Sniping is fun, but not quite as much as one would suspect
User Rating: 6.1 | CTU: Marine Sharpshooter PC
The game has you as a marine sniper. Paired with your buddy spotter, you are off to save the world through Afghanistan, Chechnya, and finally, an abandoned Pacific island. While it does live up to its title, as there is quite a bit of sharpshooter, there are significant periods in the game where you must do CQB (close-quarter battle, i.e. close range room-to-room fights) and such, that provides a bit of variety. At other times you are perched on a ledge and you must snipe off enemies coming to reinforce their buddies while your friendlies try to assault the place. Every enemy that gets through your fire means one less of your buddies will make it through. This is actually nothing close to reality, where spotter/sniper teams are used to scout enemies and provide tactical support, but it does make for some interesting gameplay. Your spotter is controlled by AI, and he will engage all nearby enemies with his M-16. You can order him to stay put (until you moved beyond a certain distance) or follow, or you can order him to hold fire (or engage at will). He will also tell you where he spotted enemies, and often this is done at night at incredible distances. Unfortunately, the enemy can do this too, withOUT the night vision optics that we enjoy! This game is DX7 based, so polygon count is low, and the enemy death chant is repetitive after a while. However, it runs smoothly on older PCs, and the graphics are good enough for its purpose. Music is okay, and sound effects are adequate. However, there is absolutely NO multiplayer, very rare nowadays in games. Enemy AI is quite predictable and not that much of a challenge. The problem is they are quite well hidden, and you cannot take many hits. You do have certain medi-paks that you can use, but they don't heal that much, and you only get lim
As befitting current policy, your kills are NOT recorded (i.e. no body count) though it must be in the hundreds by the end of 10 missions. All in all, MSS is a budget game and should be treated so. It is not far beyond average, and will provide a few hours of relatively solid entartainment, but it's not an AA-class shooter at all, nor was it meant to be.
