Feeling and looking more like the lone refugee from a circa-1990s discount bin, this highly flawed Polish import is so wrong in so many ways that it really can't be recommended to anyone, despite its discounted price point. The story goes like this: You take the role of a Soviet marksman shot down behind enemy lines during World War II. Your goal is to use your smarts and your sniping expertise to make your way back through a gaggle of headhunting Nazis to the nearest Allied unit.
This scenario, as utterly dull as it is, is soon lost in a raging sea of
disappointing graphics, ridiculous artificial intelligence, and woeful
shooting mechanics. In Sniper, you can walk up to an enemy soldier,
shoot him in the face, and somehow miss your target. You can spot a Nazi
through a window, set up your shot, then watch helplessly as your
bullet fails to penetrate said window. You can take pot shots all over
the place, making a ton of noise in the process and whizzing hot lead
past the eyeballs of the bad guys, only to only to have them continue on
their merry way, unaware of anything at all.
Perhaps most annoyingly, you can stealthily advance though a given
mission, sneaking about and watching your every move and taking out the
enemies you're somehow able to spot behind all the scenery and the fog,
but then fall immediately dead, the victim of a single blast from an
unseen source. Grr.
Sniping is, not surprisingly, the game's key element. It's played up in a
big way, with a "Snipe mode" that zooms your perspective and offers all
manner of gauges and displays and effects that take into account real
life factors such as wind direction and resistance, target distance, and
even your own heartbeat. Indeed, the screen itself appears to move
about as you breathe, which necessitates that you hit a key to hold your
breath when you shoot. It all looks and seems pretty cool actually, but
when you completely miss your target on the first shot then hit it on a
second shot aimed in precisely the same spot, you can't help but feel a
bit cynical about the whole thing.
But a sniper rifle isn't the only weapon at your disposal. You'll also
pack a Luger and a knife when you begin, and you'll have a chance to
grab other guns and even grenades as you stroll about. Sadly, our
experience with the alternate weapons, in particular the Luger, proved
to be a wholesale disappointment.
For starters, the game loses most of its already slim fun quotient when
the sniping element and sniping interface have been removed. It's not a
pretty game by today's standards, it doesn't sound particularly
thrilling, and the missions are nauseatingly repetitive. But the worst
part of all is that the Luger offers such brutal accuracy that you'd
swear it's broken.
As we just alluded, Sniper is darn near ugly. Its palette is drab and
lifeless, its animations are rudimentary (we watched one soldier move
back and forth, back and forth, like one of those metal animals at a
circus shooting gallery), and its pixels are big and prominent. And
honestly, what soldier worth his salt will float in mid-air after he
dies?
It does load and unload very quickly and it is stable. For that we give thanks.
Things are slightly better from an audio perspective. Although the voice
acting, of which there is little, is stiff and totally unconvincing,
the game regales you with thoughtful details such as the whoosh of the
wind, the crunch of your footsteps, and the sound of your own breathing.
You'll also hear so many twittering birds that you may think you're
playing the latest in the Tiger Woods PGA series.
The gameplay as a whole is little more than a series of generally
unimaginative, dead linear missions that completely fail to captivate or
compel you to drive forward. Some variety is offered in the fact that
you can jump to the far more Veteran level after you've completed the
comparatively easy Recruit level, though the number of your sudden
deaths will only incrementally increase once you're there. A multiplayer
mode would likely have added a little more intrigue if just so you
could bitch to your buddies about the awfulness of the game, but none
can be found.
