Heroine of the Sniper

Developer: kido | Publisher: kido | Release Date: 2019 | Genre: Action / Indie / First Person Shooter | Website: N/A | Purchase: Steam

The sniper rifle is often the most satisfying weapon in most shooters, so it is no surprise that there are a couple of games available already that focus almost exclusively on these ruthless long range weapons. Heroine of the Sniper is a decidedly lighthearted take on this genre and casts you in the role of a rookie sniper. After a quick training session, you are thrown into the thick of things as your heroine is called from one implausible situation to the next in order to put her sniper rifle skills to the test.

If it is not already obvious from the name, Heroine of the Sniper is pretty much a first person shooter where you will spend most of your time behind the scope of a sniper rifle. However, instead of shooting people in the head, the game throws all kinds of other strange challenges your way. These range from shooting T-800 style Terminator robots in the head to taking out armored cars, , helicopters, trains and bombs. The game only features fifteen relatively short missions, but these show a surprising amount of variety. One mission might see you using the sound of fireworks to mask your gunshots while another requires you to monitor the status of bombs on the side of a shop in order to shoot them while they are not armed. The game allows you to select Easy or Normal difficulty for these missions, but you can also unlock a Hard mode upon completion. In addition, the game provides you with a ranking for your time, accuracy and other factors when you complete a mission, as well as a point that can be spent upgrading areas such as your magazine size, reload speed, recoil reduction and more.

Even with the multiple difficulty settings and Steam achievements to aim for, Heroine of the Sniper is a very short game and most players should be able to complete it in one or two sessions. This is a pity, as the game is quite entertaining while it lasts, despite obviously being made on a very limited budget. The use of stock assets, small environments and low detail also makes it very clear that Heroine of the Sniper is not some lavish AAA production, but considering its low price, we won’t harp on about that too much. One thing that we did like about the visuals, despite everything being a little rough around the edges and lacking in polish, is the inclusion of your character on the HUD. She takes up the bottom left corner of the screen and feature a variety of animations to indicate how well or poorly you are doing. Some players might see this as a distraction and it is a little disorienting at first to see her in profile while also viewing the gameworld in first person, but her inclusion is a neat touch. It would have been interesting if the rest of the visuals were anime themed as well, but instead everything else is made up of realistic looking assets. In addition to being able to change the resolution, Heroine of the Sniper also allows you to adjust the level of detail, but even with everything turned up, it is still not much of a looker.

There’s not much to say about the music in Heroine of the Sniper as none of the tunes are particularly catchy or annoying. The game does feature very decent sounds for the guns and explosions, but no voice acting of any kind. The controls are of the straightforward WASD variety, although you can customize everything. Movement is not as smooth as we would have liked, but most missions don’t require you to go very far, so it’s not really that big of a deal. To fire your weapon you press the left mouse button, while the right is for activating your scope. You can then use the mouse wheel to zoom in or out, and there is also a button for holding your breath, which steadies your aim, but can obviously not be done indefinitely.

Overall, Heroine is a pretty straightforward and simple game that was made on a small budget, but while it is very short, it did manage to keep us entertained. It doesn’t really have a story, but the short missions with their strange, non-violent objectives reminded us a bit of the Point Blank series by Namco. The on-rails shooting sections also break up the sniping sections nicely and we definitely would have liked to see a few more levels. It’s not the first time that this type of game has been done before as Heroine of the Sniper bears more than a passing resemblance to an old Flash game called Material Sniper, but it’s still an entertaining way to waste some time.