The Sniper: Ghost Warrior series has never been good. The series started during the previous generation and while they weren’t anywhere near a seal of quality, they did garner a cult following from fans around the world. Sniper: Ghost Warrior 3 is a gigantic leap forward for the series, moving the from a linear, mission-based structure to a multiple small open worlds. As Ghost Warrior 3 reaches the fastigium of that leap however, it slams straight back into the ground, leaving a bloodied mess of potential.
Sniper: Ghost Warrior 3 has a lot of potential. Taking the well-polished sniping mechanics of the previous games and moving to wider, open areas allows the player to be more tactical with how to combat every situation they’re placed in. Using a wide array of tools from a drone to mark enemies on the map, explosive and tracking rounds, and even old-school bouncing betty mines, Ghost Warrior 3 gives you plenty of awesome items for whatever occasions may arise.
Using all of these tools will require a bit of skill. The game’s main focus of sniping will not only need you to position yourself in a suitable location to make sure surrounding enemies don’t hear your shots, but you’ll also have to take wind and distance into account when you attempt to pop the noggin’ off your target.
The moment-to-moment gameplay generally plays out like a poor man’s Far Cry 4 with a little bit of Sniper Elite dashed into the recipe for a nice, fresh flavour. All three of the game’s locations, from the dingy mining town to the snowy mountains, are full of outposts to take out as well as friendly encampments to discover. The outposts play out pretty much identically to Far Cry’s with either a target to kill or some other form of simple objective that you’ll be required to complete to take the outpost over. A multitude of different collectibles can also be found including rival snipers which you’ll have to find your way through minefields in order to kill and nab their unique gun, and artefacts which weirdly includes pictures of Jesus Christ.
Once you’re embedded into the flow of Ghost Warrior’s gameplay, it’s actually quite fun to play. Driving between outposts and discovering new, albeit very repetitive combat situations along the way is a nice distraction from the main quest. Whether you decide to go in all guns blazing or adapt the game’s more admired effort of stealth gameplay, the many outposts and key locations of the game are quite well designed meaning you’ll always be able to play your way. Main missions are often a little more restrictive, leaning heavily on forced stealth, but when you’re allowed to be set free, Ghost Warrior 3 is a competently designed experience.
Not everything in Sniper: Ghost Warrior 3 is as positive as its good but flawed gameplay. The game follows an extremely cliched narrative with all of the story’s twists and turns following the most predictable patterns in military-themed storytelling with the story’s biggest twists guessable before they’re put into play.
You play as Jon North, a soldier working in the Eastern European country of Georgia. Cutscenes move back and forth in time, showing the bond between him and his missing-in-action brother, Robert. Whilst taking down numerous key leaders who are attempting to take over the region, you’ll also be looking for clues on how to find Robert. Not all is how it seems, however, and along the way you’ll bump into a number of characters ranging from Jon’s ex-girlfriend Lydia to the mysterious masked sniper, Armazi.
Characters, while passably intriguing, are mostly just walls of cliché spouting military jargon during your missions. There are relationships and back stories between characters, although the delivery of lines from nearly every actor in the game are so stoic and emotionless that they feel incredibly bland. In fact, the best performances come from the younger versions of the brothers found in flashback cutscenes which actually leave you with a lasting sense of their brotherly bond.
By far the biggest downfall of Sniper: Ghost Warrior 3 is the last of polish surrounding every aspect of the games technical quality. Texture work is good for the most part and lighting is quite impressive, but the quality of character models—especially NCPs—give off a mannequin vibe which, when viewed through slow-mo kill cams, is incredibly unbelievable and even laughable. Combined with the softness of Sniper: Ghost Warrior 3’s visuals due to the Xbox’s lowered resolution, the game comes off as incredibly weak compare to other titles.
Performance is a gigantic problem throughout nearly every single play session of the game. Whether it be in a small, indoor base or a massive facility, Ghost Warrior 3 chugs and stutters from 20 FPS to much lower. The game is like this the majority of the time, often freezing and hanging completely for half a minute so it can catch up with itself. Throughout my entire play time, I can only recall a few sections where the game actually reached its targeted 30 FPS.
Apart from this, the game features incredibly long load times—upwards of three minutes at the worst of times—and a myriad of bugs ranging from laughable to infuriating and, yes, mission-ruining. Key objects or targets fall through the map, not allowing you to retrieve them, gun models disappear, textures and models—including full maps—don’t load properly, and, of course, you can fall through the map.
The final mission of Ghost Warrior 3’s four-act campaign was, when I played it, broken completely. Breaking into the game’s recycled facility—it was used in an earlier mission for a completely different reason—and entering a secret entrance worked fine enough. Moving into the game’s last location, however, resulted in the game not loading the entire facility properly. Any time I reset, checkpoint or full mission, the game wouldn’t load the environment correctly, leading me to accidentally skip all of the level and reach the end of the game.
Summary
Sniper: Ghost Warrior 3 is a broken experience on Xbox One. If the multitude of bugs and horrendous frame rate were fixed, the game would be quite enjoyable as a lower-budget Far Cry 4. As it stands, however, the games needs excessive patching before it becomes a viable experience to charge $60 for. CI Games need to release a patch as soon as possible on Xbox One.
Lewis is a games journalist, freelance gaming and consumer-tech journalist. They contributed 344 articles to ICXM between 2015–2017, focused on opinion pieces, game reviews, Windows and PC, and Xbox news: has since served as Editor-in-Chief at StealthOptional and Gaming Editor at MSPoweruser, with bylines at Gfinity Esports and FRVR.