SNIPER: GHOST WARRIOR 3
Aims for greatness, but fails to keep its hands steady
Anxiously, a young boy peers down the scope of his rifle. He’s forcing himself to keep his breath under control with visible and audible effort, presumably worried he’ll spook the empty bottles he’s aiming at and they’ll gallop off into the forest. Sniper: Ghost Warrior 3 begins as it means to go on, because even your grown-up avatar faces his fair share of absurdities. The young boy is actually your character’s brother. SPOILER: both siblings grow up to become snipers, but when A Mission Goes Wrong your brother is taken away and… look, the story’s rubbish. While it has one, possibly two good ideas – definitely not including the hilariously predictable plot twist – they’re lost in a tangle of clichés and imperfect translation. Brilliantly (read: not brilliantly), the subtitles often politely yet firmly disagree with the audio about what the characters are saying.
Let’s face it, though, we don’t need much motivation to split heads open, because videogames have turned us all into psychopaths. While you’re theoretically given the option of tackling missions as quietly or loudly as you like, Hitman-style, the shonkiness of the close-range weapons you start off with means that, especially on higher difficulties, stealth is the way to go. The resulting lack of real choice is disappointing, but at least playing the part of a sneaky sniper mostly works.
The locations you infiltrate aren’t particularly complex (interesting installations don’t make an appearance until twothirds of the way through, and even then they’re fairly linear) but the mechanics are sound. Send your drone ahead to tag enemies and find objectives, then get in, do your job, and get out, killing as many people or as few as you wish.
GHOST’S BUSTED
Unfortunately, there are numerous technical problems. Big ones (like the time I’m unceremoniously kicked back to XMB, and the time the game freezes on me) and small ones (like the odd, vaguely rude positions corpses sometimes collapse into). There are also lots of in-between ones, such as textures popping in and out of existence in front of you.
The all-important AI is nothing special, but offers some challenge – though it can be forgiving, to put it diplomatically. My favourite example of this is when I find myself hurtling through the air on a zipwire in plain view of nearby soldiers, who understandably grow curious. When I land like a ton of bricks on a building and go prone, they immediately forget about me. Maybe they’re amnesiacs? Maybe they just can’t be arsed.
In the end, Sniper: Ghost Warrior 3’s main problem is that its two main hooks – sniping and stealth – have already been well-implemented by dozens of better games. Choosing this over those? That’d be the illogical cherry on top of this absurd trifle.
VERDICT
There’s plenty of fun to be squeezed out of this despite numerous technical missteps, but unduly complacent, overly familiar mission design holds it back. Luke Kemp