Sniper Ghost Warrior 3 - Review

Sniper Ghost Warrior 3 is developed and published by CI Games and is the third game of the Ghost Warrior series.

Story

Sniper Ghost Warrior 3 is a new form of the Ghost Warrior franchise, implementing an open-world shooter instead of fixed routes and areas.

We play as Jon North, an elite sniper soldier who has amassed a good amount of deeds making him highly efficient at any given mission. During one mission, Jon was paired with his beloved brother to accomplish a reconnaissance when they were ambushed by the enemy. Suspicions arise that traitors are within the higher ranks.

After these events, we found ourselves in a nearby region, where separatists and citizens are at war with each other with the separatists trying to win over control of the land.

This region is where we are searching for traces after our younger brother Robert who was kidnapped by an unknown organization during the previous ambush.

After a few missions on the field, we find the first traces of our brother, and thoughts about the news is not positive. Robert is now on the other side seemingly brainwashed with a new identity and is now working for 23S, a heavily modern, superhuman gen manipulated war organization. We stand in front of him at a loss of what to do, how to win him back over, all while he is trying to get us to join him. Future is in a deep crisis for Jon.

Gameplay

The gameplay presents itself within a neat world where we take the role of a Ghost Sniper warrior. Our mission is mostly simple. Snipe down targets, infiltrate camps and bases, and kill key targets and wanted individuals.

Sidequests allow us to unlock secondary missions and has points of interest located everywhere to search for clues, events, treasures, and collectible items.

We oversee 3 different regions, in each of them we have our base of operation and a place to eat, sleep, etc... in rather wishful areas. Additionally, we have enemy camps throughout the regions, working partially as roadblocks to control over the land in its entity.

Enemy shooters, snipers, mortars, and even mines await us if we have to infiltrate these camps.

The weapon arsenal is huge, having a good amount of sniper rifles, customizable goods, secondary assault weapons, pistols, all kinds of grenades and explosives, and the second most important tool for a sniper, a drone, a must-have for reconnaissance and tagging enemies.

One thing to note is that Sniper Ghost Warrior is set up as a sniper game, but some of the mechanics work against this idea of a sniper game. We are presented with restricted and limited sniper capacities, especially in the distance. They remove the enemy sight after a certain distance causing you to move in closer versus taking a longer shot as you would expect from a sniper.

Visuals & Characters

The overall graphic of the map is nice. We have a high variety of fields, be it green mountains, snowy mountains, villages, or plains, you will see a good variety of environments.

The physics and character sprites are okay but lack the quality that you expect to find in a modern game. Their faces seem a bit bland up close and character movements are not always convincing.

The effects on explosions, lights, and weapons are done well, with the exception of the mortar firing effects which are very underwhelming when taking in account how much damage they cause.

There are no environment damage effects from shooting trees or throwing grenades. This is rather disappointing considering the good engine of the game.

One of the most disappointing parts of the game would be the bad AI for the non-playable characters (NPCs). If you shoot at the NPCs, they will take cover and begin to hide. However, after a short period of time if they are not attacked, their threat level will return to neutral and will begin walking around again even if other dead NPC bodies are still on the ground near them. I would have preferred to see them begin to investigate the surroundings instead of simply hiding and eventually "resetting" to their original positions and alert status.

Music and sound effects

We have pretty good Georgian style music on the title menu and also while loading into the game. However, once you get into the game, there is very little music, only an option to activate the radio while driving a car.

Although the selection of music is slim, the sound effects throughout the game are great, from the various weapons when you fire and reload, to the vehicles you drive, to the larger explosions, all sounding very good.

Routes & Achievements:

We do not have any possible routes to choose from that would effect the story outcome, but thanks to the side quests, we can see slight gameplay experience differences by winning ingame benefits and receiving help from partisans and local civilians.

There are 48 steam achievements in total.

Overall Thoughts

Though Sniper Ghost Warrior is a big title, Sniper Ghost Warrior 3 still manages to bring in a lot of positive changes and additions to the series. Unfortunately it has just as many negative issues that prevent the game from being great.

I do appreciate a good bit of the improvements such as exploring the open-world and seeing the variety of environments throughout. The campaign was a big improvement with its main missions, side missions, and the customization of the weapons, this was really good progress in my eyes.

While the improvements were very welcomed, the terrain was still lacking some fine-tuning. I also got stuck in a lot of places, be it rocks, grounds, objects, or even mountains with the only way to get free, being to restart at the last checkpoint or restart the mission entirely.

They could have done a lot more with the option to clear points of interests. There is very little benefit or value for clearing these, they just felt tiresome. The only exception being the civilian and rescue missions which were fun and rewarding.

I have mixed feelings about Sniper Ghost Warrior 3. Taking in account of the enjoyable plot, improved missions, and the open world, I want to recommend it to others. However, the dumb AI, number of bugs, and overall unattractiveness of the visuals pushes this off my list of must-play shooter games.

The game is available at: Steam

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