Every attempt from this game to simulate a sniper action is a fail.
At the very beginning of the game, you're led to a training camp to learn about all the features and commands of the game. The learning curve is pretty fast, the commands are solid like a good FPS game should be. One great feature of the game is the physics in general. The accuracy of your aim is effected by the posture of the shooter, the gravity makes the bullet to drop, it has wind drift, and the steadiness of the scope is effected due to the condition of your breath and heart beating. If you're running and then you try to shoot, your scope will be shaking a lot, so you have to wait until your breath and pulse gets more calm to perform shots with better accuracy. If you choose the easy difficult level, the enemies are highlighted in the environment, and when you enter in the scope mode, the game gives you a feature that allows you to see a red dot indicating where the shot should hit depending on the conditions and distance of each shot, because you can't expect to aim always in the middle of the crosshair due to the physics (We know that in real life this is different, but for a game I think this is perfect). On the hard difficult level, all these features are disabled, your enemies will be blending with the environment, and to be able to aim your shots fast, you will have to adapt yourself quickly to the physics variations, because if you want to survive you will need to perform what the snipers call a "cold bore shot", which means that you can't send a "test shot" to be able to compensate the next one, if you miss, you're dead, it has to be one shot one kill! Another good feature, similar to other shooter games, is the capability to slow down time called "sniper concentration", that helps you to be faster to acquire targets.
One awesome thing is the "Bullet Cam Mode", every time you perform a good shot, the game will show a slow motion camera of the flight of your bullet, pretty much like the system we find on the game "Sniper Elite". It never gets old to watch a perfect shot hit the target with a lot of blood spilling everywhere. The farther the shot, the better!
Talking about graphics, they are good, really good, some details of the jungle are great, only the landscape over the horizon isn't good.
With all this, you're thinking "What a great game", but.... now comes the problems!
To start, there's no much interaction with the environment, I took as comparison Far Cry 2 or Bad Company 2, where almost everything you shoot can be destroyed or moved, what doesn't happen in Sniper: Ghost Warrior.
Maybe this is asking too much but, as the rain is so good looking and with all the environment details, why not making the weapon to get wet when it's raining?
The sound is generally poor, and the shot sound from assault rifles, in specific, is terrible! The dialog between enemy soldiers is too repetitive, what creates an annoying and dumb situation. The level of the voices from the enemies do not vary with distance, which inhibits the player to differentiate their location, because it has always the same sound level. For a experienced FPS gamer, the distance of your enemy can be calculated by the intensity of the sound he's making, so, it's very important to have sound level variations related to the distance the sound is coming.
About the story, it is a cliché story, nothing memorable. You have to kill a dictator. There's nothing that makes you to want to know what will happen, there's no interaction with other characters, or at least, there's no plot behind what you're doing to be followed until the end. But this wouldn't be something so bad if the gameplay was perfectly great, what for example, happens with Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising, there's no story there, but the game holds you with the good gameplay and missions.
About the gameplay, it's too buggy, I just never seen so many bugs in one game, this game has too many flaws. You will get stuck in some glitch eventually, because in some place of the game you'll enter inside a rock or a little branch will block your passage like if you couldn't jump over it. There are so many situations where some bug prevents you from moving, that the simplest thing as walking turns into struggle. There are lots of bugs with the checkpoints, for example, when you receive two objectives, the player will be displayed with two checkpoints on screen, let's call A and B. If you pass through B first, then go to accomplish A, the A checkpoint will not work, will not trigger the next event, or at least will not disappear from your screen after done.
The slide from your pistol doesn't move when you fire, no animation, only when you reload you can see moving back. For many gamers, the mechanisms of the weapons have to simulate the reality. Games like Metal Gear Solid 4 received 10 out of 10 from the critic because they care about these details. When you reload a semi-auto weapon while still having a bullet in the chamber, you only need to change the magazine, the weapon will be already cocked, but if you empty the magazine, the slide of the pistol or the bolt of the rifle will stop to the rear, these details are important to many gamers, and they add value to the game.
Other feature from Sniper: Ghost Warrior is the "wind meter", which shows the wind direction and strength. But the variation of the wind it's just crazy, going to all directions back and forth, it's like if you're in the middle of a storm. On a normal situation it's expected to have only a strength variation, not variation of directions too. For example, It should show a East wind or 3 o'clock wind(if you're facing to the North), and then you need to check how strong is the wind to compensate your shot, but no, it doesn't work like that, when you look the "wind meter" it's like: south wind, no... now it's north, oh no, now west!
You should be a ghost as the title suggests but the player is forced to use the main roads to travel from place to place, and in some situations you're forced to assault an enemy village through the front door literally, and I'm not considering the parts where you're playing with/for the assault team, where you control another character from a more infantry type of squad.
This game is straight forward oriented(corridor), and when I say that, I mean it! You just can't take your own path because the "stealth meter" will raise and the sky will fall on you.
The "stealth meter" shows to you when an enemy can see you, and there's no mission where you can be really stealth, like if you've never been there, you will get caught eventually due to this very poor stealth mechanics.
In the whole game you're using a ghillie suit and it's used to be stealth, but your ghillie suit turns out useless because if you try to stay prone behind some high grass or bushes(which should hide you), but accordingly to the pre-programmed A.I you shouldn't be there, or in better terms it's not what the mission wants you to do, you'll never be able to keep that meter down, so the stealth AI is a lie, it works only when the game wants. Like on some missions where you can't be seen so the enemies seem to be magically blind, it depends on the mission.
You have a tool within your gear, it's a grapple hook, but it's a useless tool (if you played Call of Juarez you will understand better). There are only few places where you can grab to access higher ground, and they are mandatory to progress through the mission, so no choice, no freedom, no creativity. It would be better if they just made a cut-scene where you have to climb something to reach another stage of the mission.
Another detail that bothers me, is that you don't have the option to choose your gear before the mission. This is so Arcade. Why not being able to customize your weapons before each mission?
The game has only four sniper rifle models. All semi-auto rifles, and there is no bolt action rifle(widely known to be more accurate and used by snipers). The rifles are: The SR-25, and MSG-90 both chambered in 7.62NATO, the Dragunov SVD chambered in 7.62Russian, and the AS-50 chambered in .50BMG, which in my opinion is useless having these calibers because the player could negotiate all his targets using the tiny 5.56NATO with no problem, taking in consideration that any assault rifle is effective over 300 yd, which is the maximum distance dealt in this game. This is something that any military consultant could help the developers in these cases!
Once again, Why no bolt action rifle? Why 4 semiauto rifle models? Is it because there's no need of having highly accurate rifles due to the impossibility of taking shots beyond 300 yd?
Even worse is the fact that you don't have a spotter, at least he's never with you, the game puts him in some magical place where he can see you at all time even when you're in a dense jungle, although he doesn't help you, he just give you some orders or details about what you should do, and this is another thing that blocks your freedom from being creative. If he tells go there and do that, you WILL have to do that, or you won't succeed in your mission. It's like on CALL OF DUTY games, where even if they tell that your character is the best of the best, you have always someone with you to teach you and order you what you should do!
You can't choose between the roles of spotter or sniper, it depends on the mission. Every time they go separate ways, nothing like a real sniper would do.
Every attempt from this game to simulate a sniper action is a fail. The player spend more time crossing and shooting in the middle of enemy villages and running away(because you'll be discovered), than actually sniping.
We gamers could let all this go without complaining and have fun anyway, but it's unforgivable the fact that as a sniper you don't act like one, you don't get to shoot more than 300 yd long, your camouflage is useless evidencing a huge flaw on the stealth mechanics. You always get discovered, so where's the Ghost Warrior?
It seems that all employees from City Interactive died and someone found the unfinished-under-development game over the clipboard and decided to release it on the market. This game had everything to be the best sniper simulation game ever, but City Interactive tried to please all kinds of gamers, so ignoring the most important thing about what is to be a sniper, what in terms of "gaming" is considered boring, and it's called "camping" by online gamers, but that's the truth, The sniper sometimes stays days in the same place without moving just waiting the right time to kill one target and then go away. A game like this sounds too boring for run-and-gun gamers, but City Interactive could give more attention to these facts before releasing a run-and-gun game that claims to have a sniping essence.