Remember two hours ago, when I was halfway through the game? Since then, I got a drink, tooled around on the web, finished the game, waited for my website to come back up, and then typed this. I guess I just April Fools' pranked myself.

So yeah, my total completion time was somewhere south of 4 hours, even with numerous dies-and-retries in retarded chokepoints full of dead-eye Russians. I won't even bother mentioning the countless minor issues with Rogue Warrior - except that it is stupefying how often reloads get cancelled - since, at their worst, they will only last a few hours.

If you're like me, and have an unhealthy obsession with bad games, this is a great one because of how short and vulgar it is. Otherwise, just watch the credits and forget that there's a video game preceding them.

Better than: Kane & Lynch: Dead Men (Rogue Warrior is funny!)
Not as good as: real video games
Seriously: watch those credits

There is one good thing about Rogue Warrior: attitude. It is basically a non-stop sequence of stabbing and perforating dudes, narrated by Mickey Rourke's superb cursing. You'll never laugh so much at dead North Koreans as you will listening to this game.

Aside from that, though, it is terrible. The controls are shoddy, the game balance is stupid, the level design (and checkpoint locations) are just wrong, and it's phenomenally short - I'm at the halfway point after about two hours - although that may actually be a good thing.

It's plainly evident from playing for more than a few minutes, that Rogue Warrior is not the game that it was initially designed to be. Stealth portions, when they work, work well; it sometimes feels like a foul-mouthed Metal Gear Solid. But when you're detected, it turns into a shitty shooting game, where all the guns are terribly inaccurate, and cover frequently fails to cover you.

Not that I would have liked it much if Rogue Warrior was a completely stealth game. But its split personality makes it successful neither as a shooter nor as a sneaker.