Sniper Ghost Warrior 3 ($60, PS4, Xbox One, and PC) will never be mistaken for game of the year. It’s shamelessly derivative, particularly of the Sniper Elite and Far Cry series. The story is terrible even by the standards of video games. The music is so awful the game literally has our hero turn off the radio and complain about it. But all of this fades into the background when you shoot some sucker in the face at 300 yards.
The story is about our hero’s lost brother who is abducted at the end of the tutorial. Two years later, in the former Soviet republic of Georgia, you uncover evidence he’s alive and pursue him. Yeah, that’s it. That’s the story. Which you can, and likely will, gleefully ignore in favor of sneaking up on the game’s generic foes and stabbing them, shooting them from behind with your sidearm, and, of course, finding a perch with your sniper rifle and cleanly blowing their brains out. A good headshot even gets a custom cutscene of the bullet zipping away and going through your enemy’s head with a splat. You can check out the first mission and a few side missions below.
The game’s sniper sim elements, which are particularly tough but rewarding to master on its hardest setting, are really the key draw here. You have to set your elevator, consider drop and wind-speed, and then pull the trigger at just the right time. Or, if you want to screw around, you can blow up barrels enemies are standing next to, set nasty traps for them to blunder into, or just sneak up on them and hit them with a frag grenade while they’re bunched up.
There are some deeper flaws that might be a dealbreaker. The multiplayer has yet to be included with the game and will be uploaded at a later date. The graphics are serviceable when playing, but the cutscenes are a bit too deep in the uncanny valley, paired with some terrible voice acting. It doesn’t do a good job of explaining its systems, so you’ll have to work it out for yourself. And the open world setting, while solidly executed, is really a lateral move for this franchise. It’s nice to be able to plan your attack out from multiple angles, of course, but there was no reason to include trucking around the countryside other than a line of ad copy on the back of the box.
Still, if you’re a backshooting dirtbag like me, the kind of player who picks out a perch to pick off suckers, that’ll all fade in the background. Sniper Ghost Warrior 3 may not be the sniper ace, but if you’re yearning for a new open-world FPS, it’s a good way to enjoy yourself this summer.