H-Sniper: Middle East Review

Every so often, you come across a game that makes you think that videogames were a mistake. I’m not saying that’s the case with H-Sniper: Middle East, but I’m also not not saying it.

You’re handed a sniper rifle and positioned on the top of a single-storey building. That’s as far as plot and tutorial as you get from developer Konnichiwa Games. The buildings and sand in front of you are littered with anime women in black bikinis and headscarves, unless you own the DLC, which removes the bikini.

As you fire at the clones, the camera follows the bullet most of the time. You then get points depending on where you hit and from how far away. The strike zones are: head, body, arms, butt, legs. Oh, they’re also armed with an SMG, though they also hold an assault rifle on their backs and a pack of dynamite on their hips — neither of which ever do anything, or even react to your bullets.

Once an enemy dies (it can take two shots), they will ragdoll off into the air, landing somewhere nearby. They usually just wander around the area in which they spawn, but some of them roam the ground and come within range to return fire at you. You take a lot of damage, so can only be shot a few times before dying and needing to restart. However, if you’re running low on enemies visible from your position, you can jump down and wander around yourself — which will put you within range of their weapons.

There are 100 achievements in this game, which is 10 for each kill zone and one for each of the first 50 enemies slain. So, you can technically complete this game to 100% with only 50 clicks of the mouse.

This game has nothing more graphically complex than some asset store models. The sprays of blood are comical, especially when a body goes flying from a tall building, and the vacant stares of your victims aren’t even animated.

The music consists of one track on the menu screen, and not a very good one. Sound effects are wind, the guns, and the enemies moaning when shot. But you can only hear them when it zooms in to slow-mo their deaths, so the moans are also slowed down.

I’m not sure what they were trying to say or accomplish with H-SNIPER: Middle East. Guns and half-naked anime girls should make games more fun, and yet this game has nothing except those two things and is simply an exercise in clicking. Even the leaderboard doesn’t seem to work, as it shows dozens of names, only 25 of them have a score and a name, all the rest are “player”. If someone gifts this to you, they wasted their money.