Scattered curiosities such as mini murder investigations or antique sniper rifles litter the map, so no matter where you go there’s usually something worth exploring for. Most objectives involve scouting out an area, tagging targets either with your scope or handy drone, and then eliminating everyone to rescue prisoners, take out a high value target or pacify an outpost. For clarity, this isn’t Far Cry (the open world is nowhere near as vast), and the 26 missions and 16 side missions won’t take you all that long to get through, but what’s here is well-designed enough. By comparison, Ghost Warrior 3 is made of freedom. My biggest complaint against Sniper Ghost Warrior 2 was the lack of freedom, that a game that should be about intricate recon and precision execution was so frustratingly linear. Jon is a man with a mission, wilfully disobeying orders from whichever shady agency is writing his cheques to go off the reservation now and then for a spot of casual head-shotting, all of which is facilitated wonderfully by the new open world structure. While this sounds a bit negative, it’s actually surprisingly enjoyable. Typically, if it’s neither a cowering civilian nor stunningly beautiful black ops agent, it needs a hole in its head. Aided by Lydia Jorjadze (yeah, I can’t pronounce it either), his super-hot, super-badass ex-squeeze, and Frank Simms, the phoned-in, wisecracking “voice on the radio”, Jon sets out to perforate his way through an entire mercenary army with less regard for human life or bad guy hierarchy than Nathan Drake. To do so, he takes cues from what shall here-to-in-after be referred to as the John Wick Playbook: if you can’t find your primary target, execute everyone you can see by the judicious application of gunshots to the head until the only bad guy left standing is the one you want. Two years later, Jon is sent to Georgia on a mission to destabilise the current regime of terror, a mission he plans to bastardise as a means to search for Robert. Lifted straight from a Call of Duty game, the plot sees North’s brother (and fellow sniper), Robert abducted by Georgian terrorists for reasons unknown.
New leading man Jon North is fairly dull, as is his story.
I know that, being dead honest, he was hardly a dynamic protagonist, but for fans of the series it’s a bewildering change. Had CI made major sweeping changes to the story, setting or themes, it would have made sense, but they haven’t, which begs the question: where the hell is Cole Anderson? Going into Sniper: Ghost Warrior 3, you have to wonder why developer CI Games (formerly known as City Interactive) would replace one incredibly bland, “America, fuck yeah!” protagonist with another.