Sniper: Ghost Warrior Bringing Ballistics To Bear June 29

Polish publisher/developer City Interactive is taking FPS sniping to another level with Sniper: Ghost Warrior. It may be limited in scope, but wouldn’t you rather play a game that does one thing well than several poorly?

Sniper adds everything from wind to bullet drop and the protagonist’s pulse rate into account in its eponymous activity. It’s like the memorable sniping level from Modern Warfare, but a whole game full of it – minus the cinematic polish of Call of Duty, but plus a stealth system reminiscent of Far Cry. Its South American jungles are drawn by the Chrome engine, which powered the recent Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood. This is no Crysis, but the visuals aren’t so clunky as to diminish the experience.

Outside of a few wreck-shop-with-a-machine-gun missions that exist solely to break up the pacing, you won’t be taking enemies on head-on. You’ll have to use stealth and clever tactics to accomplish your objectives. Just being a good shot isn’t enough, either. We saw one mission go sideways when the player made a beautiful long-range kill on a sentry standing on top of a water tower. His dead body set off every alarm in the level when it tumbled to the ground.

Players have a number of tools beyond a selection of rifles at their disposal. Silenced sidearms are good for interior locations. Throwing knives serve as reusable medium-range stealth kills. Claymores, frag grenades, and C4 add an explosive punch to your arsenal. Even so, you can expect to make most of your kills with your primary weapon.

Sniper is a hardcore experience on its face, but the game’s three difficulty levels ameliorate that to some extent. Easy mode narrows enemy detection ranges, highlights them against their backgrounds, and adds a red dot to your scope that takes wind and bullet drop into account for you. Normal keeps the aim-assist dot, but has smarter enemies that don’t visually pop out. Hard mode is for true snipers: realism is the rule, and a carefully methodical approach to every obstacle is required.

Sniper’s multiplayer keeps all players in the sniper role, and sets them against each other in deathmatch, team deathmatch, and VIP (where you score points based on your time as VIP, but everyone is gunning for you since the only way to get VIP status is to kill the current one) modes. To push players toward conflict rather than camping, everyone always has arrows pointing toward their enemies. I didn’t come away with much of a positive impression of Sniper’s online play, but if the disproportionate number of snipers in every online shooter ever is any indication, there’s an audience for this sort of thing.

It’s nice to see a smaller publisher/developer take on a slice of gameplay that it feels passionate about and can execute on without sacrificing quality. This isn’t going to change the world, but it looks like a solid title that lives in an underserved niche, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

Sniper drops for PC and Xbox 360 on June 29, for $30 and $40 respectively.