powers very late in the game.
Enemy Mine: Karina and Mason are prisoner and captor, but are forced to work together to overcome the Scavengers.
Evolving Weapon: One of the highlights of the game (maybe the only one) was the ability to upgrade your weapons using modular "Weapon Energy Cores". Each weapon could be upgrades a total of three times and gained new and impressively destructive abilities as you did so.
Exploding Barrels
Gas Mask Mooks
Grenade Launcher
Heal Thyself: You have a medical injector that restores one bar of health per use and has to be reloaded like a weapon.
Human Aliens: Maybe. The Shroud are shown to be pale, hairless, corpselike beings vaguely resembling the Necris. What they actually are is never explained.
Infrared X-Ray Camera: Upgrading the Sniper Rifle gives its scope function the ability to work like this. While it does avert the tendency for this sort of camera to see through walls, it only seems to pick up heat produced by enemies, and not by the surroundings.
Informed Ability: Mason doesn't do a lot of healing (besides himself) so much as shooting.
Lost Technology: One of Jack's monologues states that the Weapon Energy Cores were once Shroud technology used during the war. May or may not also be Imported Alien Phlebotinum, given that it's not revealed what the Shroud are.
Manipulative Bastard: Colonel Stockton, warden of The Anvil. Not only does he pay the Scavengers to shoot down Mason's ship in order to capture Karina, but he then captures her himself and doesn't pay them. Then he infects himself with The Virus and tries to kill you.
Not Quite Dead: The Shroud. They're still around, they're pissed, and they'll likely make you reload your last save a few times.
Person of Mass Destruction: Karina. She was created by the Shroud. Stockton briefly becomes one, though you clip his wings before he can realize his potential.
Prison: The Anvil.
Red Shirt: Stubbs, the pilot of the ship ferrying you and Karina, and the only other friendly face in the game arms you with the Bulldog and helps you fight off the Scavengers for a few minutes in the first chapter before he's unceremoniously killed off-screen.
Regenerating Health: A variant. You have 4 (upgrade-able up to 6) health bars that drain out as you take damage, starting from the rightmost one. A bar not completely emptied will regenerate on its own, but one completely drained requires the use of your medical injector to be refilled. Emptying all those bars means death, of course.
The Reveal: Several, but probably the biggest (and most unexpected) is that Mason was working for the Shroud all along. After killing Stockton he delivers Karina into their hands. Why? Because they can supposedly resurrect his dead daughter. When they refuse to do so, he has a Heroic BSOD, goes on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge to try and save Karina, and then shoots himself, prompting Karina to obliterate everything. Damn.
Sequel Hook: Somewhat unusual in that it's not explicit, but it's definitely there. It's shown earlier in the game that Karina is capable of surviving the explosions she generates, which hints that she may have survived the massive explosion at the end of the game, even if no one else did.
Sliding Scale of Villain Threat: The Scavengers, The Alliance troops, and finally The Shroud.
Sphere of Destruction: The chief ability granted by The Virus. Kills Mooks dead.
Standard FPS Guns: Bulldog PDW, Grenade Launcher, Frag Rifle, Plasma Gun, Sniper Rifle, Rocket Launcher and Titan's Fist. It's just they're all huge and can be exponentially multiplied in power. Except for the last one.
Stuff Blowing Up
Unorthodox Reload: The Frag Rifle has a vertically-oriented internal magazine, cycling through the shells like a soda dispenser as it fires. Going with that metaphor, reloading it looks like stuffing a six-pack of shells into open port of the gun, before removing some sort of pin that held them all together.
Vehicular Combat: The story mode has a few instances where you can man an armed vehicle, and such vehicles are also available in multi-player maps. While decent and perfectly playable, these instances seem rather derivative of Halo.
The Virus: A top-secret bio-weapon that grants incredible powers but often at the risk of suddenly exploding. Karina is it's vector, and Mason gets infected during the crash, giving him an excuse to chase after her when she escapes.