"If you use your imagination hard enough, you can find a sniper rifle..."

Sniping is, and always has been, a 'black' form of warfare. The nature of sniping is difficult to comprehend, let alone model into a game. Naturally, a name like Sniper: Path of Vengeance combines the art of sniping with a sinister atmosphere.

The game, however, fails to maintain a sinister plot or even include reasonable sniping.

Sniper: Path of Vengeance starts off on a rainy night, with your character mumbling to himself about meeting a 'contact'. After walk around, you eventually find your contact and you are given a scoped M-14 to take out a target. By now you should have noticed that you are a mercenary, a fact that is never clearly presented to you anytime during the game. After taking out the target and the cops around him, you escape to meet with your contact at a pre-designated location, only to be caught by the police and hauled to prison.

While in prison, you are injected with a drug, which supposedly plays a major role in the plot. Afterwards, you are allowed wander about the prison, kill a few officers and spark off a riot while you're at it.

Many might not the inconsistency between my last two paragraphs. No, that isn't me being a bad reviewer or failing Engilsh composition. That actually is the introduction to Sniper: Path of Vengeance.

The short review is: It's a horrible game.
The long version is: It's a horrible, horrible game.

On a more serious note, Sniper: Path of Vengeance fails to live up to standards set by other first-person shooters. The game attempts to mix aspects of role-playing with first-person shooting, allowing players to customise their character, "The Sniper", by increase various stat points, including health, stamina and weapon specialties. Your stats will also grow over time as you advance through the game and gain more experience using weapons.

Unfortunately, there is no indication as to what the stats actually do. While stats like Health are self-explanatory, weapon-specialties seem to have no significant improvement in your abilities. In fact, the weapons themselves are poorly modelled.

Take weapon names, for example. In your stats screen, you are presented with a list of weapons including the M-14, Glock, S&W, SIG and HK. They might seem fine and dandy, but any weapon enthusiast will have immense trouble figuring out exactly what weapons they're supposed to represent. A SIG could be anything from a SIG P228 pistol to a SIG 550 Commando assault rifle. It turns out that it is an assault rifle with an attached flashlight. Then there's the HK gun. As far as we know, it could be anything from the MP5 submachine gun to the G3 assault rifle. It's actually a machine gun. So much for informative names.

Then, the weapons themselves are so inaccurate and worthless that you might as well fight in hand-to-hand combat, if the game allowed it. The guns bear little resemblance to their real-life counterparts, and the game's physics are scripted and cannot be manipulated. Pistols are wildly inaccurate no matter how close you are, and automatic rifles cannot hit the broad side of a barn. While games like Medal of Honor accurately model weapon accuracies, Sniper: Path of Vengeance slaps on a constant accuracy for every weapon, resulting in Ingram MAC-10's that can spray bullets across the room, but cannot shoot straight ahead.

Furthermore, collision detection and damage calculations are horrible. The game does not recognise headshots or individual body hits, so it will always take a dozen shots to take out an enemy wearing a ski jacket.

And forget about trying to understand the plot. Sniper: Path of Vengeance fails to introduce your character in any way, and the storyline seems generic and does not immerse players. Mission objectives are unclear, and you are often left wandering and backtracking, hoping to run into something that might trigger the next event. Dialogue contains horrible attempts at profanity, and is heavily stereotyped.

The worst aspect of this game has to be the integrated RPG system. Stat points aside, players are also able to select what line they want to say at certain times during a dialogue. Often, these lines have nothing to do with the conversation itself, and makes no difference to the plot. You be modest or arrogant, but it still won't get you anywhere.

There's also the incredibly clunky and worthless Inventory interface. During the game, you come across thousands of worthless items that you automatically pick up and throw into your inventory. This creates a massive clutter of junk that you have to sift through in order to obtain what you want. Items include rotten apples, cereal and chocolate bars that refill 1/20th of your health bar. You can also drink alcohol to regain more health, but you come intoxicated and walk around with your vision spinning in circles. Someone never taught the Sniper that alcohol and firearms don't mix.

The visuals are also pure crap. The walls are bland and have recurring posters of Sniper: Path of Vengeance. Weapon models are barely recogniseable, and enemies are generic and stereotypical. As you fight against Italian mobsters and Chinese drug traffickers, they'll all scream "Ah! Sniper..." as you kill them, as if everyone knows you. And sound? The sound of my keyboard is more accurate at portraying machine gun rounds than Sniper: Path of Vengeance.

But it gets worse. The game is heavily bugged. That's right, the engine is incredibly crude, and even the game's launcher causes the game to freeze and crash often. There is no auto-save feature, and there are many features that are hard-coded but are unknown to you. For example, you might want to change your Use key to your Middle Mouse button, so you can easily use Items in your Inventory by clicking them. However, the Middle Mouse button also turns on the flashlight on your SIG or P90, so whenever you use an item, you flash your flashlight, drawing attention. But wait, there's more.

Prepare yourself for the biggest irony of all. There is not a single sniper rifle in the game. That's right, Sniper: Path of Vengeance contains no sniper rifles. You use pistols, assault rifles, machine guns, submachine guns, but no sniper rifles. The only gun that comes close is the scoped M-14, and you rarely get to use that, if you even find ammunition for it. Besides, since everything is based on Half-Life-esque exploration and action, the best weapon is not the sniper rifle, but the shotgun.

Seriously.

Thankfully, there's no multiplayer.

In short, the game has poor visuals, poor gameplay, poor storyline and poor execution. Sniper: Path of Vengeance does not contain sniping, nor does it contain a path of vengeance.

Graphics: 3/10
Sound: 4/10
Gameplay: 2/10
Replay: 1/10
Overall: 3/10

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 06/05/04