I still don't know what to think of this game
Well, let's begin by putting something out of the way. This is not a FPS that relies only on sniping, since it has the potential to make things extremely dull because of the lack of direct contact with the enemy. But you will wish, after a while, that it had.
Let's start from the beginning. The game takes place in the Amazon rain forest, apparently. A group of soldiers is set to take a drug lord/general/dictator out by sniping his as*. Things go wrong, he escapes and you have to engage in various FPS clichéd missions in order to try to take him out. So you are always in the jungle. No change of scenery.
Graphics: from a distance, the game looks good. The waterfalls and the hills full of plants look good. When you get too close, though, the game shows how ugly it can be. Character models have very little detail. Houses, oil rigs, military installations, marinas, whatever it is, it all looks a little dull. I guess that would be ok, since you will be sniping most of the time and looking from a distance, but, as a matter of fact, the graphics actually get in the way of game play. Big time. It is very hard to move stealthily, which the game requires you to do constantly, in such generic looking maps. I got stuck in the scenario millions of times. I can't jump up a house, which seems to be there so I could find a good sniping position, because of jerkiness of movement and the lack of detail in the house model, making it impossible to find a place to jump onto and leading to frustration. Speaking of that, two things shouldn't be missing from future sniper games: sniping positions and weapon cache. Include them and make them useful, please.
Game play: Sniping is really fun. The animation after a head shot is slick and rewarding. It is very, very good. But that is it. That's all the game has to offer. So what keeps you going is that it is a very good trick. Take away your sniper rifle, though, and you are fuc*ed. In the first mission, things work out fine for a while. You take a couple of soldiers out stealthily. You go up a mountain, behind the trees, using a hook, meet up with a friend, he spots the enemy, you line up the shot, wait for the greenlight from the superiors, it is greenlit, you fire...
It was too good to be true. From this point on realism goes out the window. An inexplicable explosion seems to fuc* up your shot, the guy escapes in a car, though it looks like he had been hit, and you have to, I couldn't believe it, you have to use your hook to go down the mountain (I hate the hook, it is horrible, moving down is almost impossible) and shoot baddies with a SNIPER RIFLE at GROUND LEVEL. You run to a house and find plenty of health packs, so you say to yourself "that's what the game actually expects from me?". It's ludicrous. Well, so I tried, the second time, because at ground level I was bait, to use my advantage position to take out a couple of enemies. Big mistake. Shoot one guy in the head and two seconds later the whole army knows your exact position and is shooting at you so precisely that you might die, no matter what you do, 10 seconds after taking that first guy out. So you have to go to the ground. Kill a guy and run away, because they have x-ray vision. Don't bother trying to get a new gun, you are stuck with the guns you are given. No looting dead bodies, no weapon cache, nothing.
Well, at first I wanted to get a new gun, an assault rifle, because I thought it would make such a level easier. The thing is the enemy AI doesn't know if you have a sniper rifle or an assault rifle on you. They will show the same proficiency in shooting you at all times. So at a later level, I was given an assault rifle, and at close quarters it was ok, but when we got to the open jungle, F%&$#! This is worse than operation dragon rising, the enemy AI is an ace, so you can only rely on having enough health packs, abundant everywhere in the game. At one point the game autosaved when I was fooling around, so I got through an extremely difficult point with no health packs. I died thirty times. The worst thing is there were health packs right in front of me, up a flight of stairs, but the simple act to move towards it triggered my death by enemy fire. It was infuriating. I cursed the moment I asked for an assault rifle.
The point is the game makes it so easy to snipe that, even in the middle of a firefight, pulling out your sniper rifle is a million times better than pulling an assault rifle. You got a little red dot to show where the bullet will land in easy and normal, which only matters for very long shots, you got concentration mode, when you hold your breath and, miraculously, slow time as well, the enemies show in red on your scope, to distinguish themselves from the landscape and more. It is very easy to snipe, it is very hard to do anything else. Throwing a knife doesn't kill the guy in one hit, no matter where it hits, and it kills the stealth approach. The melee attack is a gamble, sometimes it kills, and sometimes it doesn't. Besides, the animation is horrible. So you only got sniping, and sniping only.
It is so absurd that at the end of act II (there are four acts in total) you have to run away from the enemy army and shoot at them using a turret gun for two minutes. After trying it for five times, I gave up, since they could kill me so easily and just waited for them to enter the bunker while crouching on the ground. Then shoot at them with a pistol. I thought the game would punish me for not using the turret with an ever mounting army, but it proved to be much more effective, though I died like that a couple of times as well. Not even a turret gun is more effective than the sniper rifle.
I am rambling for too long, so I will wrap it up. On a side note, a little anecdote. At some point I was up a there sniping the hel* out of the enemy army and saw something moving behind the bushes. It wasn't glowing red, I didn't know if it was an enemy, so I shot at it. Headshot animation and, for my surprise, I had shot a purple cow! It was hilarious!
Well, to summarize, I don't know what to make of this game. It puzzles me. It isn't realistic at all. I'd have enjoyed a scout by my side, or even co-op, to make things more interesting, rather than having something like the concentration mode, which feels like a cheat. After all, locating the enemies is 50% of sniping. I'd like them to scrape the mission not focusing on sniping and stealth, which means scraping 75% of the game. And the map, please do something about the no good map. It is a useless piece of sh*t. And sniping positions. Make them accessible and locate them in the map or include a HUD. And don't call the intel we collect "Secret". It makes me feel like a child. And make the intel useful, not the no-good genetic recycled sh*t that it is, with no connection whatsoever to the game play. Intertwine them to the story. Oh, and be more creative with the story. Make the characters more interesting. The enemy AI may continue to be aces, just make them a little less "aware". And speaking of the AI, what's the deal with the generic spanish chatter playing non stop? The guards talk to each other, but if you take more than 5 seconds to kill the target, they will repeat the same line over and over, no pause. Did the developers figure nobody would understand so it wasn't necessary to make any pauses or vary the dialogue? That would be a tad prejudicious, so I hope that wasn't the case, hope it was just plain laziness.
With that long list of complaints you might imagine that I didn't like the game, but that's not it. It is in fact amazing that a game with such an overabundance of problems would be able to hook me up. This is a one trick game, but it is a very good trick. (Well, the fact that you don't pay full price also helps)
P.S.: Very long. So I will update about the multiplayer, which I haven't played long enough, in another review space.