How to enter to win

Potential and delivery, two aspects in video gaming that are crucial to the foundation of any game’s success. Troll and I is a game that starts off with a lot of the first one, potential. Trailers for it captured my attention and after playing ‘The Last Guardian’ at the end of 2016, I was intrigued to see if another “character with mythical creature’ team up game could bring a similar experience. Sadly it quickly showcases what happens when potential and delivery turns into ambitious but terrible execution of ideas.

I truly was looking forward to playing this game, really wanted to like it and just by the trailers this was a game that hinted at having so much of what I enjoyed about The Last Guardian but obviously with a much small development budget. I only wish that the developers saw sense in keeping within their limitations and focused on delivering on quality gameplay and story but instead Troll and I ended up being a total miss mash of ideas and concepts borrowed from other games and thrown together so haphazardly that it undoes its own potential in frustrating fashion.

The game is set in Scandinavia just after World War II and opens with a cut-scene showing a really badly animated meeting between some old rich dude and a sinister looking guy, and my heart sank in the first few minutes. The game engine and character models just look very much like a last generation game that has been given a HD remake, and not a very good one. The main story is set up however as the old man hires the sinister guy to hunt down a legendary creature of Norse Mythology, the Troll. The game then quickly jumps to Otto, a young boy who is sent out to hunt food for dinner by his mother. Now in the brightness of daylight the quality of animation and player models looks even more tragic. His mother looks more like an older sister and Otto for no real reason has dreadlocks that just look strange and out of place but you kind of just go with it.

The first hour or so as Otto goes hunting serves as a tutorial for the basic gameplay that Otto has. He has a hunter sense that enables him to track animals by their footprints and can cut down trees to make wooden spears to throw. This is where the potential quickly became over ambitious because so much of what the tutorial is suppose to teach the player about how to play simply becomes a demonstration of how much is just wrong in this game. It is so bad that if a demo for this game was released of just this first section, no one would go on to buy the full game. The hunting side is so clumsy and inaccurate thanks to an over the shoulder camera angle that really becomes a hindrance the further into the game you go. The footprints the sense is supposed to reveal are barely visible and very easy to lose track off forcing you to restart the hunt. When you do finally catch sight of the almost ninja level wild boar, the game then fools you into thinking you can throw a spear and kill it at a good range, but you cannot. Instead the game wants you to get closer but does not tell you this, instead the aiming shows you making contact with the boar then throwing the spear that makes it to the boar simply obliterates without hurting it.

That frustration is a theme that runs all the way through the gameplay and it breaks the experience so much. The game will show you how something can be done but then it is just so lazy in that it gives no follow up help should the mechanic fail, instead it just repeats the same line of dialogue for Otto where he admits he got it wrong and must try harder. If that is how you are going to do the teaching of gameplay mechanics then you have to make sure those mechanics are polished and worked but when they do not such as using spears, you have to do more to help the player get a better handle on how to use them better.

Something that stuck in my mind is that Troll and I is marketed as a full price AAA game but it is very clear that it had a very limited budget, so when such things as the visuals begin to fail you got to start asking how it was given the high tier of pricing for what ultimately comes across as nothing more but a £15 indie title or arcade game level release. When moving around the woods and the draw distance of the world around you is so short, literally watching trees, grass and foliage generate in front of you as you move is eye rolling at best and insulting at its worst. Almost everything this game does unravels the potential it shows right before it breaks down.

Nothing really makes this point more than when the Troll is finally introduced into the game. The game tries to make the player feel an emotional connection to the Troll much like other games featuring a partnership of two characters but sadly I never did. Gameplay wise with a combination of the RB button and Dpad, the player can switch between controlling either Otto or the Troll, with commands to follow or stay as well. In combat Troll is capable of just one hit killing enemies or sweeping them away with one swing of his arm. He is so powerful that you really never feel the need to use Otto in combat despite the game taking a bit of time to explain how Otto can craft weapons and fight enemies. Then there comes the awkward and clumsy platforming with level areas designed to make Otto and the Troll have to work together to navigate around which just feels forced and fails to work as fluidly as it needs to.

Overall Troll and I had the chance to do something really great but in trying to do everything the developers thought the game should do, it ultimately does so much of it badly. By doing it badly it often breaks the pace and gameplay to the level that it is more frustrating and draining than fun and enjoyable. It cherry picks popular ideas from other games and the original essence for the game is buried underneath the poor execution of those elements. This is not a game that deserves the AAA pricing that it has, if had been released at half the price along with other indie level games then it could have had a level of forgiveness almost but if you are going to be charging full price for this game it has to be of a better quality in terms of visuals and gameplay for which it just never manages to reach.

Potential and delivery, as I opened with, doing both of these can create a great game. But being over ambitious cost Troll and I in just about every way, it is just not enjoyable to play and with too many issues it certainly needed to be more refined before it released. Destined to be more of a “oh this could have been great” than an instant classic, it really is a shame it failed more trying to do too much than simply focusing on what it wanted to deliver.

When a game has had its release delayed multiple times, there is always a worry that when it finally releases, it will have problems. But there is some small amount of hope that the delays were worth it and the game has been polished and is ready to be released to the expecting public. But with Sniper Ghost Warrior 3 it was obvious from early reviews that it was sadly the first reality, that it had multiple issues especially on PlayStation 4, some very much game breaking. So when I was given the chance to finally try the game for myself I kept my expectations low and I am both glad and disappointed to say that those low expectations were justified.

Going to start off by saying that Sniper Ghost Warrior has plenty of issues, some are game-breaking, others are just eye rolling baffling as to how someone thought that was a good direction to take. But before I go into them, I do want to talk about some of the game that I actually enjoyed and felt actually worked well because whilst it is not all bad for this game, it just was not enough to save it.

The main story follows Marine Captain Jonathon North, who along with his older brother Robert, are sent to the Ukraine-Russian border to destroy Bio Weapon stockpiles who are at risk of being taken by terrorists. Acting as both a tutorial and prologue to the main story, it sets the scene as the brothers successfully complete the mission only to be ambushed by a group of Special Forces soldiers led by a man called Vasilisk, resulting in the capture of Robert but Jonathon is knocked unconscious and left behind and alive.

The story picks up two years later with Jonathon now sent into Georgia on a mission to try and destabilise Separatist cells which are rising in strength and wealth and have become an ongoing concern for authorities. Of course the story has to have that little extra emotional arc running through it and our hero Jonathon has an ulterior motive for taking on this mission. He has heard intelligence sources reporting that his brother Robert is still alive and is in Georgia, so whilst he is has a main objective, his real goal is to locate and rescue his big brother.

The story really feels as though it would make a great straight to DVD movie for either Steven Segal or Jean Claude Van Damme with how it sounds and plays out during the four acts that make up the main campaign. The dialogue in cut-scenes and between characters is cringe worthy at best with the voice acting more wooden at times than the forests you sneak about through whilst on missions. It makes trying to immerse yourself as the main hero in the game and story quite difficult. One thing that does try to make it easier is the new game-world style that CI Games have adopted for this third installment. Complaints about earlier games in the series were that they suffered from being far too linear, but now an open world has been used which is far to say is pretty much taken from Far Cry. Freedom to explore, take side missions outside the main story campaign adds more gameplay for the player and using a day and night cycle which the player can use a rest feature in the safe house to either do missions in the day time or sleep till the night to tackle missions under the cover of darkness.

Jon is basically a one man army, and whilst he has help from side characters such as his handler, former love interest and Georgian Sniper Lydia and a Mossad Operative Raquel, who bares more than a passing resemblance to MARVEL’s Black Widow in look and attitude. The side cast never feels believable however with some really inane conversations between Jon and Lydia about their past that feels like a really forced narrative in the breaks between missions. I did enjoy the flashback scenes where we see the brothers growing up with Robert as the older brother and soldier heavily influencing his younger brother Jon who is showing tremendous talent as a sniper. The story of the brothers is interesting enough to keep my attention but the rest is just noise and clutter.

I do like the gameplay which as I said feels far more Far Cry in its approach and style. I also like that you can craft your own weapons, ammunition and kit in the safe house and that whilst on mission, looting enemy bodies does not result in a handful of ammo. This means depending on your choice of weapon load-out, you can run out of ammo for a weapon on mission, forcing you to change strategy. I also like the missions themselves which can be anything from taking out a camp of enemy soldiers to infiltrating a base area to gain intelligence or to help disrupt enemy forces to gain favour with local resistance. So the game has aspects that I do enjoy, but when the issues it has just envelope the good things, it just become a frustrating mess.

On the first reviews for Sniper Ghost Warrior 3 on PlayStation 4, the load times became its own social media joke but it is one that definitely becomes less funny when it happens to you whilst playing. It literally takes up to five minutes to start the game and then to move to a different region in the game. The theme song, which sounds like a rejected Eurovision Contest contender, actually plays completely through twice during the loading screen, and it is a song you really do not want to hear for that length of time. I struggle to understand how or why the loading is this terrible for a game in 2017, it is such an annoyance and completely takes you out of the game experience. As you play main campaign missions, you can be sent to a new or previous region to continue and boom, five minute loading screen and annoying song which then after it loads, will play audio from the mission briefing whilst the theme song is still playing so you miss most of it.

For a game that is called ‘Sniper Ghost Warrior’ it is equally baffling just how many times the sniper part gets thrown out of the gameplay and you are expected to play it like any other first person shooter title. A mission may start with doing some reconnaissance using your drone to tag enemies or objectives but then the game will encourage you and even make it unfeasible to do actual sniping. Which is a shame because the sniping part is really the most fun, finding your target and taking them out is satisfying despite the bullet time kill animation often feels rather weak and underwhelming. There are issues with target range as well, I actually experienced enemies that were tagged suddenly not appearing when I zoomed in with my sniper rifle only to reappear if I sent my drone back up, which is just nuts.

Then you have the crashes, which when they occur, can will take the game with it forcing a restart, another five minute loading time and discovering that all progress on that mission was lost. It became so infuriating that when I first attempted to stream the game, it crashed on me on three occasions in a ninety minute period. Hit detection on weapons can also be hit and miss at times, especially with pistols up close barely doing any damage leading to that enemy turning around, raising the alarm and shooting me dead. Worse was during one early mission to take out a target on the local Hit List of criminals, I moved to a sniping location that kept me away from enemy patrols, using my drone to spot the enemy beforehand so I could pick a position giving me great line of sight for a long range shot only for the shot, which was right on the money, failing to go through the glass window where the target was standing. Buildings have a nice level of detail but if you are going to make players wait five full minutes for the world to load, if you are going to take the time to put boxes and lockers in enemy locations with padlocks, and fail to make them fully enough so the player can interact with them,  so when a player tries to shoot a lock off to loot it only to find its just a drawing of a padlock, it just breaks the world again.

Sadly this comes down to the problems and issues being far too large in numbers and game experience breaking to be forgiven for the good it does. After three delays it still seems as though Sniper Ghost Warrior 3 was not ready for release, in fact the planned multiplayer side is still in the ‘coming soon’ list that along with unacceptable load times and crashes on PlayStation 4 make this game a firm contender for the naught step. It should have been in a much better and optimised state to be released. It has the feeling that it was a “get it out and fix it later” mentality that is truly annoying to gamers right now. The main story missions become tedious after a while and with ever increasing deadpan character interactions in cut scenes, it is a chore to plough through this instead of fun. Never knowing how far you will get before a game crash wipes out your progress in that mission is beyond frustrating.

Time will tell if CI Games can get updates out to correct issues and fix the loading times but right now, this is a game heading straight to bargain bucket territory and that is the only time and pricing that should be considered before picking this up. Which is a shame because you can genuinely see the steps taken to add a new level to this series with this game, but being ambitious but rubbish is not a great way to make video games.