

In one particularly eerie moment, I killed two guards and they continued speaking, even as their angular polygonal corpses juddered halfway into the floor. Use the grapple hook and you walk out into space on an invisible bridge, then slowly clamber down through an atmosphere of treacle, as your poor virtual arms flail in front of you, trying to work out where they belong in a world where gravity makes no sense.Įnemies are subject to the same weird forces. Climb up a ladder and your feet pinwheel as you run, vertically, up the rungs without touching them. The frame rate is terrible, the game freezes just before any dialogue or autosave, and objects float in the air or lodge in the ground with clockwork regularity. Quick! You can earn bonus points for shooting Swamp Thing in the arse! The Chrome 4 engine wheezes and sputters as it tries to generate something even broadly comparable to the genre's base requirements, and the result is a parade of near constant quirks and glitches that obliterate all realism and immersion.
#Sniper ghost warrior 1 review code#
Like pretty much everything else from City Interactive's budget code factory, Sniper Ghost Warrior is a technical horror show. But, at that point, you're neither sniper nor ghost and the game is squarely in Modern Warfare 2 territory, where its low-budget limitations prove impossible to ignore. As you single-handedly sweep and clear another enemy stronghold, you can always switch to your backup pistol, lob grenades or ditch your sniper rifle and swap it for a machine gun. Several times, Sniper Ghost Warrior dangles the prospect of serious sniper play, then snatches it away and replaces it with yet more mindless firefights where you're stuck using the wrong tool for the job. Presumably the title was created using a random Tom Clancy codename generator.

For the bulk of the game you're stuck, on your own, in a jungle, and must advance through linear villages and camps, blasting away at the enemy.

So, yes, this is ultimately just another corridor FPS, albeit one where you're stuck using a sniper rifle, even in situations where it makes no sense.Īfter a reasonably promising opening in which you're teamed up with a spotter who talks you through a covert assassination, things rapidly devolve back to genre basics. Unfortunately, Sniper Ghost Warrior has no interest in making the required effort to deliver such difficult ideas. In a gaming environment riddled with bullet-blasting bombast, the prospect of a shooter where patience and concentration pay dividends is enticing. There's undoubtedly room in the first-person shooter genre for a sniper-based game, provided the game in question tailors its challenges to the unique aspects of long-distance, "one shot, one kill" combat. Shame, then, that Sniper Ghost Warrior squanders that thrill so horribly. It's probably best not to dwell too long on why shooting someone in the head from far away feels so satisfying, but there's an undeniable feeling of control and power that comes from the perfect headshot that is downright intoxicating. Both tap into some primal thrill mechanism, leapfrogging our critical thinking and making us have fun whether we want to admit it or not. Sniper Ghost Warrior Contracts introduces a good new gameplay structure, only to waste it with lots of bugs, a lackluster enemy AI and quite bad graphics.Sniping is a lot like driving a car off a ramp.

When you think of all the content you get for that price however, Sniper Ghost Warrior Contracts just may be on your radar.ĭespite remaining true to the essence of the franchise, Sniper Ghost Warrior Contracts has no elements to highlight in the FPS scene and may represent an option that attracts the attention of the public that remains true to this CI Games proposal, but nothing more. With a lackluster story mode that means relatively nothing, some graphics that are good but not great, an army of glitches at its disposal and no bullet X-Ray kill cam, this game is far from perfect, and at $40 maybe even a bit overpriced. Sniper Ghost Warrior Contracts offers a lot in a surprisingly small package, however, with all the glitches and errors, there is just some guilty pleasure I get when I drop a sniper from 500m+.
