Reviewed: November 12, 2002
Reviewed by: Josh Lamb

Publisher
Xicat Interactive

Developer
IncaGold

Released: September 17, 2002
Genre: FPS
Players: 10
ESRB: Mature

3
3
2
3
2.8

System Requirements

Let's go ahead and review the story and setting of this game. You are a hitman known as "The Sniper". You're super-hardcore and you're one of the best in the industry. Except we sort of have a paradox, because you would be mildly shocked at how much sniping you don't do. You could easily be like other snipers and take time to formulate plans and not be seen, but instead The Sniper just sort of annihalates everyone within sight. Instead of just killing your target, you take out like six to eight policemen right along with him. Hey, might as well have used up all those extra bullets anyway, eh?

After viewing that little spectacle of what appeared to be Smurfs with guns you get caught by the Five-o, tossed in jail, and sedated with a drug. Five minutes later a guy flops onto a guard with all the ambition of a dying fish and calls it a riot. Semi-hesitantly, you grab the gaurds nightstick and just leave. Something is wrong though, because there appear to be eight guards for every prisoner, and none of your fellow convicts want to help you. They don't shake you, however, because after all, you can snipe them with a stick. Perhaps if I had been wielding a cardboard tube things would have been more diffucult.

Run into a room, clear it out, laugh at the AI that runs right at you with a stick while you blaze an automatic weapon at his eyebrows. This continues to be the pattern for beating the game. They do make up for it though, with their ghostly ability to walk through walls, doors, and other solid objects without batting an eye. You'll be quite suprised when that happens, I assure you.

I had assumed we were passed the idea of goofy items in an FPS, but this game pays homage to side-scrolling action games of the past, providing you with chicken drumsticks and vodka as power ups. What can you gather from this? Sniper: POV attempts to be serious with its massive violence level, but remains a silly, feable attempt at innovation in the market.

The one thing I can like about it was the idea of the point-skill-system. For instance, the more you use a weapon the more accurate you get with it. It's a nice attempt, but fails to have any impact because you're going to use a given weapon for a given situation and not keep a conscious awareness of your skill level.

Supporting details are as follows: Textures are bland and tiled over and over, water acts like gelatin, character models look like second-grade level artwork - that is, very strange and very blocky - animation is choppy, the colors were all out abused and neglected, and finally, the obscene amount of clipping in this game was frustrating to the extent that it will be responsible for the murder of several monitors.

Blood, oh the magical blood that hangs in suspended animation as if being held in place by imaginary shelves. The only visual feat accomplished in this game was that weapon models and the appendages touching them looked suprisingly decent.

Let's cover a final check on my grocery list of problems with this bi-polar shooter. Fifty percent of game characters get lip-synched while the remaining half get to talk through closed mouths. The ones that did get the treatment are terribly done...think of hearing a voice, and five seconds later the lips move. That bad, oh yes.

Weapon sounds, shmepon sounds the developers said. You get a nausiated feeling of using a paintball marker in a firefight when shooting at things, and it gets a little discouraging to hear your full auto machine gun make pelting noises.

Music takes twists and turns, and the plot does not. This game's music gets intense and electrifying when nothing is happening. Fast beats while you reload in an otherwise empty room make for an awkward pause to try and rectify at least some sort of logic as to why the music is thumping while you twiddle your thumbs. Not an Oscar winning score either I guess.

Put the box down, back away to the other end of the shelf, and pick up Deus Ex or something if you want an RPG element-injected first-person shooter. At lest it was innovative; still is actually.