Sniper: Ghost Warrior for Xbox 360 Reviews by Gamers

i really wish that gamefly would indicate these things. i really like first person sandbox games where i can wonder around doing my own thing with the game's mechanics having a good time of it.

and i'm not a big fan of the story missions in these games that force you to play through maps in very specific ways. i mean i'm even usually annoyed at the opening scenes for some of the sandbox games. they're just a bunch of one off things that are usually just frustrating and i want to just skip it and get into the world so i can start collecting all the fun toys to play with. i got sick of series of maps fps back in the 90s.

the sniping mechanics are mostly fun though. not sure it it opens up more later. might not be what i'm really looking for in a game though. :/

I love me some sniper games, so I was surprised just how disappointed I was with Ghost Warrior. For one thing, every other mission is a straightforward 3rd person shooter, and not a great one.

For another thing, enemy AI is all over the place. You'll find out in the first mission that the enemy's AKs are somehow more accurate at long range than your own sniper rifle. You're a quarter mile away, hundreds of feet above them, lying in cover, cloaked in a ghillie suit, and a half trained militia will be picking you off with assault rifles while you're still scanning for targets.

It'll take you about ten minutes to figure out the myriad problems with the game. In fact, one almost gamebreaking moment comes while you're still playing through the tutorial mission:

You come around a corner and get an alert that enemies are coming and you need to find some cover. You hustle to the nearest tall grass and drop prone, and a few seconds later enemies are riddling you with bullets. I repeated this sequence about six times trying different hiding spots, only to be instantly located and quickly killed each time.

I finally went online and found a walkthrough and figured out that there is one specific bush - which requires you to run across the road in what should be plain view of the enemy you're trying to avoid - and that is the ONLY spot where you will not be discovered. Why? Because the game said so.

The entire game design is like this. You're constantly pulled out of the game by questionable design decisions that make no sense in the context of the game. They couldn't make the AI smart enough to figure out when they could detect you and when they couldn't, so if you're in the magic spot you're invisible, and if you're not - no matter how well concealed - you're toast.

Poor design, terrible AI, and the frequent run & gun missions that are unexpectedly shoehorned in are all deal breakers for me. Not recommended.