Sniper: Ghost Warrior 3

 

 So the first two Sniper Ghost warrior games were pretty awful and I hated them both for various reasons (check my reviews)

So hopefully this one is atleast better than those right?


Well this time around its on a completely different engine, CryEngine, which definitely looks and feels a lot more polished than the first two bargain bin titles.  Everything about this game is more polished and visually pleasing than the first two right off the bat. The visuals look pretty tripple A even though its probably a relatively low budget game.


What does this game do different? well, this time its an open world Far Cry clone, except with more emphesis on tactical sniping and Stealth.  For essentially the entire campaign it goes like this: Go to a safehouse, interact with a laptop, choose the next mission/equipment,  Drive 5-10 minutes across the map/fast travel to start of mission.

Then, once you arrive, the vast majority of times you end up at the outskirts of some outpost . From there you throw your drone up in the air, to spot all the enemies and mark them on your hud/visual map, then you proceed to either snipe them all, or sneak past them all straight to the objective. Thats basically the entire campaign in the a nutshell.

Is it fun?
Yeah its alright. Its extremely derivitve, and a lot of the mechanics are incredibly untuitive and confusing. For example theres a crafting system at your safehouse where you scroll through lists of ammo types , gadgets, and equipment, but the way its set out is so hard to understand and so poorly explained its just not interesting to engage with. The menu interface is so confusing and obtuse that I basically just ignored it for the entire campaign.

You can unlock a bunch of different weapons and gear and you buy them with money you collect by just shooting/looting people and items (although the animation is painfuly boring every single time so I tried to avoid it)  
 But for the first half of the campaign I just ignored getting any new weapons or anything because I felt it wasn't needed. It will randomly give you new gun upgrades and silenced weapons when appropriate sometimes as well, other times it wont, which is pretty bizarre. It all just feels shoehorned in as a cheap imitation of contemporary shooters (Far cry, ubisoft formula)

I'm really starting to think open world games are just generally worse than carefully crafted set piece to set piece linear experiences. Atleast 40% of this game is spent fast travelling back and forth to your safehouse/mindlessly driving across the same boring roads just to arrive at your location. Whats the point? It doesnt add anything to the game. As for the 'free roam' stuff, who cares? Its the same dull 'point of interest'  to gives you some materials/loot/crafting stuff, over and over, when I already  dont have a reason to care about unlocks, and I already just want to get on with the main campaign. So yes, for the whole campaign i just ignored free roam and everytime A mission ended I instantly just fast traveled to my safe house and picked the next one. Theres no point , no incentive to freeroam. I just didnt see the point. Like are you really going to be so desperate for more Sniper: Ghost Warrior that you feel totally compelled to just roam around randomly in some low budget knock off shooter? not me.

So the main campaign is almost the same mission copy pasted 20 times in a row then the game ends. Its almost always drive to X compound, find X guy, steal X item, or kill everyone. Its not extremely bad per say, its just extremely generic and forgettable. Nothing stands out.

The story is laughable at best, animation is hilarious, the characters are all coomer bait women with their cleavage showing and being seductive as your partners, spewing military jargon the whole time, with zero semblance of personality or character development. Your main character is just some low talking voice grunt, and the plot basically revolves around finding your long lost brother or some shit. Painfully boring and cliche, but was fun to laugh at.

I didn't like how the game is essentially a glorified stealth game. for atleast half the missions you have an objective "dont get detected"  or "Sneak to this place" I found myself wanting to often just stop sneaking around and go guns blazing, but theres so many locations in the game where its just not what it wants you to do. The enviorment is built around being stealthy for example, theres not really the freedom of choice in a lot of instances.  Halfway through the campaign I bought a super powerful sniper that cant use a silencer, and just went around killing everyone in 1 shot with gruesome headshot animations and that was pretty enjoyable.  Theres a weird mechanic where your silencer can actually break and you have to bring around silencer repair kits, but as mentioned the interface and store UI is so uninitivie its just clusmy and a chore. Espeically buying ammo and health kits

The health system is rediclous. If an enemy is anywhere close to you , youll just die in 1 shot. So going close quarters with assault rifle you have to be extremely careful and rely on tagging enemies through walls and stuff, or else its hopeless.  Theres no regenerating health, and theres a confusing medkit item system where you can carry multiple healing items but i was never clear exactly how much which one healed. Oh yeah, did I mention the controls are pretty horrible? Theres multiple different radial menus, when you sprint and then hit crouch he ALWAYS does this horribly long awful sliding animation that got me killed so many times, the climbing controls are crap and will get you killed etc. The game has a habit of making you climb around a lot too which is double painful.

What did I like? I liked the fact that unlike Homefront: Revolution, enemies dont respawn. So you can actually come up to an outpost and strategically figure out how to kill every last enemy and not worry about them constantly spawning behind you or some shit. That was pretty fun. The graphics are good, the world looks decent and believable, the story is pretty bad but its kinda entertaining in a cheesy B movie way, the game isnt a slog to get through or anything, I beat it in just 6 hours (ignoring all the side crap) but at the end of the day its just a rip off of Far Cry with a lower budget and a focus on sniping, the same derivitive contemporary mechanics youve seen a thousand times, tagging enemies through walls, hit markers, the stealth system with the bars over enemies heads, all of it is the same stuff youve played dozens of times. Its not done particularly bad, but its not good either. It's funny how when the enemies dont know where you are, they'll just stand in place for minutes on end behind cover or something. The AI is bizarre. The enemies towards the end of the game will be wearing super duper armor and will take half a dozen shots to the chest to take down while they can kill you in one. The game is tough on difficulty 2/3.  Sniping mechanics are decent I thought it was cool you can change the distance of your sniping to the metres of how far the enemy is, its pretty tactical and developed with wind velocity and stuff like that .

6/10

Homefront: The Revolution

 
 

At first glance everything about Homefront: Revolution seems to be superior to the first game. The first homefront game was incredibly generic and boring copy pasted Call of duty clone, very linear and cliche, but not painful to get thorugh or anything

So what does Homefront 2 have to offer?
Well this time around its not a linear level to level corridor shooter like the first. No, instead this time around its an open world style ubisoft clone where you go from city location to city location surrounded by outposts you can capture and a map full of various activites you can conquer.


Now, for the first hour or 2 the game seems very promising. Its got good graphics, feels polished and professional, it has a cool gun customisation system where you can press a button and completely dismantle and change up your gun attachments a moments notice.. but folks, the cracks begin to show VERY quickly.

For starters, a huge glaring flaw that becomes rapidly apparant is the entire game is just a romp of infinitely respawning enemies. Its essentially a shitty stealth game in disguise and the moment you are ever spotted, an alarm goes off and infinitely enemies just run towards your location like Grand theft auto police or something.  So for the entire game you feel punished or like youre wasting your time for simply shooting at enemies, because you know its pointless because they'll never stop coming towards you.
 Instead, you find yourself wanting to just sprint as fast as possible past every single enemy/outpost STRAIGHT to the fucking Objective marker, because the SECOND you hit that objective marker it despawns and deletes every enemy. The combat is so trivial and pointless because of this.  
 I will just reiterate that in a shooting game it feels completely pointless and worthless and a waste of time, to actually shoot at the enemies , in 90% of the scenarios because of this.

NOT to mention that the game is extremely unforgiving ontop of this. You die in 3-4 hits, and theres not regenerating health. You can only carry a limited amount of med kits, and theyre almost impossible to find out in the wild. You need to purchase them at one of the stores.  So what you end up doing is stocking up on med kits, sprinting past every enemy in the game while frantically spamming the heal button, so you can make it to the objective and do some shitty hacking mini game while theres 100 guys shooting at you, so then when you complete the objective they all get deleted and you are free of threat.

 I've tried the route of actually engaging in combat and shooting enemies, but its a waste of time. You do not arrive at your objectives any faster, but the contrary. You just sit around shooting wave after wave of the same generic soldier for infinity, when you could just sprint to the objective and spam health kits. The game is fundamnetally designed like shit. What the fuck were they thinking?

Now, imagine on top of ALL of this retarded design, there are MANY places in the game where you are FORCED to capture outposts to progress. Now, the issue here, is that virtually ALL of them are located vertically, up in some very obscure random window that requires JUMPING PUZZLES to get to every single one of them.

So, you have infinitely respawning enemies/alarms/cameras running towards you, all the while youre trying to figure out how to climb up these obscure jumping puzzles to finally reach some switch in some apartment complex window, just to progress the campaign

Im not kidding, it forces you to do this shit like 40 times. You reach points in the campaign where you have to raise some 'hearts and minds' meter by capturing outposts, freeing prisoners, destroying equipment ETC..  and capturing outposts raises the meter the fastest, but the vast majority of them are so obscure and insane to get to i just found myself looking them up on youtube.  

I cant stress enough how frustrating and annoying and tedious it is trying to jump across these awful jumping puzzle rooftop "where the fuck do I go?" segments while theres just waves and waves of drones swarming towards you. Nothing about this game is difficult or challenging, just tedious and fucking downright annoying.  Not to mention the game does a HORRIBLE job of explaining half of the mechanics to you, there are multiple times where I found myself stuck without a clue how to progress, looked it up on youtube, and apparently I was suppose to know i had to be using some RC toy car with just the right specific Hack tool , or  I have to use a camera picture function in just the right place etc.. just totally crap mechanics that arent explained anywhere.

There are three of these forced 'freeroam'  'hearts and minds Raise the meter'  segments in the game and they are by far the worst and most tedious stuff ever. You can run around like a dickhead being as slow and careful as possible but its just not worth it. Once youre detected you can do some 'assassins creed' type ubisoft garbage like hunting in dumpsters or trying to lose them,  but again, why would I want to be doing that shit for hours on  end when I can just rush to the objective? The mechanics are not particularly enjoying or rewarding to utilize, I just found myself wanting to progress and not dick around playing with some boring geenric mechanics.

So the campaign revolves around some incredibly cliche political bad guys VS revolutionary storyline which is totally forgettable and I just finished the campagin 10 minutes ago and I seriously cant even remember a single name of any of the main characters. I dont even know what my guys name is. I think there was a guy called jack? which was a total stereotype of a typical alpha male grunt war guy. Some really annoying girl who just was over emotional and archetypical as well. I dont know, nothing about the story was at all stimulating it was just a means to an end.

So it tries to be open world, but fails, because you find yourself punished for actually engaging with any of the enemies because THEY NEVER STOP SPAWNING. None of the actual campaign missions are fun or enjoyable, you just get an objective marker and sprint towards it. Most of the time its just shit like "run inside this enemy encampment and hit a switch"

Other times its just "run here and steal this vechile and bring it back"   "rescue the prisoner"   "run here and kill these guys"  "defend our position from bad guys"   its very very boring. The game is boring.

Like I said, the first impression is pretty good. It has kind of awesome graphics and the guns seem fun to use at a glance. The open world at first seems like a cool idea. But then you actually get into the game and find out its designed by a bunch of fucking monkeys who cant figure out what the word 'fun' means. The saddest part of all, is that the first Homefront game is a pile of shit, but its not a tedious grueling slog to get through. Homefront: The Revolution however? it might actually be worst than the first game. purely for the fact that its actually so boring and so annoying and so badly designed that its tedious as hell to get through. Luckily I finished it in four, two hour sessions. But some of those moments where im just staring up towards the sky/rooftops while being chased by endless swarms of enemies and wondering "ok how the fuck do I get up there?"  for 15 minutes straight, those memories wont leave my head anytime soon. That is all I will think of when i think of this game.

5/10

Battlefield: Hardline

  

Battlefield Hardline is a bit different from other battlefield campaigns because usually you're a war soldier going through huge open fields, but in hardline you start out as a typical police officier going about routines taking on petty criminals  drug dealers and things like that.

Well early on in the campagin you spend a lot of time in cutscenes, following around a NPC, listening to dialogue, and not really doing much playing. For atleast half the game is like this. You are being handheld by NPC's and not really making much choices yourself. Then about halfway through you stop being a typical good cop and are more a convict on the run. At this point it kind of opens up and you stop being handheld and you get into way more open ended combat segments which is a lot more fun.

The campaign has a mechanics such as the ability to sneak up on enemies and hit a button to freeze them and then arrest them. This makes sense for the first half of the campaign when you're a cop, but on the second half when youre basically a run away criminal , you can still do this. Which didnt make sense to me, but its still kind of fun. But the animation gets old fast.

Another mechanic in the campaign is experience/scoring. Almost everything you do gives you experience, which then unlocks new attachments and weapons you can use at any point. It reminds me of games like Rainbow six Vegas where there are equipment boxes scattered around and you can swap between your entire loadout including attachments, med kits, and stuff like that. I found this part pretty fun to explore all the different options and weapons, opposed to the typical just picking up random guns off bodies.

There are three difficulties you can choose from, and its highly suggested in the menu that you choose the hardest one. So I did that one. And for the most part, it was a well rounded challenge. But there are other sections which can get pretty frustrating. Similar to all contemporary FPS games, you can hit a button to pull out a camera scanner and 'tag' everything in the enviorment (far cry, among other games)  so this is a big deal you have to do.  Because the worst threat of the entire campaign is Alarms.  Before you bother shooting anyone, you have to constantly look around and make sure theres no alarms. And if there is, you have to sneak up to the box and disable it. Or else clearing an area becomes near impossible.

So that brings me to the stealth mechanic.  It's pretty decent and fun to engage with, but with this in mind its almost like you're forced to use stealth.  If you try to always engage with every situation guns blazing it wont work. Because of the alarms, and because you die in 3 bullets. Yes, it is very unforgiving on how much damage you can take. You are extremely fragile and even being caught off guard for a second means your death.  There is regenerating health, but its extremely slow. There are ways to mitigate this, such as throwing med kits on the ground to speed up the recovery,  or sticking near your NPC team mates which sometimes can heal you faster.

There a few moments in the campaign where it spawns you in areas where you're tottally surrounded by enemies / turret machine gun fire and it just says 'Survive'  and before you can even get a chance to react, you're already dead. These points are pretty annoying and I found myself wishing I didnt choose the hardest difficulty, but after crawling around and finding a spot where they cant hit me it was finally over.

The story and characters are nothing special, but its a servicable 'good cop gone rogue' plot. It works in an episodic format which makes it feel like a TV Show, which modern games just love to do.  it makes for decent pacing, because there a clear beginning and end points to every session. The campaign is also very short, and I finished it only three 2 hour sessions. 

The last level is pretty funny because if you sent someone gameplay of it, they would probably think its Far Cry.  its just some tropical island where you go around tagging people and eliminating outposts. almost exact same mechanics and setting. lol

Its a tripple A shooter, so the graphical effects, sound, and gunplay feel very developed and polished. At times the enemy health is rediculous though. I'm going around using a high powered rifle, the enemies are wearing shorts and a t shirt, and I have to shoot them 3-4 times in the chest to kill them. While they can kill me in 2 shots sometimes. I found that pretty rediculous. So for the most part I just went around with a single shot rifle and a scope trying to get headshots. Theres a satisfying hitmarker everytime you shoot the enemies so that was fun to try to get headshots with.

So the pros are:

-Highly developed graphics/combat

-Interesting unlock system and open ended equipment choices

- Many ways to tackle situations and the same fight can develop in different ways
-Decent story which feels like a tv show via episodic format


Some cons:

- Too cinematic at times, the pacing can be boring where youre sitting around for minutes on end listening to dialogue/following NPC

- Half of the campaign you barely do anything, just handheld by the same NPC for levels on end. Basically an escort mission, but youre the escort.

-Some of the difficulty feels unbalanced or just bullshit

- Generic gameplay that dozens of other games have done 

-Some of the driving sections are boring where its pseudo open world and you have to drive back and forth to locations. The actual driving feels fine, but driving around without anything happening kinda lame


7/10