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