We often complain about xenophobia, Russophobia and other unhealthy manifestations in games, but in the case of the Polish studio C.I. Games We will try to evaluate the game only for its gameplay qualities.

And the story in Sniper: Ghost Warrior 3 is really on fire, deserving the Order of Honor named after the late Tom Clancy. The protagonist of the story, Jonathan North, an American super-soldier and the best sniper in history, along with his brother-terminator Robert, goes to the Russian-Ukrainian border to neutralize a warehouse with biological weapons. Saving the world is not easy, and now a beloved relative is kidnapped by sinister terrorists, and the leader of the gang, having tested his luck, leaves Jonathan thinking about the meaning of life.

The scenery changes, a few months later, America's best sniper saves a torn civil war Georgia from pro-Russian separatists. He is accompanied by former girlfriend Lydia and a red-haired beauty from the Israeli Mossad. It would seem that Georgian nature, Borjomi, two beauties at hand, a warm cave with wine, but Jonathan, like an obsessed man, is looking for his adored brother, cracking down on the leaders of local groups.

C.I. Games they cannot keep the hype line-up and add cruel sadists, organ dealers, insane Russian scientists and other well-established clichés to the game. But already in the middle of the project, the writers have a fit of genius, and one of the main characters suddenly blows his brains out playing Russian roulette.

Macrame plot aside, Sniper: Ghost Warrior 3 is like a mixture of several popular series. There is also an attempt to make a cinematic action in the style of Call of Duty, a little smack Hitman and the enthusiasm for the open world of Far Cry. But the main thing is sniper shooting, which at high difficulty levels requires taking into account the distance to the target, the strength of the wind and other important characteristics of the environment.

There are also conventional weapons in the game, which include traditional AKs, machine guns, grenades, pistols and knives, which do a good job in case of force operations, but you still spend most of the time taking out targets from a distance. Moreover, you have a miniature drone at your disposal, with which you can mark all enemies within a radius of several hundred meters. To the credit of the creators, in the event of the death of the main character, all the goals highlighted by you are saved, saving you from unnecessary work.

The missions themselves are trying to take a variety, somewhere offering to cover an agent in enemy territory, kill a well-guarded leader or rescue captured hostages. At some point, the writers are inspired by a series of adventure projects Batman, offering to analyze the trajectory of a bullet, find footprints in the snow or the place of a fatal shot.

Driving, rock-climbing, ziplining, and awkward stealth mesh the disparate missions together into an open-world idea of ​​fast travel points, objects to explore, special crafting materials, and boring side quests, including a visit to a Georgian brothel. In the latter, you can look at terribly animated women with reduced social responsibility.

The workbench in the shelter offers to craft ammo for all occasions from materials collected from outside, but it is much easier to just buy them in the store, hiding behind the next tab. The same applies to skill branches, which are unlocked with experience points and are absolutely useless.

The authors really want to make their own Far Cry, so you are invited to capture outposts, open points for fast travel, complete side quests and explore the surrounding area. But there is simply no desire to spend time on this.

Game designers try really hard and sometimes they get it right. interesting tasks, but the feeling of secondary and unfinished accompanies the whole game. Closed doors in houses, sometimes the only way around, and a funny animation of the flight of a fired bullet, when you can see that your character is just standing with his hands down, cause disappointment. Polish developers even cut a story about saving Lydia from the main campaign for a separate DLC which does not motivate to buy at all.

The game is full of glitches, the most incredible problems, errors and imperfections. The character falls through the textures, forcing you to restart from a checkpoint, enemies see you through walls and hit you with machine guns in the head from a couple of hundred meters. In addition, downloads between levels take 4-5 minutes, and at some points the game starts to slow down terribly even on a top-end video card.

Sniper: Ghost Warrior 3 is a failed attempt at making your own Far Cry clone with a focus on sniper battles that is mired in bugs, stupid story, redundant mechanics, and very bland gameplay. After Sniper Elite 4, which is a serious step forward compared to its predecessors, Ghost Warrior 3 you can safely skip.

Game completed on:

• Intel Core [email protected] 3.40 Ghz
• 16 GB RAM
• ASUS ROG STRIX GTX1080 O8G GAMING
• LG OLED 65C6V

The ability of CI Games (formerly known as City Interactive) to follow the trends in the gaming industry is admirable. In the 2000s, this Polish company produced typical shooters of the Terrorist Takedown series by the standards of that time. Variable action games in the open world are now in vogue, to which Sniper: Ghost Warrior 3 belongs. True, the “townspeople” are true to themselves and still create surprisingly unprincipled projects, the only advantage of which is workable mechanics.

The lack of a “creative spark” among the authors perfectly illustrates the plot. Duty and the search for a relative brought American sniper John North to Georgia, to a place not far from the border with Russia. Separatists are operating in this region, destabilizing the situation. From such a plot, you can make at least a political thriller, even carbon monoxide trash. History has the beginnings of cranberry-flavored fun. These are futuristic technologies, and beauties (special services representatives) who have descended from the covers of fashion magazines.

However, the screenwriters, with the efficiency of the best maniac in the world, kill one tempting idea after another. We are slipped a story overloaded with pathos about brotherly love and secret experiments. A stamped set of nonsense is served with a deliberately serious face, and the characters do not try to joke about the idiocy going on around them. All this is seasoned with a miserable romantic line and family showdowns. Scandalous implementation of the Russian threat with references to real events not visible. The creators only had enough for cardboard villains and leaders of the resistance, whose names hardly anyone will remember.

The game contains, it seems, all the elements popular in action movies, starting with a drone to inspect the surroundings and ending with the ability to complete the mission in any way. The hero, using an analogue of "eagle vision", detects ledges on the rocks, climbs higher, finds a sniper position and hunts for ducks. Then he makes his way to the target, hides the corpses of enemies killed on the sly, and the surviving soldiers are unaware of his presence. Nobody cancels the option of shooting objectionable ones, as well as the combination of all styles.

The missions in Ghost Warrior 3 are quite interesting, even if they are zero point zero originality. John has a lot of non-obvious paths at his disposal. It is possible to carefully maneuver between the guards, since their density does not exceed reasonable limits even at the end of the campaign. In addition, you have to make your way either to a military facility or to a secret laboratory with narrow corridors and small rooms. At these moments, they are not forced to methodically kill dozens of extras and leave a chance to solve all problems quietly.

Enemies, of course, resignedly lead to deceptive maneuvers and quickly run to the source of the noise. You should not expect any attempts at team interaction or a thorough and long combing of the area from them. The learned tricks with the exploitation of stupid artificial intelligence work flawlessly. But in the formula there are no foreign impurities and sudden bouts of inhuman vigilance are alien to enemies.

Periodically, John is reminded that he is a tough sniper, and forced to cover his comrades. Here it is necessary to demonstrate exclusively shooting skills and quickly follow the instructions of comrades-in-arms. Otherwise, they will be noticed and killed. Such retreats are not repeated too often and do not last very long. They dilute the adventure, as well as the crime scene inspection with the collection of evidence.

With well-placed checkpoints, useful upgrades for John, and quests without outright excesses, Ghost Warrior 3 even on high level complexity, where a number of hints disappear from the screen, does not turn into an endless series of trial and error. In this mode, you need to take into account the strength of the wind, the distance to the target, and the like when calculating shots from a sniper rifle, and not rely on a magic hint point.

Don't be too quick to get hopeful. What upsets the game most of all is not the plot, but the presence of an open world, more precisely, three large locations without a single hint of a coherent simulation of life. They exist only to justify a series of useless things, led by tedious back and forth commuting on back roads.

The hero can collect materials to create ammunition in the hideout, rescue prisoners for a reward, and search for secrets. But there are enough materials and money to buy or repair equipment even without secondary employment. The authors did not offer a clear incentive to collect weapons and improvements. In this world, there are elite fighters, but they are slightly stronger than ordinary dummies. To deal with them, it is not necessary to have the best rifle or machine gun at your disposal. Side missions and the elimination of wanted criminals do not stand out from the background of the main program. Unless there is a prospect to repeatedly look into previously visited buildings.

Senseless routine with clumsy curtsies to Far Cry 3-4 artificially stretches a well put together campaign. The fast travel system doesn't completely eliminate the annoying but unavoidable breaks between boring tasks.

With the optimization of Ghost Warrior 3, everything is rather sad. Even on powerful PCs and after several updates, performance is unstable. It’s better not to run the game without an SSD on a PC, otherwise you will find tediously long downloads when moving from one location to another. On consoles, these downloads take about five minutes (!), and the frame rate sags noticeably even on PS4 Pro.

Externally, the game is more attractive with post-Soviet color than with advanced technologies. John inspects unsightly houses in the villages, admires the view of dilapidated churches and buildings of the times of the USSR under the rays of the evening sun, and also makes his way through the forest and climbs the mountains. Despite the fact that the design lacks the stars from the sky, and the faded textures are hard to miss, the game does not take away the original surroundings. It's hard not to smile when you hear Russian rap from radios at separatist checkpoints.

Diagnosis

Years, decades pass, entire genres disappear and are reborn, and CI Games seems to never learn one truth: well-copied mechanics are a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for exciting game. Sniper: Ghost Warrior 3 allows you to feel like a cool sniper, the campaign is not buried in dull tasks, the scenery sometimes pleases with beautiful views. However, the variable passage is done at a basic level, the plot is disappointing with hopeless nonsense and there are no spectacular kills in the game in the manner of Sniper Elite 3-4. Mediocre technical performance and meaningless open spaces only exacerbate not the most pleasant impressions.

• Well balanced campaign without inadequate difficulty spikes
• Moderately long sniper missions
• Scenery sometimes pleases with beautiful views

Contra:

• The plot is a graveyard of promising ideas
• Useless open world with repetitive side jobs
• Worthless optimization
• Unforgivably long downloads (console versions)

In search of a mechanic for the third part, CI Games shoveled the entire genre of stealth action.

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And CI Games didn't stop there. It's hard to believe, but literally every radio in Sniper: Ghost Warrior 3 rushes real Russian rap. At a sawmill, at a wedding, at a military facility - it doesn't matter. When the wind for the first time brings to the hero's ears a recitation about fate, enemies, family, love and grandmothers (the texts are very diverse, from criminal to philosophical), you experience a slight cultural shock. It's funny, of course, that the developers so categorically defined the musical tastes of the entire Georgian people, but it still makes the world more alive - like the phrases of enemies, such as "Search the perimeter!" with a pronounced Russian accent.

As for the multiplayer, it is not in the release version. And it will not be at least until the third quarter of 2017: according to the developers, they decided to first "let the players enjoy the single player campaign." Gradually, it should acquire DLC (maybe at least they will fill the sandbox with tasks?), And multiplayer, free for all owners of the game, is apparently intended to be the icing on the cake. It remains only to wish good luck to CI Games and hope that by then the players will not forget about the existence of Sniper: Ghost Warrior 3.

The Polish studio City Interactive has been trying for fifteen years now to make a game with a quality that is at least a little higher than “indistinct dregs”. Whatever the “urban interactive people” tried: they juggled genres, shortened the name of the studio, licensed venerable game engines - nothing happens: the output is still the same lumpy, foul-smelling slurry.

The Polish game about modernity cannot but be Russophobic. Therefore, everyone who hoped that they would not have to shoot at the Russians can shove these hopes away until better times, that is, until the next partition of Poland.

According to the plot, some hybrid separatists attacked small but very proud Georgia. They are hybrid because their names and surnames are Russian through one, and their faces are entirely Arabic. Hybridity should also be emphasized by the form of clothing, which eclectically combines army camouflage, Adidas sweatpants and arafats under dark glasses. As it should be according to the cheapest television canons, these very separatists immediately begin to destroy the local population, and those who do not have enough cartridges are driven to work in the mines. The worried world community immediately sends a special agent of the Special Intelligence of the Special States of America to Georgia.

So that's what you are - a Russian separatist!

In addition to the official task to find evidence of war crimes, identify the perpetrators and immediately finish them off (so as not to get up twice), main character he is also busy looking for his brother, a special forces soldier who disappeared on the Russian-Ukrainian border. Why exactly in Georgia it is necessary to look for a person who disappeared five hundred kilometers from it is an inconvenient question and therefore left unanswered.

Also, many questions that arise during the passage of the story campaign will remain unanswered. The delusional events are rapidly growing from the beginning to the climax, and in the finale it turns into an epicly predictable farce. The spreading of the local cranberry is such that, pushing through it, you can leave a fair amount of the brain on the branches. Therefore, we advise you to treat plot dislocations SGW 3 with a certain amount of irony.

That's what I understand - a support group!

In fairness, I must say that the plot of most modern shooters can hardly be attributed to works of literature, so the developers for the most part justify the sketchiness of a single player campaign by focusing on the network component. CI Games has nothing to nod at: the promised multiplayer didn't make it into the release, it was postponed until better times, we hope that not until the next partition of Poland.

Left foot of God

Externally Sniper Ghost Warrior 3 it looks like a Rolls-Royce, painted with a mop in a poisonous green color, which in the middle of the last century was used to give a barracks look to the entrances of Khrushchev. You can guess that the game is based on CryEngine 4 only by the inscription in the intro, where it says in plain text "Achieved thanks to CryEngine". This is a very honest statement, since there is little that can be praised for the picture in SGW 3, appeared in the game thanks to the engine. Great lighting work and great weather effects - that's Crytek. Ugly animation and creepy textures - this is CI Games.

Well, who didn't like the faces in Andromeda?

And, of course, bugs! Ah, those endlessly varied Polish bugs, from curious to fatal, every minute, ubiquitous and annoying. They circle around the player, grab him by the sleeves and pant legs, preventing him from concentrating on the main thing - the expectation of an inevitable fall on the desktop, which will definitely happen sooner or later because the CI Games programmers for fifteen years have not learned what it is - a memory leak. The control does not shine with logic either, partly due to the alien interface, partly due to the sloppiness of programmers who did not bother to carefully adapt the console control for the PC.

There are only two things that the Poles actually succeeded in: firstly, the weapon models, and secondly, the authenticity of the environment. The weapon is really drawn with all possible care and scrupulously repeats real prototypes. The developers, of course, do not have licenses, therefore the trunks are called as God put it on the soul, but this is not the essence of it.

But I wanted to quietly drain the gasoline from the tank

As for the detailing of the “sandbox” provided at our disposal, it looks like the north-west of Georgia was in a state of stasis recent years thirty. It was precisely this color that the bedspreads were on the beds in the late Soviet period, wallpaper with such patterns was massively glued in the five-story buildings of sanatoriums, and the understaffed “Belarus” rusted in the collective farms in no other way. All in Sniper Ghost Warrior 3 extremely accurately recreates the situation of a provincial region of not the richest republic of the USSR of the early eighties. Authenticity does its job, especially for those who remember that life from their own experience. What a sin to conceal, under the spoon regularly aches. However, there is one global inconsistency in all this. The thing is happening in our days, and the life of the locals from the last century. Approximately the same picture was observed in Stalker", But the Zone was a forbidden territory, so the catastrophic state of Pripyat is substantiated by the plot, which cannot be said about Georgia. So far, no one has closed it for quarantine.

Bigos in Imereti

Previously, in Polish taverns there was such a regular dish - bigos. The process of its preparation consisted in the fact that everything that the customers did not finish was dumped into one cauldron, it was cooked for a long and tedious time, and then served to not very rich visitors for a pittance.

Every sniper is a bit of a witcher

Sniper Ghost Warrior 3 also collected from leftovers Far Cry, MGS5, call of duty and many other hits, and if you hold down the Ctrl button, then the traces of " Witcher' will show up. secondary SGW 3 absolute, the developers have not put any of their own ideas into the game. Moreover, many things are borrowed thoughtlessly and mechanically, for example, a completely useless craft, which by and large is not needed.

In the sight from two hundred meters no one ...

... and in the drone chamber from fifty - an hour!

Even the basic things for a shooter like shooting and ballistics are done very badly, the weapon in the hands is not felt at all. Sniper shooting, which the authors of the series are so proud of, is reduced to hunting unsuspecting dummies from distances of 250-300 meters. The fact is that the range of drawing models is limited to about three hundred meters. In practice, this translates into the fact that from a distance of, say, 400 meters in 12x optics, opponents are simply not visible. They are not corny, because the engine does not display such distant objects. But one has only to launch a reconnaissance drone and fly a little closer, as enemy soldiers will miraculously appear on the map and in the sight. If you recall the drone and turn away from the separatist checkpoint, it will miraculously empty again.

The exception is story missions, where the enemy is highlighted according to the script. On such sorties, it is possible to conduct aimed shooting from four hundred meters, and even from five hundred. But even in these cases, there is nothing more to think about distances per kilometer. Calling it sniping is a stretch. There is no point in taking a correction for wind and range. As a result, all the vaunted Polish ballistics goes like a forest: you can knock out a sentry's eye from two hundred meters without holding your breath. For this, they will also give additional experience points.

Against the background of all of the above, discussing little things like perishable silencers or impenetrable stupidity of AI is like talking about rivets on the harness of a long-dead horse. Kicking her is a thankless task, and not plausible, so let's move on to summing up the disappointing results. Sniper Ghost Warrior 3 this is a deeply unprincipled, more than usual buggy, with a senile plot, but without multiplayer, a representative of a third-rate category of games known as the “Polish shooter”.