Sniper: Ghost Warrior (PS3)
A while back I took a look at the first Sniper Elite game, and while that game had good intentions in mixing realistic sniping with the thrill of being a one man army picking off foes from a far, it also hit some snags as it couldn’t fully commit to the concept and didn’t always build levels around its concept properly. However, as the Sniper Elite series continued on, a second series based around sniping started to gain ground, and after a humble start with Sniper: Art of Victory, developer City Interactive would start to grab wider attention with the title that would grant their sniping franchise its name: Sniper: Ghost Warrior.
Sniper: Ghost Warrior is a first-person military shooter with almost an exclusive focus on the use of sniper rifles for both the completion of its single player campaigns and its multiplayer competitive battles. As such the sniping really needed to be handled well and it actually manages to find a fairly strong balance of incorporating many of the real world variables and considerations a sniper would need to make without being unapproachable to novices. When bringing up your sniper scope you need to consider a few factors before firing at your target as the middle of your crosshairs is rarely where your bullet will land. Managing your breathing is one of the most important as it determines how steady your shot will be, the player able to slow things down and focus by holding their breath. This window isn’t too long and your heartbeat and breathing will rise to the point any shots taken immediately after utilizing this helpful feature will definitely be wilder and less likely to hit, but you can also adjust your position like crouching or laying down to help you even out more quickly and line up your next shot.
Depending on how far away your target is, you’ll also need to account for other factors like the flight distance and how that might lead to gravity dragging your bullet down. Flight time is also important to consider when working with moving targets, and even the wind can prove to be a factor in some areas. This might sound like a lot to accommodate into every shot you take, but there is also a helpful red dot that will appear in your crosshairs after you’ve been lingering your scope on a target for a bit. This won’t always appear due to other factors and it’s not perfect since it won’t account for flight time, but this red dot shows you what the expected trajectory of a shot taken at that moment would be, this allowing the player to achieve a greater general level of accuracy without being so prominent and simplistic that it undermines the player’s role in setting up and landing the right shots. Even with that red dot to help it is immensely satisfying to see the bullet cam activate after you take a shot, the slow motion scene following the bullet until it makes contact with its target in a bloody display.
Hard mode and the challenge missions will take away the red dot assistance for players who believe they’ve got a handle on the game’s mechanics, but it definitely feels like a normal run would be best first to acclimate to the way the game influences your bullet as it flies. Hard mode can also crank up enemy awareness and other factors a little too much in its chase of being more difficult, but playing the game normally is able to have plenty of engaging sniper missions where it feels like you need to be careful with your shots without it being overly limiting. Enemies will be on alert if they notice a fellow soldier is shot down, they have a decent sense in picking out where a bullet came from, their ability to detect your movements is reasonable without undermining your efforts to move from perch to perch or crawl through foliage cover, and while you can get healing items, being spotted can quickly become lethal if you don’t take care of the opposition quickly or finding a hiding spot.
This balance between your own power and the enemy’s seems to help Sniper: Ghost Warrior land in a spot where it can have the thrilling sensation of picking off unaware enemies from afar with careful planning and stealthy navigation of the area while also leaning into an action fantasy at times. You aren’t doomed if your position is given away but you’re also not going to be able to fight off incoming enemies by rushing in guns blazing. Besides your sniper rifles you mostly just have your silenced pistol as a back-up for quicker shooting anyway, this not as likely to kill in one shot as the stronger but slower rifles but it is perfect for the sections where you need to sneak through enemy camps or make your way to a perch. Your regular sniping options can sometimes be noisy affairs you need to account for, even sometimes firing in time with the rumble of passing vehicles or needing to make sure you’re properly isolated so you don’t alert guards with the crack of your gunshot. The silenced pistol allows for missions where you slink around enemy encampments in search of the next spot it’s safe to snipe from, the weapon just effective enough that the ghost warrior part of your journey can be tense without being overly difficult.
Beyond the sneaking sections, Sniper: Ghost Warrior also concocts a lot of missions for its single player campaign that reimagine how a sniping mission can unfold. For the most part you’ll be playing as Sergeant Tyler Wells as he works with various branches of the U.S. military and local militia groups to help track down his main target. General Vasquez took over the fictional island of Isla Trueno via military coup and is in the process of making his military dictatorship a more potent threat when Wells and his team are sent in, but the process of hunting down him and his associates leads to an impressively varied spread of mission types. At its highest points Sniper: Ghost Warrior creates large open areas with plenty of troops you can snipe from various vantage points and the need to traverse carefully so you aren’t shot from an unexpected angle yourself, the player needing to carefully consider when to move forward and how to make their way through these large environments to best avoid unnecessary trouble. The map assists in navigating them without confusion as well, adding enemies to the radar only when they’ve revealed their position while also having a meter at the bottom to tell you if you’re starting to give yourself away so you can gauge how noisy your movements might be.
Some missions though will have you in a set perch, the player needing to pick off targets properly to assist in a greater mission. Sniper: Ghost Warrior does a surprisingly good job of making Tyler Wells feel like an important member of a larger team even though his rifle can easily pick off most foes with a single well placed shot. Some missions have a fire team on the ground who needs coverage, the player unable to complete the objective but key to taking out the soldiers who stand in the way of your allies. Other missions might have you work for a spotter who tells you where enemies are and when it’s safe to take the shot, and there are actually chances to play as that spotter yourself and indicate to Wells when to fire and who to target to avoid raising suspicion.
Even as the game explores its environmental variety with the player traveling across the tropical island, the ruins, villages, military installations, and industrialized areas don’t forget they’re meant to be home to sniping missions first and foremost. While you may need to sneak through some tight quarters with your pistol from time to time, the troops there are few and it’s mostly as a transitory section before you arrive at the more open areas. There are interior locations, but these small buildings often just hold provisions or enemy intel that you can quickly swipe and leave without encountering any close range resistance. Sniper: Ghost Warrior is for the most part playing to its strengths, and it even concocts unique ideas for how you can snipe like doing so aboard a moving boat. Certain areas will even feature wildlife to throw you off, movement being a helpful tool for spotting well-hidden enemies but a bird, cow, or gator potentially getting you to react impulsively in an attempt to snag a soldier only to give yourself away by shooting a pointless target. A few ideas are perhaps too clever for their own good like one where you hide inside a boarded up perch where you can only poke your scope through small gaps in the wood, this mission mostly held back by the fact it makes it hard to determine where you’re meant to be looking to help your allies on the ground, but for the most part you’ll be interacting with nifty ideas for how to twist the sniping into something fresh yet not too outrageous.
There are definitely some segments that lean hard into outright action though. There are mounted guns in some areas you can grab and fire, but the kickback is so great that they’re only really good for clearing out a group of soldiers who already know you’re there since precision is practically impossible with them. You get grenades fairly often even though you’ll only want to use them on heavily isolated foes or in dire straits, and there’s even a segment where you’re mounting the back turret for a vehicle as it drives through enemy territory. These less calculated portions and less subtle weapon options are spread out or limited properly so they’re more interesting for their rarity, but the segments where you just need to run after your cover is blown for plot reasons are certainly rather simplistic injections of action in a game that already intertwines it well enough into the sniping by making it quick and accessible enough without the need to be so overtly high octane.
The multiplayer manages to balance its sniping action well without being too prone to people hunkering down and waiting for their shots. This is mostly due to the designs of the maps available, the game taking some of its best constructed single player locations and turning them into areas that are limited in how wide they are but have a lot of cover and areas you can climb up to so that you never know where enemy snipers might be hanging out. Large open spaces in the middle are used for good effect in Capture the Flag where the flags are brazenly sitting in spots everyone can see and the shortest path to claiming them for your team would be running out in the open, but that puts you in the crosshairs of any player eying the center of the map. A helpful indicator also appears when taking damage to inform you of where the shot came from so no hiding spot is permanently safe for the opposition, the point focused game modes able to progress at a pretty good speed despite the expected pace of a sniper duel.
Admittedly, for how much it gets right, Sniper: Ghost Warrior does not do a great job at hiding some of its rougher edges. The extra campaign Unfinished Business where you track down Vasquez’s son has plenty of enjoyable level concepts including a greater focus on sniper duels with AI opponents, but it definitely has more present issues with enemies detecting you even when they logically shouldn’t such as a section where you’re meant to snipe men sitting around the campfire but the expected positions for doing so raise alarms while the functional hiding spots are a bit inexplicable in their effectiveness. These men don’t react properly to the sight of their allies dying in a level where otherwise troops would normally raise the alarm if they realize something is up, making the process of figuring out what to do at this portion grueling.
That optional mode is definitely the less well put together part of the game, but the main campaign has a few hiccups as well. Crawling and crouch walking has problems in general, some inclines too steep or ledges a little too high so you have to quickly stand up to hop up them, this process usually easy enough to do subtly but an unnecessary annoyance. Enemy spawning isn’t always handled logically, foes never appearing out of thin air where you can see it happen but it’s quite clear they’re just being spawned in despite the player clearing the area and no obvious points of entry being available to that soldier. There are plenty of small huts that could have just been closed until the game wanted more enemies to spawn in, but one of the few areas where this negatively impacts the game is a mission where you are meant to snipe from atop a cliff face and moving forward too far triggers soldiers to appear behind you, often killing you before you can even realize where their shots came from. The game’s ending is also surprisingly sudden, the lack of a denouement perhaps appropriate for a military operation but still feeling clipped short rather than a more palatable fade out. None of these programming issues or odd design decisions destroy the experience, but it definitely is a tangible part of play that can interfere with otherwise enjoyable mission structures and area designs.
THE VERDICT: The sniping mechanics at play in Sniper: Ghost Warrior do a good job incorporating plenty of true-to-life variables without sacrificing accessibility. Lining up consistently well placed shots and surviving still requires skill but the game gives you tools to make the fantasy of an incredibly efficient marksman a bit easier to achieve. Levels and mission types are often well designed hosts for this style of play while mixing up how the mission unfolds as well, your sniper often feeling like they’re truly part of a military unit as he provides covering fire or otherwise works with his team in diverse locations. You’ll definitely hit on some rough spots when it comes to the technical design of the experience that are a bit too blatant to entirely overlook, but when Sniper: Ghost Warrior is working well, it hits a lot of the shots it attempts to take.
And so, I give Sniper: Ghost Warrior for PlayStation 3…
A GOOD rating. Coming out almost a year after the PC and Xbox 360 versions definitely gave this version of the first Sniper: Ghost Warrior game to iron out certain issues, but even for all the little slip ups or conceptual flubs that crop up, Sniper: Ghost Warrior pulls through thanks to how it handles the most important aspects of the play experience. Crawling might need some work in spots, but getting around a map can still be an exciting experience even when you need to move slow as you try to get into the mindset of a soldier sneaking through enemy territory to that one spot where he can do the most damage. Enemies may spawn in oddly in parts, but the mission and map design are often so strong it’s easy to forgive as it rarely leads to the kind of ambushes seen in that one cliff side mission. The action can serve as brief bursts of adrenaline without undermining the game’s otherwise well realized focus on the careful maneuvering and planned shots of a stealthy sniper, and clearing out an area efficiently is a satisfying experience because it’s never too easy nor too difficult in the normal modes. Harder options do crank things up a bit too much and lead to frustration a bit too often, but the fantasy of being such an effective marksman is often tempered just enough with the realistic elements in the more reasonable modes while also ensuring multiplayer is able to stay active and competitive too.
Sniper: Ghost Warrior and Sniper Elite both went on to get many sequels that continued to hone their mechanics and explore how missions and multiplayer could be constructed, but Sniper: Ghost Warrior is definitely the more appealing starting point as it rarely pushes the player into spots where they feel like they aren’t equipped for the task at hand. It even handles its devotion to sniping better and cooks up more unique area and mission concepts, but this could always be because it’s technically the second in its series after the easily overlooked Sniper: Art of Victory. Regardless of how you weigh this game up against Namco’s take on a military sniping experience though, Sniper: Ghost Warrior hits a lot of the right marks to be an enjoyable early attempt at the same concept.