Review Sniper: Ghost Warrior 3 | After a couple of delays, Sniper Ghost Warrior 3 finally hits our consoles. Delays a bad sign of things to come? Or does the end result really shine? Let’s zoom in on the game and how it plays.

 THE GOOD

• The sounds in the game are pretty great, shooting, reloading, comms, most of it is spot on and I personally really like the theme song that’s played in the menus.
• Gunplay, at least when it comes to sniper rifles and pistols is well done. Adjusting for distance, seeing your character turn a nob with distance markers when you do, and then lining up your shot adjusting for wind or elevation feels great. It’s not a simulation by any means, but it does give the illusion of some realism involved.
• The game allows for multiple approaches, using sniper rifles from a distance, taking out enemies up close with surprise melee attacks, using an expanding range of equipment including mines or even just avoiding most of them altogether by causing distractions and sneaking around enemy presence.
• The more I played, the better the game seemed to become. On several occasions, I actually felt like I was sneaking around. When trying to infiltrate an enemy base, for instance, I always took my time and used a diverse range of tools and tactics to get the job done.

 MIXED FEELINGS

• While the game isn’t ugly by any means, it also doesn’t look as polished as you could expect from a modern game with a realistic visual style.
• While using an open world is par for the course with most FPS games these days, Sniper Ghost Warrior 3 is not the best implementation of the concept. The world is really empty with hardly any traffic and little to do. Though travelling to your mission start does add a bit of immersion, and some of the points of interests actually are interesting. I suggest you check those out when you play this game.
• The season pass supposedly includes new multiplayer maps in the future. However, at launch, the entire multiplayer feature is nowhere to be found. While I feel the single player is what makes this game worth playing, promising a multiplayer mode and not including it doesn’t sit well with me.
  

THE BAD

• The loading times, when starting the game or transitioning to a new area are incredibly long. It takes several minutes. I clocked the loading screen after selecting “continue campaign” at a little over three and half minutes!
• The storytelling is very cliché, it’s hard not to see the unexpected plot twists coming as if you were scoped in on them from the start. The voice acting performance used to tell the story is a bit inconsistent between characters, ranging from good enough to very mediocre.
• There are some technical issues; some are minor graphical glitches or the “Y” button prompt frequently not showing up when looking at a gun on the ground. However, I’ve also had a couple of crashes, one in a long (and cool) mission. Reloading put me back in a safe house instead of at a checkpoint in that mission.
• When bullet time triggers during a great shot, sounds are vastly amplified making your silenced shot seem like an incredible explosion. This is a strange decision as during really stealthy play it completely breaks the immersion when this gets triggered. Fortunately, it doesn’t make the loud noise in the game world, and the shot will still count as silenced.

Score: 70% | Sniper Ghost Warrior 3 lacks a level of polish that you could expect at this price. You can’t help but notice some issues that really need to patched. However, stopping at that would take away from the enjoyable sniping there is to be found in the game. If you enjoy this genre, Sniper: Ghost Warrior 3 can still offer many hours of single player excitement, as long as you can get past the technical issues.

A multiplayer review will be published when the content is live!

Patrick spent twenty-five hours on the game before writing the review, earning 330 Gamerscore. Thanks to Koch Media for providing the review code.