I rarely write about games in here, but when I do it’s usually because I’ve been annoyed by one, and that is also the case today. I got interested in this game after watching the E3 walkthrough video, so I decided to give it a go. Now, when I think “sniper game” the gameplay element “stealth” comes to mind. I would expect a game where full frontal assaults are not advisable, where you get in, take out your target, and get out. Well, that is not the case in Sniper: Ghost Warrior. In your first mission you are supposed to take out a general, you line up your shot, shoot, and for some reason you don’t hit and everything goes to hell. The general escapes, and now you have to hunt him down. And this is where it starts go down hill, because instead of chasing the guy by hiding in the jungle, you’re told to assault the base he’s no longer in. With a sniper rifle. First I thought I’d just stay in my position and take out all of the enemies, but for some reason they have no problem hitting you from across the base, while you’re hiding in the mountains, with regular, unscoped assault rifles. So yes, you’re forced to jump into the base and try to gun down everyone, not very sniper-like.
And on top of that the game is littered with annoying design decisions and bad implementations of these. For example, if you choose the hard difficulty, you have to account for wind and distance to your target. This intrigued me and looked interesting in the mentioned video, but the problem is that you are not told how to properly do this. You can see the distance to your target and the wind strength, but there is no way to know how much you’re supposed to move your crosshair, you simply have to guess. When playing on easy and medium you get a small, red dot, which indicates where the bullet actually hits, but I’ve found this dot to be very imprecise.
