The focus here is squarely on dispassionate questions of craft and technique – scouting out guard patrol patterns, finding the right vantage point, adjusting your sights to compensate for a myriad of ambient factors, and waiting for your moment. Sniper Ghost Warrior 3 doesn't appear to be that game, though it's a shade more involved than the average military boomfest.
There's real need for a sniper game that explores this side of what has become an excessively valorised archetype in video game fictions. A soldier on the frontline has the instinct of self-preservation to fall back on, but how do you drum up the requisite bloodlust when your enemy is 1700 metres off and blissfully unaware of your presence? Moreover, to be a sniper means killing people who, much of the time, pose no direct threat.
I can only imagine the long-term psychological effects of living in the shadow of such weapons. These guns are characterised as delicate tools, the preserve of a methodical elite, but while sniping may require subtlety, a sniper rifle is essentially an instrument of terror.įorget neat, decorous holes in foreheads – a 50 calibre rifle can hit a target over a mile away with more force than a point-blank magnum blast, ripping through concrete or body armour to erase limbs and shatter machinery. Sniper rifles are ubiquitous in video games, but I'm not sure a game has ever captured what it means to be a sniper – or to face one. We sent Edwin Evans-Thirwell into the field to see Sniper Ghost Warrior 3 and he came back to us with a report about the good, the bad and the ugly of the game, and thoughts on the loneliness of the long distance killer.
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