Lets start with the first major gripe. I bought (pre ordered) the season pass edition to get the online maps and gameplay. THERE IS NO ONLINE GAMEPLAY! that portion has been delayed for another 3 months apparently. For my season pass cost I got a buggy to drive in game instead of the default jeep. Oooooh. So this review is based solely on single player. That said, I would have been happy to get a good 1st person single player sniper game, but this isnt it. I have played it a lot. Its the reason it got a two in the stars, At various times in this game it can be a 3 star game or a one star game. Right this second its two and picking two stars is a middle ground option. Gameplay wise this is a lot like a cross between farcry and project igi (if anyone remembers igi on pc). I really wish this was a lot like igi as that old game had far more character than this game. I dont want to throw hate at this game, it had so much potential, but it really has some major issues that stop it being a big league title and feels like its creators are punching a long way beyond their weight. So unfortunately I need to start the review proper with a catalog of issues. The first shows itself quickly. Loading times are ridiculously long. I mean three or four minutes at a time. On first loading it takes you to a screen where you press x to continue, so nipping for a brew after you initially start the game only gets you to this x screen. Pressing x then 'continues' the loading to the actual 'start campaign" screen. This is where you go and make a brew, or sit around for four minutes watching a loading screen. Driving aspects of the game are important, you need the vehicle to get to mission locations (and to roam free when you fancy, which you wont after a while). So you walk close to the car and press square. Nothing happens. Move nearer, nothing, slide along the car pressing square and eventually you get level with the door and get in. You have to be directly level with the door or nothing happens. Its pretty ibvious you want to get in, you are by the car pressing the 'get in' button furiously, but for some reason the coders have decided if you are not right by the door its not happening. Worse still, it has to be accurate. It doesnt end there though, not by a long chalk. Once your character responds to the command to get in the car, there follows a 5 second 1st person view animation as he climbs in while looking at his feet (like everyone does getting in a car, not), gets in the seat, then leans forward to put the ignition key in (also seen as a primary viewpoint) before starting the vehicle and being ready to move on. Its almost vomit inducing. At the very least the whole process makes it look like you are a drunk getting in a car. The headlights come on every time (very stealthy if you were just moving the car up a bit). While the button to turn off the headlights is now acting spongy. Its not an instant reaction, more of a hold for half a second before the game responds to the press. Pushing the throttle you set off, heading towards a cliff is always a funny moment at this point as the steering doesnt work! At all! Every single time you get in the car the steering is locked forward, you have to quickly waggle left and right to make the steering do anything but go straight. Why? No idea, you just do. When you get where you are going you press square to get out of the car and get yet another five seconds of a drunken driver but getting out of the car this time. If you want to keep the contents of your stomach, always get in and out of the drivers side, otherwise the animation increases to cover the sliding over the passenger seat. Staying with the car a little longer. You will use fast track a lot (a way to jump from one place to another without having to drive all the time). Points on the map open up that show these fast track points as you drive past them, see them once and they stay. But on starting missions you have to get to the car before you can use fast track. When you use this option the screen goes black and you are instantly transported there. Remember the car you got in? Apparently this game thinks every time you use tast track you should spawn by the signpost (thats the fast track point) OUT OF THE CAR! As fast track points are ofyen a fair way from where you actually want to be, this means another ride on the vomit comet as you again have to go through the 'get in the car' scenario. If you are in a car when you trigger a fast track, for the love of logic, leave us in the car when we arrive. At the very least I wish they would ditch that whole animation scene. So what else is wrong? Quite a bit unfortunately. Money is tight in this game. Earnings less than stellar as you play. Ammunition costs, it costs a lot. Use an lmg too much and you will see ten grands worth of virtual money disappear before your very eyes. Why thy set the game up to need so much messing about with ammunition and costs initially had me confused. But then I figured they were trying to inbuild some kind of carrot and stick scenario. Always something to work towards and not enough cash to do it. I hit a mission that really needed the 50 calibre, but in order to keep retrying that (ridiculous, but thts for later) level you need to keep buying ammo and repairing armour. It does nothing but add frustration to the game. Unlock the guns and let is pick them, but dont do this 'bank manager sim' thing where we have to keep working out what its best to spend money on. Then there is the menu itself. The button selections for moving through menus and selecting equipment/ammunition, purchase etc are abysmal. L1, r2, back using square, but use square at other points in the menu and you drop out of the weapons selection screen back to the cave. Rearm bullets pressing triangle (even though all this could be done with a simple menu and x for nearly everything), but when selecting to fix the silencer (more money) you press triangle, but then have to press x to continue. It beggars belief that anybody could come up with such an unintuitive menu system. Then there is the mission select system? It just keeps getting worse. You are in a cave. There are tables dotted around. On which is a computer dock on one, an ammo crate on another, and a workbench. There is also a bed to heal yourself if you are injured (Really?!). To heal yourself you go to it, press square then select how long you want to sleep, then press x, then press something else to wake up...... Omg, even writing this hurts my 'why the hell have they done this' thought process. Anyway, back to the tables, walk to the bench and press square (tack animation of characters hands using vice), then you can craft new ammunition and the like. Once done its square to leave that bench with more tack animations, then walk twenty feet or so to the ammo crate. Press square (cue tacky animation of hands opening box) do stuff, press square, tacky animation of box closing, then walk to wherever the docking computer us (might be ten feet, might be thirty) do yet more button pressing, get more animations, this is truly a chore. Why its not all in a simple onescreen (and logical) with an equally simple control method rather than this press nearly every button on the controller approach is baffling. Once you are happy and have selected a mission, you press the button to fast track there...... Nope, you dont, because you are not in the car. So now you have to trot through the cave, past your trophy case of 'special' rifles that you have found throughout the level (that you cannot use by the way, they are just ornamental). If you pick the correct route out of the cave and dont go down a dead end (there is a dead end) then you are out, then its another 100 yard dash to your car. Except is not, its a fifty yard dash and a fifty yard walk as your character runs out of breathe fast. I get the feeling this sniper is about sixty years old going of his performance on foot. On the second hq there is a zipline outside so you can go a bit quicker out there, but that whole mission start walk out of the cave use the zip line, get in the car gets tired real fast. Then there is the voice acting. BEYOND AWFUL IN EVERY WAY! Stilted and fake to the core. In the so called conversations between characters and your character too, the dialog os so obviously done in seperate sessions. Take this as a phrase. 'I want to take this disk and snap'. You know there is more, but in game there would be a character interrupting, its just so obvious the voice actor only had the words up to 'snap' as they stop dead. Plus they are cheesy beyond belief. You can turn the voices off (you will already have turned the awful 'suspense building' muzak off. But if you do then any guards using radios will be silent, although you still have to endure the radio beep sounds as they broadcast silence. So unfortunately you are stuck with the cheesy acting. I found i spent a lot of time shooting civilians in this game. Mainly to shut them up. So many times you get a character stuck in a loop saying the same thing over and over 'I am unarmed, please dont shoot me" after the fourth time when you are aim;essly seatching for a set of car keys in an area the size of b and q, you just kill tham for some peace. Some of the bigger guns and guns with high zoom, are near impossible to line up on a target. Waving all over the place, again this must be the sixty year old sniper.I am ok with some waving, but not the way this does it. Especially when a level dictates you pull off a 'miracle' shot of killing two guards with one bullet. This level (the bridge) is not alone in stacking the odds against you. You fail, then have to wait to reload the checkpoint. Then fail at exactly the same shot, then reload, then fail, then reload (you get the idea). Sometimes it really does make you want to give up. Finally, the lara croft 'esque' style of climbing rock faces and walls is superfluous. Its tacky and unreliable. You need to use l1 to use an extra sense to find shiny ledges to climb. They are too often an irritation. Lots of wasted time. Often these four or fuve minute climbing around stages then insist you climb back down to complete the mission. The worst part of this is all the areas you cannot climb despite them being visually identical to the climbing areas. There are numerous crashes coming your way. Game hanging and even crashing out completely. Not to mention the times you clear an area of troops but cant free prisoners because the game thinks there is one still alive. There isnt. The area is more clear than it could ever be for miles, but still the prisoners cant be freed. Remember the loading time issues? You will get them a lot. If you are playing through the campaign it jumps to different areas that are not stored in memory and have to be loaded. So a message pops up saying 'the mission you are about to do is in a different area, do you wish to proceed? If you want to play the 'next' mission, then you have to say yes and endure a nother four minute loading time (and be out if your car when you get there). Finally, guards are dumb. Spook them and sometimes they chase you down, other times they hide. Then two minutes later they forget about their dead colleagues on the floor and who shot them and just go back to patrolling. This game is fundamentally flawed in so many ways. If the guys who did igi remade it for ps4 i would play it over this all day long. But sgw3 is one to avoid. It could be good, but there are way too many problems to hope they will ever all be fixed. By the time multiplayer arrives most will have sold this, or at the very least given up any thought of getting fun out of it.