Sniper Ghost Warrior is a bold first step into the console market for Warsaw-based City Interactive, a developer/publisher known more for its budget children’s PC titles than for crafting full-size, mature first person shooters. It’s off to a good start, though, licensing Polish neighbour Techland’s Chrome engine (as seen in the Call of Juarez games) to build a verdant island play area that, while it has glaring visual flaws like flickering shadows and weirdly shiny, almost sweating, rocks, is more than fit for task in representing a believable tumultuous banana republic. Sniper Ghost Warrior’s flaws lie elsewhere, however and, unlike its minor visual complaints, are unfortunately rather numerous.

Ooof!

Curiously, though a touted feature of the game was its ‘real world’ sniping concerns – wind speed, gravity etc. - City Interactive has chosen to try and all-but dispense with these hurdles from medium difficulty downwards, providing a handy red dot that does the maths for you. However, the fluctuating wind speed in particular throws off the accuracy anyway, often requiring four shots where you’d like one to suffice. You’ll be cursing within mere minutes, and that’s even before the game’s perpetually muddled mission structure has started to lead you down increasingly blind alleys.

The first mission, for example, contains these headsplitting moments: you’re asked to hide from an oncoming guard patrol. Following the COD-lifted white spot with the metres-to-target countdown, you arrive at some bushes. “Hide in the bushes” your partner advises, before another dot pops up on some nearby shrubbery. So is that the bushes we’re in, or the ones over there? We decided to stay put, and were instantly killed – despite being well concealed – not only highlighting the misinstruction, but also the clearly scripted nature of proceedings.

Next, after a bungled assassination, we were informed to engage the remaining enemy at will. We began to fire down from our cliff face, whereupon around twelve machine gun-equipped enemies began to inexplicably land shots on us from half a mile away, ripping us to shreds as we tried to get a bead on just one of them. It was then that we were advised to take out our grappling hook and rapel down. This would have kept us out of sight, and is clearly what we should have done to begin with.

OOOF!

It’s all just trying too hard to be Call of Duty; marrying setpieces up with dialogue-led objectives is fine, but a technical improficiency in pace, coupled with the game’s desire to lead you all-to often into close up firefights (for which you have only a pistol in your defence) is a mismatched design choice. We’d have been quite happy to be simply plonked into an area and told to get to the other side, capping everybody in our wake, but it just wasn’t to be.

And anyway, even in the quieter, more considered moments, the disappointing enemy AI (failing to notice the chap next to them is dead, running on the spot into walls, and so on) tends to make a mockery of any tactical effort on the part of the player, and that’s saying nothing about the clumsily-placed, 10 minute-apart checkpoints.