Sniper: Ghost Warrior Review

"You had me at 'sniper'"

Ever since I saw the movie Clear and Present Danger with Harrison Ford, I've pretty much been obsessed with anything having to do with snipers. There are few things in this world more kickass than a dude dressed up as a bush blowing people's heads off from 300 yards away. I love sniper movies, and I especially love first-person shooters that feature good sniping. That said, I was practically salivating in anticipation of playing the game Sniper: Ghost Warrior.

Judging from the trailers and what the game was advertised to feature, I was sure that this was going to be an excellent title. Unfortunately, my expectations were apparently much too high, because Ghost Warrior ended up being a major disappointment for me. To be fair, it does provide you with a few very satisfying sniper moments, but for the most part the game is a convoluted train wreck. I'll briefly outline for you what I feel are the game's pros and cons.

First of all, the pros: The graphics are actually pretty nice, and can almost be compared to excellent games such as Crysis or Far Cry 2. The dense jungle environments are beautifully rendered, along with the weapon models. The biggest eyesore of the game is the character models - more specifically their faces. Game developers have made great strides in the last five or six years in the area of facial animation, but Ghost Warrior abandons any effort to follow suit, resulting in dull, lifeless faces that often remind me of dead fish (especially with the main character, who should arguably be the most animated of all). By the way: I know that I just put a "con" into the "pros" paragraph, instead of saving it for the "cons" paragraph. I'm not sorry.

The sniping and stealth mechanics are actually both the greatest pros and the greatest cons of the game. When they work, they're brilliant. The following video shows a few minutes of the first mission of the game, in which I was able to successfully use stealth to evade enemies, and (for most part) successfully snipe the hell out of the ones that weren't so lucky:



After playing this first mission, I was pumped and ready for more, thinking that this would be the norm for the remainder of the game. For some reason, though, it seems that the first mission is the only one of its kind, as each subsequent mission is marred by broken and inconsistent stealth mechanics, which make the game irritating at best, and nearly unplayable at worst. In some cases, I could sprint right through a group of hostiles at full speed, barely inches away from the enemy, and no one would even give the six-foot tall galloping shrubbery a second glance. In other situations, I would crawl at a snail's pace through thick foliage, several yards away, and be spotted almost instantly. The idea that a sniper in a full ghillie suit sitting almost perfectly still in the middle of a friggin' tropical rainforest would be easier to spot than a brightly-clad South American standing in the open and shouting obscenities in Spanish really, really pisses me off. This is the kind of crap that would make Tom Berenger cry.

Along with broken stealth mechanics, the sniping mechanics are often pretty finicky at times. One of the coolest features of the game is that you have to compensate for wind speed and distance in your aiming, so the center of the crosshairs isn't always where your bullet will land. In the easier modes (I chose to play through on the "Medium" setting first), you see a red dot that represents the actual point that your bullet will strike. Placing this red dot on a target's head will most likely result in a pretty wicked-sick cutscene, in which you get to watch your bullet travel through the air in slow motion and nail the bad guy in the brain basket. Sometimes, however, no matter how well you line up the shot, the bullet just doesn't hit the target, or else it does something lame like this:



Probably the worst mistake the developers of Ghost Warrior make is to periodically attempt to create scenes similar to those found in the far superior Call of Duty: Modern Warfare games. I'm sure that their intent was to provide a change of pace from sneaking through foliage and sniping by dumping you into an intense combat situation, but it's so horribly done that I could barely force myself to play through it. The only endearing qualities of the game are the rare moments in which you can pull off beautiful headshots and remain undetected, watching your foes spiral around and run aimlessly in panic and confusion. They should have stuck to that type of gameplay, even if it was only marginally better.

I'll admit that I haven't played the multiplayer mode of Sniper: Ghost Warrior yet, but I really don't imagine that it would redeem the game enough to make it worth buying at full price. My advice is: if you're a sniper fanatic like myself, wait until this game inevitably drops in price to buy it. There are plenty of games out there (many are years older than this one) that feature sniping and handle it much, much better than Ghost Warrior. If you have any appreciation for contemporary computer games whatsoever, you will be sorely disappointed in this half-assed attempt at a sniper game. If I were to give this game a grade, the best it could possibly achieve is a C, and that's being quite generous.

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