Apparently, sniper games are hard to make

User Rating: 1.5 | Sniper: Art of Victory PC
It's one that seems like it should be easy -- snipering is specific art-form, slow-moving, careful, attentive, precise. And yet, in most video games based on being a sniper, it's a disastrous mess, chaotic, poorly thought-out, jittery, and obnoxiously inaccurate.

What motivated publisher City Interactive to attempt this genre, we may never know. Though there is an obvious obsessiveness to being a sniper which appeals to gamers, Sniper: Path of Vengeance fails to capture it.

The gameplay is voodoo at best. From enemies who seem instantly able to sprint out of sight (all of them Olympic sprinters), to the fact that no-one ever hears your gunshots, to map layouts that can't be figured out with the map open on screen, there are too many flaws in this game to make it viable.

Take, for a moment, the fact that a sniper is a relatively sneaky type of assasin. You're even given a silenced pistol and a knife. But it seems impossible to sneak up on enemies. The moment you raise your head out of the grass they're standing there firing their submachineguns as accurately as your rifle. Lucky for you, they don't seem to move or take any tactical steps once they're shooting, but it makes for a disappointing battle if you can neither kill stealthily nor need to take any effort to kill them overtly.

The game has obviously been pressed into duty with no background. It's a WWII shooter, which means every image, every background event, every bombed out building is simply modelled after something the developers saw in other, better games of the genre.

Perhaps, if the game had brought something new to the table, one could overlook the glaring flaws, but it simply does not. One of the few features which give it some charm is that it gives you a bullet-cam ride if you pull off a head-shot, but that is something that we've seen with Sniper Elite, and to be honest, it was better done there.

There isn't much to recommend this game at all. If you need to play a sniper game, it will offer you new levels you've never played before, but the game will disappoint in almost every other way.