Game: Sniper: Ghost Warrior (Xbox 360)
Publisher: City Interactive
Developer: City Interactive
Genre: FPS
Price: $39.99
Verdict: Great ideas but poor execution
Pros: Stunning visuals, captures the feel of a sniper
Cons: Broken game mechanics, ultimately frustrating and boring.
City Interactive seems to have tapped into the core of the style of shooter that most people in FPS styled games refer to as campers. The people who will find a cozy spot on a map and wait for a hapless victim to cross their hairs in line for a bullet. Sniper: Ghost Warrior is a first-person shooter designed for the gamer who enjoys stealth and camouflage to ultimately dispatch their target from the shadows. Taking place mostly surrounding a fictitious island in South America called Isla Trueno, you’ll find yourself partaking in assassination attempts, stealth missions and all out defensive assaults as you plod through 16 missions aimed at taking out the evil militaristic regime.
Before you begin any mission, or even the sub-missions contained within, you’ll be greated with faux overhead satellite imagery depicting your combat arena and then a highly rendered and lush cut scene that sets your stage. The visuals in the game are impressive as lush tropical forests provide a lush and colorful backdrop in which to blend your ghillie suit with. Character animations are fitting and the details in the environment impress, but its when the enemy begins to appear that the attention to detail begins to suffer. While nicely drawn, I noticed in several places that the exact same models were used to depict enemies on the screen. One mission in particular had me staring down my sights at two guards positioned on a dirt road. The character models used for both of them were exactly the same down to the pulled back ponytail and sunglasses. While it could be entirely feasible that identical twin brothers hold the same rank and responsibility in a South American guerrilla force, it doesn’t make for a good impression. Even dispersing the enemies a few feet apart would have solved this oversight. What is impressive (while admittedly gimmicky) is the bullet-time camera attached to the game. When you score a headshot, you’re treated with a slow motion depiction of the bullet leaving the barrel of your sniper rifle into the unsuspecting foe. This addition makes the trouble of scoring an accurate headshot worthwhile and satisfying.
Scoring that elusive headshot becomes a mini-game in itself. Implemented into the game are aspects of lining up the shot perfectly. You’ll have to take wind speed, target movement, altitude and your own breathing into account before you squeeze the trigger. Depending on your difficulty level, you may or may not have a small red dot within your reticule that will tell you the approximation of your shot depending on these factors. Crank up the difficulty higher and that safety net is gone, leaving you to figure out the perfect shot on your own. In real life military sniper operations, one might expect a spotter to assist the sniper in figuring out the best shot to take for the kill. In Sniper: Ghost Warrior, your spotter will do nothing but yell at you to take the shot and give you unnecessary information that does not help your case. In an early mission when you and your other team member are split up, he proves even further unreliable as he radios that there are people advancing to your location, but decides its best for you to enter a firefight with a sniper rifle, throwing knife and pistol instead of simply eliminating the target before it discovers his partner hiding in the brush. The frustration over your selfish partner is abated once he is shot and ultimately removed from the mission, leaving you to fend for yourself. Ultimately this works out better for you as you no longer have him barking orders into your radio.
Each mission is laid out in GPS waypoints that you must get to in order to advance the mission forward. Each new waypoint spawns a new set of pre-scripted enemies that walk the same exact path, duck behind the same exact bushes and kill you at the exact same times. This seems to happen quite a bit in the game. As a sniper, you’re expected to blend in with your environment and slowly advance to your designated area. All too often in Sniper: Ghost Warrior, you will be happily camped in full brush in complete camouflage, not moving when all of the sudden your character will yell out “Fuck, I’ve been compromised” whereas you will be quickly killed and forced to restart the mission from the last checkpoint; something also supplied in small quantities in this game. Each checkpoint restart tends to bring you back to a point in the map that was several waypoints ago, forcing you to drudge over the same exact pre-scripted drivel once again and most likely get killed in the same place you just did. One particularly frustrating mission pits you against a small village of guerrillas. You’re expected to make your way to the checkpoint without alerting anyone of your presence. Short work as a sniper in full ghillie suit right? Wrong. Even if you systematically dispatch each of your foes along the way, belly crawl through the brush to the middle of the map, scan the horizon from your heavily covered area, its inevitable that someone on the map will find you and raise the air horn, subsequently ending your mission and forcing you to start from the beginning again. The visual prowess of your combatants are astounding as it seems they are able to detect the smallest movement from a sniper covered in brush and full camouflage suit from over a quarter of a mile away.
The sounds are not the most impressive either. Voice acting leaves a bit to be desired and what few things your character does say is usually simply confirming mission objectives or the aforementioned blown cover expletive. AI seems to appropriately discuss their day to day activities in their native South American language satisfyingly, but aside from that it is pretty standard fair. 
Multiplayer seems tacked on at best with most maps being ridiculously small considering you’re playing a long range firing class. The maps are also covered with unnecessary and illogically placed objects that make finding a direct line of fire to your other sniping cohorts next to impossible. This lends itself to everyone on the map simply running around with their pistols or throwing knifes equipped or lobbing wayward grenades in random locations hoping to score a kill.
In the end, it is very difficult to recommend this game to anyone. While City Interactive took a nice premise and showed a small taste of what it could be like to play as an elusive stealth long range killer, they didn’t execute their intentions very well by delivering a lackluster game riddled with horrible AI and frustrating gameplay.
GrE Grade: D
Popularity: unranked [?]
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