Sniper: Ghost Warrior 3 has one thing going for it. The world isn’t engaging, the characters are lackluster, the story is cookie cutter, but you have a rifle, and an uncanny ability to shoot people in the face from very far away. And that is what you do. Start a mission, mark targets, and snipe people. Wash, rinse, and repeat. It isn’t a bad system so much as it is a well-trodden and forgettable one, but luckily the novelty of shooting people in the face with high-powered rifles from hundreds of meters away lasted a while for me.

You play as American Marine Jon North, who, besides being one of the generic shooter protagonists that I’ve ever seen, is in the war-torn country of Georgia. After a short tutorial mission, your brother is captured and you have to save him. The game tries to tug at your heartstrings by peppering in flashbacks of the two of you bonding over hunting rifles and sniping, but predictably, they fall flat. Joining you on your mission are your standard cavalcade of common characters, including a fiery love interest who you’ve scorned before, even though you were totally gonna ask her to marry you. Which reads like the plotline to a bad daytime drama, and it feels like it in action.

The open-world adds an interesting new element to the sniping gameplay, but there was still usually a “right” way to attack a target, indicated by preset sniping spots that you can see via your detective vision. Outside of the main mission, the world feels painfully generic. There is your standard array of open world tasks, like fast travel points to uncover, wanted targets to hunt down and kill, outposts to clear of enemies, and lots of shiny collectibles to find.

The gameplay loop lays itself bare rather early. Mark targets with your drone, then take out people with your suppressed rifle. Move in and clear out the stragglers. Repeat ad infinitum. It plays like every other open world title that I’ve played in the last year or two, and it gets old quickly. They try to balance it out by making suppressors a finite resource that depletes (think Metal Gear Solid 5), but they are so cheap and easy to repair, so I was never in a situation where I was without one.

The equipment of the game raises a lot of questions. Why was a .308 caliber rifle more powerful than a .338, a much more powerful and longer range cartridge? Why could you suppress an old AK that you pick up off of the ground but not the high-tech AR-15 that you drop in with? Why can’t you carry a bunch of extra suppressors? Why do you have to pay for your guns?

The game doesn’t make a lot of sense, but on occasion it was a good time. Watching a .50 caliber shell arc over 500 yards to hit a sniper in the head just felt good, even if these moments were few and far between. It’s average in almost every way, but that is ok every now and again.

2.5/5

Review written for the Xbox One version of the game. Your experience may vary on different platforms.

The title was provided to us free of charge by the publisher.

Our review code can be found here for information on how we write and score our reviews. If you have any questions, comments, suggestions, or concerns, please contact us at contact@deathofthecritic.com

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Tags: First Person Shooters, Sniper, Open World Games