Snipers is an almost multiplayer-only first-person shooter for the Xbox 360. Sounds like a good idea, right? Everybody loves snipers, so what could possibly go wrong with a first-person shooter dedicated to snipers? Yup. You guessed it, everything. Fortunately, I played and reviewed this awful game so you don’t have to. Before diving into the review, some odd history of the game needs to be covered.
Snipers was first released in European countries on February 24, 2012 for the Xbox 360 and the Playstation 3. It was developed by Hydravision and published by the turd machine known as Bigben Interactive. For those of you that don’t know of Bigben, they are a company based in France that pump out some of the worst games known to man and produce the most bizarre peripherals you will ever see. I could go on about Bigben, but I will save that for another day.
Snipers was then published again in North America digitally on March 12, 2015; more than three years after its initial launch in Europe. I played both the physical German version of the game and the digital North American releases for this review. Both version of the game are fully compatible with each other, and as far as I can tell, are identical in every way.
StoryThere is no story-related information provided in-game, on the game’s Xbox LIVE Marketplace page, or in the instruction booklet. The only information comes from the back cover which relates to the image on the front cover. “Eine einzigartige urbane und postapokalyptische atmosphäre.” Is written on the back cover, translating to “A unique urban and post-apocalyptic atmosphere.” The front cover displays what appears to be just that; a sniper standing in what looks like a destroyed and polluted city. This seems like a cool idea for a game like this, and it may explain why a number of snipers are running around killing each other.
Unfortunately, the “unique urban and post-apocalyptic atmosphere” ends at the statement and the front cover. The cities in game don’t look destroyed at all, they just look like they are slightly under construction. There is a map inside a mall that is a little broken and run down, but it looks more abandoned than post-apocalyptic. I go into more detail about the mall in the graphics section. In general, the lighting doesn’t do wonders for the post-apocalyptic environment either. Maps are generally well lit with clear skies, unlike the gloomy and polluted-looking cover. I could nitpick the “story” a bit more, but it wouldn’t accomplish much, the next criticisms fit more appropriately in the graphics section.
GraphicsThe graphics are balls. They aren’t the worst I’ve ever seen, but they’re pretty bad, and there’s a lot of corner cutting. Everything looks kind of off. Most of the maps have a glazed over grey look, as though they’ve all been run through a VCR, while simultaneously being overly bright. It gives a really confusing look to the maps. This brings me to my next and largest criticism of the graphics. The “unique urban and post-apocalyptic atmosphere.”
At no point do any of the maps represent a post-apocalyptic atmosphere. As mentioned above, everything just looks bright and overcast. I’m not sure if they were trying to go for a polluted sky apocalypse look, or if the marketing team, if there was one, just threw that statement on the back cover in a desperate attempt to sell this excuse for a game. Either way, there is no post-apocalyptic style. One of the levels that more closely represents the style is a run down mall. This level could almost pass, except for one fatal flaw. There are multiple perfectly groomed, green trees on the bottom floor. Well you might ask, “Crandy, couldn’t these trees have grown from the sun and rain coming into the partially destroyed post-apocalypse mall?” No, they can’t. The windows on the ceiling, the ceiling itself, and the entire exterior of the mall are still intact! There is no way those trees could be alive unless somebody was watering them. Because of these flaws, the mall seems more like a run down mall under construction or something, that some snipers decided to hang out and kill each other in for fun. Next, on to the laziness.
Most of the environments in Snipers don’t look terrible. That is, until you start looking at things from up close. I first noticed in a docks-style map, that the water looked a little strange. I zoomed in with my scope and noticed something bizarre. The platform I was looking at was hovering above the water! The water was moving in a rippling motion below the floating platform to give the illusion that it was moving up and down. This got me looking into other parts of the environment to find more cut corners.
In a more urban map, I looked closely at a crane. The objects hanging from the crane were two-dimensional. I don’t mean they were poor 3-D models, they are actually two-dimensional. It’s not possible to look at them to the point that they disappear, but I am confident that if you could they would.
The 2-D models in DOOM from 1993 look better than this. There is a different crane where the 2-D object doesn’t even line up with the parts that are supposed to be holding it in place; one of them is just floating in the air. When looking at the cranes, I unfortunately gazed over at the mountains, which leads me to my final complaint. They look awful. It looks like somebody went outside the office, got a flip-phone camera, took a picture of a pointy rock, magnified it 100 times, used the block eraser in Photoshop to cut it out by hand, and finally slapped it on every outdoor level in the game.
GameplayFortunately, if you were to buy this game, you would be unable to experience most of the sub-par gameplay Snipers has to offer, because nobody plays the game. Aside from multiplayer, the game offers two modes; tutorial and time attack. The tutorial gives a very brief rundown of the Sniper’s tools, your knife, drone, grappling hook, sniper, and handgun. You run through a sort of obstacle course, shoot some dummies, and grapple to some stuff. It’s pretty lame and not very useful. What about time attack though? That must be fun right? Nope. Time attack is exactly the same as the tutorial! All they did was add a timer and remove the vague hints. There is only one level and it’s super lame.
The multiplayer portion, isn’t the worst, although it isn’t great either. There are some general issues I have with the multiplayer portion of the game, the first is that there are only seven different weapons. Six snipers and a single handgun. Considering this game only has snipers, you would think there would be a little more variety. It ends up not mattering much anyway. The default sniper is a one shot kill regardless of where it hits, so there is no reason to ever use another weapon unless you run out of ammo, which is unlikely.
Some of the other snipers have faster reloads and more shots per clip, but are nowhere near as useful as the default one. The pistol is useless too. It takes multiple headshots to kill a person, so you might as well just continue to use your sniper. The only thing good about the pistol is that it looks like fire is coming out the end of it when you shoot it. It gives you something to laugh at while you slowly drag the flag to the other base.
The final problem is ghosting. There are some serious lag issues, even when playing with two consoles on the same network. Your character tends to want to keep moving in the direction he is going for a couple of seconds after you stop. It makes shooting people very difficult, because they are moving all over the place when the person playing is actually standing still.
The grappling hook is actually a pretty cool addition. It’s a small gun that shoots a hook onto objects so you can climb up to good sniping ledges, and more surprisingly works properly most of the time. The gadgets are pretty cool too. You have proximity mines, C4, and claymores you can place around the map to catch other snipers off guard. Grenades work as expected as well. The only problem I have with them is that they are bound to the LB button, instead of the conventional RB button and without a way to change the binding. I found myself very often throwing a grenade when I meant to use the grappling hook. Other than that small complaint, gadgets overall were pretty decent.
There are five game modes: free for all, team deathmatch, where’s the flag, last team standing, and contract. Free for all and team deathmatch are what you would expect for the most part. You get plopped into a map and kill each other. The only problem is the maps are so big, that even if they were full, the gameplay would be very slow and boring.
Where’s the flag is an appropriate name for Snipers’ capture the flag game mode. It is exactly the same as every other capture the flag, except sometimes the flag will not show up, appear to be in a place it’s not, or have an incorrect marker. When I was playing with a friend, more than once we were on opposite sides of the map both claiming to be looking at the flag. In reality, the flag was only in one location. but appeared to be in multiple. One time, the flag even appeared to be outside of the map floating in the air above the water. Unfortunately, I did not have my capture device connected at the time, so I was only able to capture a picture with my phone’s camera.
Last team standing is just deathmatch without respawns. Contract is a free for all game mode where you are given binoculars to identify your enemy. Identifying your enemy doesn’t actually do anything other than give you a few points. I don’t mean game points either, it only gives you experience points, making it almost completely useless. When you identify a person, it tells you whether or not they are your assigned target. Your target gives you twice as many points as a normal kill. The only issue is that if you kill a person that is not your target, you still get points, you also still get double points if you kill your target without identifying them. What ends up happening is, contract just becomes free for all with a person that gives double points. It seems like it could be an interesting idea if there were a penalty for not identifying an enemy or killing a non-target. Unfortunately, it was poorly thought out like most of this game.
SoundThere’s not really much to say about the sound, other than there isn’t much of it. There's some generic background music at the main menu, and that’s about it. Considering the bulk of the game is versus multiplayer, the absence of music is appropriate. The sound effects aren’t bad, but they aren’t anything special either. Sometimes if you fall or take damage, the sound seems to glitch out. Everything goes quiet and when you fire a shot all you can hear is a buzzing noise, or no noise at all. I suspect that the sound going quiet from a fall is intentional, but the buzzing is not.
Other OdditiesObviously, this game did not sell well. It is entirely dead. Almost every person with a semi-significant position on the leaderboards is from TrueAchievements and boosted the entire game like I did. Clearly Bigben and Hydravision had high hopes for Snipers though. Believe it or not, the PS3 version of the game had a dedicated PS Move sniper rifle. The thing is massive. I don’t know what they were thinking when they okayed that.
A minor complaint, but funny nonetheless. When I initially purchased the digital version of the game, the box art for Snipers was just a message telling me that the it was just placeholder data and the real box art would be updated with the final cert submission. It did eventually show up, but I have never seen that on any other game before. Again, I was only able to capture this with my phone’s camera as my capture device was not connected.
I suspect it originated from a poor translation, but, when viewing another player’s gamertag that is playing Snipers and sitting at the “press start” menu, it says underneath their tag “Don’t Play.” The game obviously knows it’s bad. It’s warning everybody on your friends list not to play it. I don’t know what it’s trying to say, but I got a great laugh out of that when I stumbled across. I recommend you take the advice provided by the game and don’t play Snipers.
Invisible walls are not uncommon in games, even if they don’t make a lot of sense. Snipers, however, takes it to another level. They put you in some sort of invisible barrier dome, but instead of being completely invisible, when you approach them you can see the semi-transparent mesh of the dome. It’s really weird, rather confusing, and it just made me wonder why they bothered to include this as opposed to the traditional truly invisible, invisible barrier.
ConclusionOverall, Snipers is not the worst game I have ever played, but it’s pretty bad. The graphics are generally sub-par, the gameplay is mediocre, and the game is basically unplayable due to its lack of online community. Unless you really like to play the tutorial, I mean, “time attack.” Would I recommend this to a friend? Nope, although I do appreciate my friend who suffered through the boosting with me. I give it one floating two-dimensional crane object out of five.
You will likely have a laugh here and there, but not enough to enjoy it for any length of time. Traditional ratings I give it two out of five, mostly because it is technically functional and doesn’t seem to have any game breaking bugs, not because it is enjoyable.
The author suffered through about 12 to 15 hours of boosting Snipers, with some additional idling time, and managed to unlock all 36 of the game’s achievements.
2.0