Marine Sharpshooter II: Jungle Warfare (PC)

GameSpot editors' review

• CNET editors' rating: 2.5 stars OK
  Detailed editors' rating
  Overall score: 5.3 (2.5 stars)

• Reviewed by:
  Erik Wolpaw
• Reviewed on: 09/07/2004
• Released on: 06/24/2004
• Originally published on GameSpot: Marine Sharpshooter II: Jungle Warfare (PC) Review

Marine Sharpshooter II: Jungle Warfare is better than Marine Sharpshooter. It's also the best of the five budget-priced shooters that developer Jarhead Games has churned out over the last two years, which is mostly a testament to how bad those earlier games were, because Marine Sharpshooter II still isn't very good.

For example--and this may be a spoiler for anyone still planning to buy the game and then play it all the way to the end--the final boss is a Hutu strongman you've been chasing all over the impoverished sub-Saharan nation of Burundi. He's introduced in a cutscene that makes it appear that he has run off somewhere, at which point an unending stream of rebel soldiers begins attacking you from a few hundred meters away on the far side of an impassable gorge. Rather than having some sort of distinguishing feature or behavior, the rebel boss acts and looks almost exactly like the surrounding grunts. Worse, the fight takes place in a downpour at night, meaning you'll probably be using night vision, which turns everyone into an even more indistinguishable green blob. The boss also exhibits absolutely no reaction to being shot. Because he's hiding behind a pile of crates and because you've had eight hours to become acclimated to the spotty collision detection--sometimes a tuft of grass will act as a bulletproof barrier--you'll assume that he's a minion inadvertently protected by the gameworld's haphazard physics and move on to other targets. Finally, you'll need to shoot the guy--who doesn't look like a boss and doesn't react to being shot--11 or 12 times before he'll die, a level of superhuman endurance completely unprecedented in the game's otherwise realistic damage model, all of which adds up to one of the most confusing boss encounters ever created. You expect a certain level of corner cutting in a budget game, but a small budget can't excuse what is, in this case, purely a failure of design. This boss battle isn't just poorly implemented; it's terrible from inception.

The game also features the more traditional shortcomings of budget games: bugs, bad graphics, and generally crummy gameplay. At three different points during the game's five large missions, the scripting broke in such a way that reloading a previous save was the only way to continue. Since the game doesn't let you reload any arbitrary level and only stores one autosave and one quicksave, you'll need to make hard saves at regular intervals; otherwise, you could be stuck restarting from the beginning, or, more reasonably, you might give up altogether.

The game's visuals--powered by Lithtech's Jupiter engine--are bland and repetitive, which is pretty much to be expected in a value-priced shooter. Unexpectedly, a good half of the game takes place in areas so dark that you'll need to use night vision the entire time. The uniform green lighting makes the scenery even more monotonous.

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