Inner Working Reviews: Sniper: Ghost Warrior

Introduction:
Sniper Ghost Warrior released on Steam and PC June 24th did not get a welcome start in the world. Another low flying title made from a fairly unknown non Indie company. The concept of the game was to fill the desires of the public that wanted an action packed sniper game, but did it match up to expectations? Lets look closer.

Story: 4/10
Snipers story is INCREDIBLY bland. Once again you are thrown into Latin America for the purpose of..you guessed it, preventing nukes from getting into the wrong hands. This story line has been thrown around so much that it feels all the military games, even well known ones like Modern Warfare are all using the same script. However while Modern Warfare was able to tell the story well, Snipers just doesn't feel urgent. The military only sends you, a single sniper to recover the plans, with little to no back up at any point. A few parts in the story you get another Sniper buddy looking over you but he does almost nothing to help you in killing and gives no real input into the story.

I will give it some marks though for decent voice acting and the plot is told "well enough" to move the story along. My usual practice in these reviews is to look at the inner workings of each story in the game. What is the theme of the story? I'm not sure, i fell asleep during the overwhelming blandness in the cut-scenes, So Theme= Retarded

Gameplay 6/10
You would expect one thing that Sniper would get right, is the sniping element.  In Call of Duty Modern Warfare, they introduced the element of wind effecting your shot. Sniper follows the trend but adds two elements. The first thing was Bullet time. Yes Bullet time. The realistic sniper shooter added something so fictional it makes you feel like there's no challenge to the shot. Especially adding in the second aspect is the red dot that shows you exactly where to make the shot on your scope. It makes you feel supernatural in a way and doesn't give you the challenge on an actual Sniper.

Another time, The developers of Sniper shoot up some acid and get the bright idea of throwing you into the bodies of other soldiers that are not snipers, these are the hardest missions in the game, mainly because of the insane difficulty of the A.I. Without stealth you'll be using the morphine kits every few seconds as they hit headshots nearly every time, this being only on normal difficulty. The A.I. has the same Far Cry ultra vision that immediately when you make a noise everyone in a five mile radius knows your exact position at that certain moment and can snipe you with a shot gun or an AK without even looking. The only option you have is stealth and unfortunately this doesn't add up well either.  Overall i am giving this game a 6/10 on its gameplay because after the 3rd act you start accepting the difficulty and gets mildly fun to succumb to that torture.

Functionality 2/10
I have to remind you this game was released in June 2010. This is a jungle based game, years after the release of Crysis, and this game is terribly optimized. Several moments during the game i would find landscape not attached to the ground. Many times when you over hear a conversation of the enemies, they repeat the same dialog, granted its in Spanish, they still will be on there cell phones talking the same dialog lines over and over again. Even when you kill them there sound file will still play sometimes till its end. I once killed two guards across a bridge and immediately upon walking over there the sound file started playing.

Immersion 5/10

With all of the games short comings, It does finally immerse you into the sniping mode, it does take you out of it constantly but once your put into  the very few occasions you can snipe an entire village, you immerse yourself in the planned shots.

  Overall Score: C
Sniper is riddled with blandness and poor design decisions. Breaking of immersion, horrible optimization and and shaking story make this a hard sell to a minority of players that like stealth type games.