Ghastly

I WENT into Sniper: Ghost Warrior expecting a game devoted to the art of sniping. Lying in the brush, looking at the world through a grimy scope while waiting for the perfect shot. Lining it up, accounting for wind, bullet drop, and then finally pulling the trigger to end the nasty, brutish and short life of the game’s preferred villains. However, unless I’m very much mistaken, what I received was a game populated by cyborgs.

On the surface, clad in hideously jagged shadows, the game asks you to undo the generic evils of a group of drug dealers hiding out in a South American jungle. After your brief tutorial in how to fire your guns, introducing you to the notions of bullet travel and physics that aren’t present in most other games, the game begins proper and you come to realise that – despite some good ideas – Sniper: Ghost Warrior just isn’t finished.

Sniper: Ghost Warrior takes an interesting stance on the role of snipers in warfare that – for the most part – is quite refreshing. For a start, the further you have to shoot the more you need to consider the real world effects of gravity, the curvature of the earth and wind. On the hardest difficulty you are left to deal with this yourself, which seems a little harsh considering the lack of external stimuli that drive a real sniper’s decisions. Lower difficulties mitigate this by providing an overlay onto your scope, a small red dot that says where your bullet will actually end up. Some may say that this is too easy, but taking the enemy AI into consideration would make me declare that this is not nearly easy enough.

The effective range is 200 metres, Hershey

The reactions of the AI are so perfect that one has to wonder if they have some sort of symbiotic connection to the forest, like the weird creatures in Avatar. Once they know that you are there, something which will not be hard for them – except in specific situations where obliviousness is hard-coded – they will turn on you like a blizzard of death. It is not unusual in this game to find yourself being outsniped at a stupidly long distance by a man wielding nothing more than your typical assault rifle, his aim pinpoint precise while yours wavers like a reed in the wind.

Every enemy in the game is a crack shot with supernatural hearing and sight, being able to pick you off from a magical distance with guns ill-suited for the job, their x-ray vision picking you up no matter where you hide. Actually, that’s not strictly true. Sometimes, you can hide from them and it will work fine. It is the moments where this fails that causes frustration, usually as there is no logical explanation for such failure.

This sort of AI is not unique to Sniper: Ghost Warrior, it has cropped up in any number of sub par games, but it is especially aggravating in this particular game because of how close it comes to being good. The story is rather generic, sure, but it serves to move you through the game fair enough. The weapons have weight to them, although there is a slight discrepancy in the lethality of the pistol compared to the other guns. But the thing that takes the biggest hit is the bulletcam.

It may be a little corny, but I love the bulletcam. Line up a perfect head shot, and the game presents you with a tracking shot of your bullet leaving your gun and travelling to the bonce of your target. It gives you a nice bit of feedback and an immediate reward for taking the time to aim properly. Or it would, were it not for the frustration caused by the omniscient guards themselves. For every shot that feels like an achievement there are twenty that rob you of that feeling due to the AI. In fact, for all its supposed stealth and long distance gameplay, Sniper: Ghost Warrior feels more like your typical first person shooter, albeit one where it forces certain weapons on you.

It does some interesting things. A split storyline that has you jump from sniper to marine and back again, their missions overlapping being my favourite, but it is all undone by one flaw. It suffers visually and technically, and gives off an unfinished vibe that, unfortunately, its good idea just can’t escape.

5/10

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