Sniper: Ghost Warrior Preview

11 Jun 2010 at 10:47:25 by Tim McDonald

There is, one assumes, an awesome sense of power that comes with being an ace sniper. You have the power of life or death over anything that enters your crosshairs, at a much greater range than most mere mortals can conceivably fire back. Whether a soldier lives another day to return to his family, or dies a senseless death on an insignificant stretch of muddy beach, depends solely on your whim. Is it any wonder sniping tends to be one of the most popular occupations in online shooters?

Ignoring the reality of the situation – windage, bullet drop, spin drift, and a whole lot more – it's not a surprise that there are games focusing almost exclusively on sniping. Rather, it's a surprise that there aren't more games focusing on this. Excluding Rebellion's surprisingly excellent Enemy at the Gates-'em-up Sniper Elite, we're hard-pressed to think of anything else with that level of devotion to long-distance murder.

With Sniper: Ghost Warrior, City Interactive looks to be trying to fill that particular niche. As a member of an elite sniper team sent into the fictional Latin American paradise of Isla Trueno, your job is to assassinate the despotic General Vasquez, who has enacted a bloody coup d'etat. Everything goes predictably tits up, and you and your team scramble to fix the situation that arises from the botched assassination.

Depending on your mission, you might be forced into a stealthy approach, or you might be given free rein. In this context, enforced stealth isn't actually a bad thing – you're a sniper in a Ghillie suit, and the pseudo-invisibility this allows, combined with a meter that rises when you're in danger of being spotted, keeps frustration to a minimum. Obviously, though, it's the occasions when you can drop everyone in a four mile radius where you'll have the most fun.

Your sniping here is affected by everything, from breathing and heart rate through windage and distance, but this is mitigated by a number of factors. Clicking the left stick in controls your character's breathing, which stabilises the crosshairs, tints the colours to make foes stand out, and drops everything into slow-motion. On the difficulty we were playing on, lining up a shot also caused a red circle to appear, showing where the shot will actually land based on the environmental factors. While this takes bullet drop into account, though, it doesn't make things too easy – you still need to account for distance on moving targets, as someone sprinting to one side will likely be out of the path of the bullet by the time it reaches where they were a half-second ago. Happily, a bullet-cam will pop up when you nail that perfect shot, following the path of the bullet as it arcs towards your foe's head and turns them into a spinning ragdoll corpse. There is a tremendous sense of satisfaction in this.

Trying to combine this with stealth creates something that plays out a bit like Pyro Studios classic Commandos. If you want to avoid getting shot, clearing out an enemy camp involves picking out both the perfect target and the perfect timing. Take out someone who's having a conversation, or who's standing in the middle of a camp, and you'll quickly attract unwanted attention. Being careful is the order of the day, although your sniper rifle is combined with a variety of other tools including a silenced pistol and throwing knives. We're promised the ability to set traps and defensive perimeters with high-explosive goodies like Claymores, too, although this isn't something we got to see first hand.

On other occasions, you'll be taking the role of a Delta Force operative, and these sections run more akin to the standard FPS run-and-gun. From what we've seen there really isn't much spectacular about these sections – they're serviceable, certainly, but that's about it. Still, we're eager to see what's going to happen when tools like C4 become available.

That said, the Delta Force operative did partake in the highlight of our preview experience. Having spent a mission sneaking our sniper through a heavily-defended enemy camp and up to a vantage point, we were tasked with taking down the enemy's own snipers in the village below. This accomplished, we went back in time ten seconds or so to the Delta team arriving on the pier, and witnessed our actions taking out the snipers from a different perspective. From there, we cut through the village, gunning down everyone in our path (and a few chickens), before swapping back to the sniper to cover Delta's escape from the reinforcements pouring into the village. Seeing your actions from different perspectives is a very, very cool thing, as is essentially running a complete operation every angle.

So, what's next? Based on this early code, the sniping is most definitely there, and judging from the early setpieces we've seen there are likely to be some grin-inducing moments. We're not entirely convinced by the Delta sections, but considering how satisfying the sniping is, we're not ready to shoot Sniper: Ghost Warrior down just yet.

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