Going Open World With The Sniper: Ghost Warrior 3 PC Beta

Major sniper games are coming along like busses in 2017. You’re lucky if you get one a year, but now we have two coming in the space of a few months, both with developers looking to push their series to new heights. Sniper: Ghost Warrior 3 is the game with by far the bigger transformation, making almost a complete break from previous entries, and it’s been sampled by PC gamers with a beta that ran over the weekend.

This is a game with a lot of ambition, switching from a series of linear levels to a large open world environment set in Georgia, dotted with enemy encampments and giving you a variety of missions to choose from. The beta opens as you take on the role of American Marine Jon North, a sniper deep behind enemy lines in the war-torn country. Just two missions were available in this area, though with a large section of the open world to drive around and explore – this game’s a little bit like Far Cry in that regard.

Whatever situation you find yourself in or mission you take on, you’ve got a number of different ways to tackle it, with CI Games dubbing the three main approaches Sniper, Ghost and Warrior, and Jon can be upgraded in these three styles. You can go in with brute force, finding yourself an overlook position and start raining bullets down on the enemies, take the polar opposite route and sneak in, making close quarters takedowns and avoiding the patrolling enemies. Heading in all guns blazing, is also an option, though the odds will be stacked against you as enemies quickly close in and return fire.

You’ll be at your best mixing these styles of play together, but the game gives you the ability to pick your fights, if you will, letting you skip time by catching a few minutes of shuteye in the safe houses and simply by letting you come at a mission from any direction. That’s only aided by being able to throw a little drone up into the air and scout the area, spotting and marking enemies, or if you’ve upgraded it, hacking cameras and other things in the world.

I’ll admit I’m a pretty boring and conventional player who looks to mix sneaking with clean and precise sniping. I’m also the kind of player that, if things go a bit wrong, will be quite likely to reload a checkpoint. This game seems to play into that kind of player’s hands, with the missions I’ve seen both in this beta and before having nice self contained mission areas. Yes, you can spend a long time finding your way through an area, but know what you want to do, know what’s in front of you, and it’s possible to speed through with the most efficient route.

That’s exactly what I did in the Blockout mission, which tasks Jon with hunting down a war criminal who’s holed up in an abandoned apartment building. You’re pushed to visit the building opposite, with an optional mission objective taking you up onto the roof, which gives you a perfect view of the target and even features a zipline that takes you out of the area to complete the mission.

There’s still a few things that I’m a little wary of, though, that I hope CI Games can polish. Stealth play, for example, is hampered by all enemies in the area being immediately alerted to your presence and position if you’re spotted, and when there’s no leeway in close quarters if you come face to face with an enemy, it feels a bit too punishing for normal difficulty. The drone is also a bit too wobbly to control, in my opinion, and feels like it could be more stable as you scout a position from the air.

Performance was also pretty ropey on my PC – featuring an Intel Core i5 3570K and Radeon RX 480 – dipping well below 30fps at times, before recovering to the high 40s and up. I’d expect this in particular to be improved as the game heads toward release in April.

However, on the whole, playing the beta helps to back up some of CI Games’ ambition. Going open world in particular is a major leap for the series, and while it’s not trying to be as dynamic as some other open worlds, it has a big effect on how the game plays that I think is absolutely for the better.