Sniper: Ghost Warrior Review

Sniper: Ghost Warrior feels a lot like the video game version of Snakes On A Plane. The concept itself is fantastic: you play as a covert sniper moving silently through hostile territory to take out high value targets. However like its analogy, Sniper: Ghost Warrior falls flat on its face, another good idea that is marred by broken mechanics, uneven design, and a lack of originality. And while there are some moments of greatness, you have to trudge through a swamp of sadness to get there.

So when you’re dealing with a title that has flaws it's only proper that you talk about what it did right first, give it its dues. The visuals of the game are easily its strongest feature: on the highest settings you really are looking at a fantastic looking game, but that should come as no surprise to anyone since it uses the Chrome 4 engine. For those of you who have no idea what that is, it’s the same engine that was used for Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood. The jungles are lush and vibrant and the game also uses environmental elements to effect gameplay. This means strong wind could dramatically affect how easy it is to stay on target.


The other element of Sniper: Ghost Warrior that really clicked was the slow motion kill animation you get when you pulled off a perfect headshot kill. It’s like getting to watch a melon explode at 1/6th the speed, and just as messy. Of course these beautiful scenes are so few because most of the time the game feels like its smacking you over the head with a rolled up newspaper, punishing you for trying to actually play the game.



There's also a mechanic that in reality acts more of a crutch or a handicap for the games lack of depth, although it is still a rather effective and enjoyable element of the game. What I am speaking about is the abilities that your sniper has to help him do his job. For the sake of making it sound cool we’ll call them “sniper skills”: these make you feel like a veteran sniper because you’re getting the same experience a real sniper would have for that key kill. The big one is the ability to slow down time while you’re holding your breath and really concentrate on your target. Again though, it could be argued that this is just a crutch the game uses to compensate for the lack of more sophisticated gameplay mechanics.

So let’s finally take a deep breath and dive into the murky pool of misery and pain that was most of the game. For the lack of a better analogy, Sniper seems to suffer from a severe case of Bi-polar disorder. Sure the game looks fantastic, but it’s so badly optimized that even on my high end computer there were times when it would slow to a crawl. It wasn’t even from an overabundance of activity happening in the scene, and a lot of the time I was left completely confused why I was warping ten feet in front of myself.

Then there is the AI, which sometimes seems to be the worst AI I have ever seen, almost to the point where you could kill a soldier standing beside another guy, and yet the remaining guy would never register that his smoke break buddy no longer has a jaw until you've missed him three times and he realises that he doesn't have a jaw either. And then there are other times where the game will go to the other extreme, unleashing super soldiers who are alerted to my presence even when I am crawling through mud two miles away. Nothing kills the experience of feeling like a silent killer then having a troop of soldiers see you from across the jungle.


And then you try and move off the beaten path. This aspect of the game really confuse the player, and just serves to highlight how linear the game really is. You're moving through these great looking jungle environments, they're open, they look big, but try to deviate off the path and you’ll find yourself hitting invisible wall after invisible wall. It really kills the experience as a result because you no longer feel like you have control on how the character gets from point A to point B, apart from following the route they provide.

The game also suffers from poorly coded sequences - you can easily miss some random point that is supposed to start a cutscene or make an event happen and so you’ll be standing around wondering what the hell is going on. I reached the end of my patience when I spent 15 minutes trying to figure out why getting to the check point had not started the next part of the mission, only for me to activate it at some random point in the road and get mowed down by a brand new group of troops that appeared.

The action in between the sniping is nothing to write home about either: these periods fall back on tired FPS gameplay - pretty much shoot, move forward, shoot some more, move forward. There may also be a group of you who are looking for some kind of plot to help make the whole experience easier to handle, but all you’ll find is a generic story about an evil regime taking over an island, a super American sniper come to save them, and dialog that actually contains a number of glaring errors in it.


Of course what kind of shooter would this be if it didn’t have a multiplayer element for the player to enjoy? There isn’t a lot to say though, when everyone is a sniper, it’s hard to actually get any sniper kills, not to mention most of the maps are rather small when one is looking for a place to effectively snipe.

In the end Sniper: Ghost Warrior fails at coming together. What little positive elements it has going for it are marred by its problems. Maybe with more time and some lessons learned a sequel could provide the kind of gaming experience that the developer was hoping to achieve with this game, but to say that despite this games list of flaws you’ll still find a fun experience would be grossly incorrect. Some games are able to be bad but still hold onto their fun element: Sniper had no such ability.