Game Reviews

Sniper Fury - Turns out fury isn't conducive to successful sniping

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Sniper Fury - Turns out fury isn't conducive to successful sniping
Why is your iPad just sat on your lap?

Oh, sorry, I'm playing Sniper Fury. Well, I would be, but I've reached an impasse and there's basically nothing I can do. I need my energy to regenerate far enough so I can raid a base, get some gold, and then spend it on mashing components into my assault rifle.

That doesn't sound like that much fun

You're right. It's sort of like waiting for an email from an incompetent colleague at 4:59 on a Friday afternoon. You can almost taste the first weekend pint, but it's so far away. Except of course the beer here is shooting people in the head.

So the shooting people in the head is as good as a delicious cold pint?

Er, unfortunately not. It's actually pretty dull. This is your standard sniper game fare. You swipe around the screen to find enemies, slide a finger along a bar to look down your sights and zoom in, then tap a button to fire.

And then people's organs explode?

You've got problems. There's a splurge of blood and some reasonably entertaining rag-doll flopping, but the gore is kept to a minimum really. The reload animations are nice I guess, but the action here just feels a bit stilted.

You don't feel like Mark Wahlberg in Shooter then?

I rarely feel like that. Sometimes you're so close to the action that you kinda feel like it'd be easier to reach out and smack your assailants than peering down your site and blasting their face off. Plus the mechanics here are just a bit too simple.

Simple how?

Well there's no breath-holding here, which has kind of become a staple of good sniping games. Compare what you're doing here with what you get to do in Hitman: Sniper and Sniper Fury comes off a pretty poor second.

No shooting fuse-boxes or setting off car alarms?

Nope. There are some red barrels. Guess what happens when you shoot them? Otherwise you're just zooming in, popping off a shot, and zooming out to cock your rifle. There are some assault sections that see you wielding an assault rifle, but they feel flimsy and tacked on.

Are there at least some nice guns?

Not really. You don't feel any sort of connection to your weapons. You upgrade them, but it all feels a bit arbitrary. Throw some cash at your barrel and get more power. And you'll need more power to play, and the slope gets increasingly steep after the first hour or so.

Is there anything interesting here?

There's a reasonably sharp asynchronous multiplayer mode that sees you invading other players' bases, but it costs energy. A lot of energy. I mean, there's nothing horribly broken here, but there's nothing that makes you want to reach in your digital wallet either.

Not getting a recommendation then?

Unfortunately not. There are better sniper games out there, with interesting new ideas. Sniper Fury just feels like it's come out a couple of years too late. It's not an awful game, but it's not one that's going to entice you in for more than a few minutes.

Sniper Fury - Turns out fury isn't conducive to successful sniping

There's some shooting to be done here, but it's not very exciting, so you probably won't do much of it
Score
Harry Slater
Harry Slater
Harry used to be really good at Snake on the Nokia 5110. Apparently though, digital snake wrangling isn't a proper job, so now he writes words about games instead.