Sniper : Ghost Warrior

I’ve recently ordered a bunch of stuff from Amazon.  Somehow, my order got exploded into four or five packages, each shipped separate.  Yesterday, the first one arrived, with the PS3 version of the “Sniper : Ghost Warrior” game.  I would have never discovered this game if it wasn’t for a colleague of mine.  The game didn’t have a lot of promotion.  User reviews mostly call it average and mediocre.  But I bought it anyway.

Why?  Because I am a huge sniping fan.  Sniping is an art. Snipers are gods of war.  Sniping is the best part of the modern warfare (not the game).  Frankly, I can’t understand why most people aren’t fascinated by that.  To me, all those weapons of mass destruction are sloppy. Remotely controlled weapons are just cool gadgets.  All of them miss the point.  Sniper is human.  Sniper is very precise. Sniper is scary. Sniper is the essence of war.  Sniper is personal.

In each and every first-person shooter video game that I played, I tried the sniping mode and weapons.  Video game are getting better and better at it, but usually snipers have way too much advantage over other warriors, so game developers have a tendency to cut sniper powers to balance the game.  That’s understandable.  But what about us, people who don’t care about other warriors, who just want snipers, the more the better?

Well, for us, there are special games.  And “Sniper : Ghost Warrior” is one of them.  I didn’t have much time to spend with the game yesterday.  I thought I’d just give it a quick look and leave it until the weekend, when I’ll have more time to properly explore it.  I ended up glued to the screen for more than four hours.  There was no way I could switch it off.  Only when my neck started hurting and eyes crying from all the concentration, I remembered that I had other things to do.

If you are a fan of most modern first-person shooters, you probably won’t think much of the game.  You’ll probably name a few games that have better graphics, physics, game play, and weapons.  You’ll probably get bored quickly with a slow pace compared to most other games.  You’ll probably start hating the video sequences and will skip them fanatically. But.

If you do like sniping, if sniper is your favorite in-game mode, and if there is nothing better to you then use your stealth skills to get to that point where you look through the scope at unsuspecting targets, breath steadily, prepare, and squeeze the trigger, sending death so far that even if the enemies were looking at you they’d see nothing but a tiny spot on the horizon, then, and only then, this game is for you.  It does all the right things for the sniper fans.  There is a variety of missions. There is plenty of stealth.  There are different weapons and scopes.  But the best, the best part of it is when you aim through the scope, hear your own breath, hold it, shoot, and, if you got everything right and it is a head-shot,  you’ll see a beautiful video sequence of your bullet travelling the distance and going through yet another enemy.  Once you do your first head-shot, you won’t be able to stop playing this game.  It’s that good.

The game is not very expensive – I got it off Amazon for less than 20 GBP.  Given that I played for four hours straight yesterday, and I’m not even half through the story, I think it’s a good bargain.  There is also a multi-player mode, which I haven’t even looked at yet.  But even after this brief encounter with the game, I can do nothing but recommend it to all the sniping fans.  It’s plenty of fun and it’s not difficult at all – not like some of those sniping simulation with the calculator and such.  This one is more like the movie where you play the main character. Brilliant stuff!