Customer Reviews
Let's look at the technical side of this game...
As a marksman-in-training, I
will write my review less on the game play and story and more on the
technical stuff. I make no claims at being 100% accurate on the factual
information I provide, but I will do my best. If you want my overall
opinion skip to the bottom. For the rest of you who want to be bored by
my technical babble, read on my friends.
Lets start with the
stuff i found realistic from my experiences.
When looking down a
scope, your field of view (FOV) is usually fairly narrow (it depends on
what scope you have and a myriad of other factors). So when you look
down the scope in Ghost Warrior it does give a fairly realistic FOV.
Although this is frustrating, it does lend itself to the real world
fairly well.
When you squeeze off a shot intended for someone
more than about 100 yards down range, the bullet will drop at a
calculated rate, and the wind will do its best to make your bullet fly
away in the wrong direction. These are very real problems that do
manifest themselves well in GW. In fact, this is why most
snipers/spotters have binoculars- which GW neglects to give you.
I
personally own a rifle that is very similar to the SA-25 so I can say
GW does do it justice. The effective range is roughly 1000 yards. This
means that any shot taken that is less than 1000 yards should be
accurate. While playing GW, the gun is extremely accurate, and in my
opinion does the real world justice.
However, this is really
where the realism starts to taper off... quickly.
The most
frustrating part for me was how much the gun bounces around, even while
prone. While standing, yes it will bounce around a lot, and the game
does a good job of showing you that. However, when you are prone or
crouching the gun sill bounces around at an unrealistic rate. The guns
have bi-pods on the front for just this reason. No its not perfect, but
at least you can get a stable shot off.
Next, as i stated
earlier, the effective range of the SA-25 is roughly 1000 yards. This
means you should be able to be accurate at roughly 1000 yards. The
effective range of an AK-47 is roughly 300 yards (I am being a bit
generous). The longest engagement i can remember was roughly 250 yards.
This means that the enemy will have no trouble shooting back at me with a
great deal of accuracy. As a sniper, this puts you in a bad position.
If you miss, or you are discovered, the enemy can shoot back and kill
you.
I believe this is the fundamental flaw of this game. Almost
every engagement you get into has enemies shooting back at you. If this
game is supposed to give you the experience of being a elite sniper, why
does it force you into a situation that a trained sniper would
intentionally avoid? If i were in the position of needing to take out an
enemy, i would use my own strengths... that is, i would put a lot of
ground in between me and my target... say 500 to 600 yards? And i sure
as hell wouldn't put 100 yards between me and my enemy as this game does
time and time again.
Nevertheless, I think there is a good
reason the game does this. Anyone who has never shot a gun before could
go out to a range and shoot reasonably accurately at 200 yards after
about a day. Shooting at 600 yards is a totally different story. As
there are probably more people out there who cannot shoot at 600 yards
than people who can, the game needs to be tailored to them. So,
annoyingly, your restricted to close-quarters engagements.
OVERALL:
In
the end the game was fairly entertaining. Watching the bullet-cam is
very entertaining (in a sick, twisted way). Sneaking around enemies with
X-Ray vision and telepathic powers is fairly infuriating. Fortunately,
this game does give a nice mix of the two. I just wish it were more of a
real sniper game. Overall, I think its worth the $30 despite the
plethora of AI flaws, game engine annoyances, and game play lapses which
im sure you will read in other people's reviews.
Great fun, but only for dedicated sniper-types
In the face of the onslaught
of negative reviews, I have to go against the grain and state that I'm
totally loving this game. I've been a fan of PC sniper games for years.
They are rare, so I grab every one of them. "Sniper Elite" was great,
but had no first-person option. And there are a few other, lesser
attempts, and a few hard-core games like "ArmA 2' which is a great
sniper game if your system can handle it.
"Ghost Warrior" fits my
playing style perfectly. I like to take my time and set up my shots, so
I do a lot of belly-crawling and sneaking around. Which you will need
to do in this game. I'm currently deep into Mission 8 (about halfway
through the entire game), and have thus far spent almost nine hours
game-time getting there. And I've had a blast. But again, don't play
this if you're even the slightest bit impatient, or this game will kick
your butt. Fortunately, the PC version allows you to save anywhere, and
also Quicksave and Quickload. Quickload takes about one second, so it
really is quick. Graphics look stunning to me, similar to the original
Far Cry. Areas are huge, and provide plenty of various places to snipe
from. There are some invisible walls here and there, but I was actually
quite pleased that a budget title let me go exploring as much as it did.
The ballistics model takes into account bullet-drop, your breathing and
heartrate, and wind. There is a red dot in the scope showing you
exactly where the bullet will land, which makes it easy. But on the hard
difficulty setting, you can play with this red dot turned off. How
accurate the ballistics are, I have no idea, as I'm not an actual
sniper. However, for a game, they are more than accurate enough.
Controls
work extremely well. I mapped 'C' for crouch. So you press your crouch
button to toggle crouch. You hold that same button to toggle prone. It's
very intuitive, and I love that aspect. Zoom defaults to right mouse
button of course. Depending on which rifle you have, there are 3 or 4
levels of zoom, controlled with the mouse wheel. Again, very intuitive.
Left Shift key causes you to hold your breath and slow down time, which
is handy, but makes hitting moving targets quite difficult. There is
also a very nifty bullet-cam if you manage a headshot, but this feature
can be turned off if desired.
AI is a bit too sharp though.
Foliage sometimes works, and sometimes doesn't work for cover. And if
you take out a guy who is near another guy, make sure you're out of the
line-of-sight of the guy you aren't shooting, or he'll be all over you
if he spots you. Once I figured out how to play this game strategically,
I'm having no trouble with the AI however. I actually like it.
Okay,
performance is a bit of an issue. I am experiencing good framerates,
but this game really pushes my GTX260 with everything cranked to the max
and at 1920 x 1200. I'm also running a quad-core Intel, and it seems to
be making use of all 4 cores, according to my monitoring program. I'd
recommend nothing less than an 8800GT, but you'd have to turn a few
things down. Out of curiosity, I installed it also on my older
single-core 3700+ with a 7900GS. It runs in that case, but only with
everything turned down, and set to 1024 x 768.
I've thus far only
run into 2 action sequences, and yes, they both sucked. But the first
only took 15 minutes to get through, and the second about a half hour.
Most of my 9 hours in this game have been blissful sniping, so I can
forgive the game its flaws, however I hope for the next installment,
they strip those COD sequences right out of there. Using a turret-gun
has no place in a sniping game.
Overall, I'm really loving this
game in spite of those few annoyances. Be warned though, this is
definitely a love it or hate it type game. If you still have doubts,
please do more research, or watch a few gameplay videos before you
purchase. Myself, I'm already hoping for a sequel.
Simplistic
Very disappointed. The
graphics are only OK at times by todays standards, the water is
laughable. The game is totally scripted with very narrow paths you must
stay on. You can not even jump over a bush if it is not on the path they
want you to take. Most items are not useable, such as vehicles. No
serious weapons choices, just once in awhile you can pick up a dead guys
weapon.
In Far Cry 2 and The Saboteur you have full access to
the entire map, you can go off on side trips killing and blowing things
up at will, then later come back to the mission and you can use all
earned weapons plus what you take off downed enemies. Not here, you must
follow their scripted missions with hardly any discression. It is
really more like a arcade game. Move here, now do this, OK now move here
and shoot this guy........Blah, Blah.
Short.
Fair would
be $19.95, at $49.95 it is a rip off. If you think you would like to try
it, wait for the bargain bin, should not be that long of a wait.
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