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Sniper: Ghost Warrior

Sniper: Ghost Warrior

Sniping and jungles and bad men who need to be shot at until they're dead, together at last! Full review of the cowardly, long-distance killing!

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Ideally you want to be as far away from somebody as possible before you kill them - about half a mile away generally does the trick. Not only do you avoid locking eyes with the man you killed as the last wisps of life leak out of a hole in his head (which can be an awkward moment for all concerned), but you dodge a massive dry cleaning bill to boot. Sniping is a neat, efficient, relatively clean and emotionally detached way to murder a man. Also you get to dress up like a bush while you're doing it, a sartorial choice so few other army roles can offer.

Sniper: Ghost Warrior does its utmost to represent long-distance death-dealing by placing you in the ghillie suit of a jungle-bound American sniper, whose task it is to kill the leader of some vague, despotic, and very foreign insurgent group. The plot's as unimportant as it is unintelligible - what Sniper does best is place you in a string of situations in which you're overlooking enemy campsites. Peering through your scope, a wandering red dot shows you where your round will land. Wind and gravity affect your bullet's trajectory, lending the routine of setting up a shot that crucial measure of authenticity - just enough to make Sniper feel realistic, but not so much as to make sniping a tiresome real-life slog of knob-twiddling, distance-finding and waiting, waiting, waiting. This is an arcade shooter with only a slight conceit to the patience required of real snipers, who famously must go hours without even checking Twitter.

Sniper: Ghost Warrior

Line up the perfect headshot and the game presents you with a visual treat: the camera tracks the path of the gently spinning lead as it carves a path towards its victim in slow-motion, finally meeting the target's noggin and showering the immediate vicinity in bits of skull and brain. Sniper's a pretty game, with dense foliage and, of course, a far-reaching view-distance, and these bullet-cam set-pieces showcase the sort of detail the engine's capable of.

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So, the sniping in Sniper is fun. What you do when you're not sniping isn't nearly as enjoyable. And unfortunately, for a game with "sniper" in the title, you'll spend an unforgiveable amount of time as another character entirely: an assault team grunt with a machine gun and no sense of style. Playing as this chump drags the game into mediocrity, as you trace a frightfully linear path through the game's environments. The jungle density even works against you here, as you struggle to determine who's firing at you by squinting at green pixels and observing which side of your television is bleeding.

Sniper: Ghost Warrior

Even when playing as the sniper you're often forced into these below-par, point-to-point treks along heavily checkpointed routes, and on too many occasions you'll find yourself firing on enemies six feet away using your sniper rifle, directly contravening everything you learned in sniper college. Here, Sniper: Ghost Warrior forgets its few strengths and reveals its myriad weaknesses: confused AI, invisible walls, buggy animations and some tedious and heavily directed level design.

When it treats you like a sniper, and allows you to find and use effective cover to poke holes in heads using bits of supersonic metal, Sniper: Ghost Warrior offers a tense, cinematic and gory experience. When it tries to emulate Modern Warfare, it lets itself down. It might allow you to dress up like a bush, but it's hard to dress Sniper: Ghost Warrior up as anything other than a mismatched, budget shooter.

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05 Gamereactor UK
5 / 10
+
Sniping itself is great fun, as are the gruesome slow-mo bullet-cam shots
-
Linear levels, all the bits where you're not holding a sniper rifle, wonky stealth mechanic
overall score
is our network score. What's yours? The network score is the average of every country's score

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Sniper: Ghost Warrior

REVIEW. Written by Steve Hogarty

Sniping and jungles and bad men who need to be shot at until they're thoroughly dead, together at last!



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