Sniper Dan Review – Review
The indie titles that tend to pique my interest are those that take well known ideas and merge them into something truly unique. Sniper Dan is the natural evolution of Where is Waldo? In videogame form. A hide and seek game where your goal is to help people across a large map with all sorts of small tasks. And by help I mean spotting and shooting objects with your sniper rifle. While the visual comedy and gameplay are entertaining, it’s this rifle’s scope that makes Sniper Dan wear thin rather quickly.
As a self-employed entrepreneur, Dan is called in to assist people all across town with his trusty sniper rifle. Each stage you are presented with a list of tasks to complete and perhaps a cryptic hint. Your only interaction with the world is through the scope of your rifle as you shoot and make the problems go away. Hitting people or animals isn’t just evil, it is also bad for your overall score. Solving the clue and helping out awards both money and reputation, which can be spend at the market to improve your rifle and offices.
The charm of Sniper Dan is in the vignettes of its levels. Busting harbours, busy parks and stretched out farmlands, the levels are pretty diverse. Each filled with all sorts of little absurdist jokes. Whether it is a walrus commandeering a pirate ship, cranes going haywire, fountains leaking or engines being clogged. You can only do one thing. Shoot at it with your rifle. It becomes this game of spotting what your request wants you to handle. Take the clogged engine. In the harbor you may first be searching the cars, but the actual solution is a lone boat that has seaweed all over its engine. The game plays with your expectations and more often than not peering over these locales is quite a challenge. Especially when alternative missions open up upon completion.
But again, interaction is limited and gets fairly stale. Your actions in the park, do not suddenly tell a little storyline with returning characters down the line. While you are rewarded with money to buy better scopes or outfits, frankly they don’t change much in terms of the gameplay. It is nice to collect small decorative pieces for your office, but there isn’t really a point to them. While I stand by that the levels are pretty diverse, I do think that the visual style makes it blend a bit together. For comedic purposes the big eyes and bright colors sell the tone of the game very well. But as much as I smirked or chuckled, I never really had a laugh-out-loud moment.
And ultimately that is the weird gap that Sniper Dan falls in-between. The charm of a hide-and-seek-book like “Where’s Waldo”? is in spotting the little connections. It is in having this physical object and art that has weight to it. Here Sniper Dan’s levels can be cluttered for nothing other than distraction and absurdism. There are a few missions to break up the pace. Urgent requests that net a bigger reward. Yet the game never feels comfortable in putting pressure on the player. You have all the ammo and time in the world. Making the choice of a sniper feel at odds with the game’s overall design.
On Switch 2, the experience with this Switch title was pretty solid. I will say that it is a bit of a shame that there is no native Switch 2 version that supports mouse controls. And even for the aiming itself, there are no gyro controls for those who prefer that. I wouldn’t put it past the team to come back and add those in later, but at least with the Switch version you can press your face up really close to the screen in handheld mode to spot your objectives.
I do love a good hide-and-seek like experience. Hidden Folks sold me on its charm with the cute visuals and audio design. And I had hoped to get something similar out of Sniper Dan. Where perception is rewarded. But in the end, I got bored fairly quickly. Viewing the world through a scope becomes a tunnel and made me less appreciative of the level designs. Its absurd humor did give it a distinct flavor, but with the meaningless rewards and progression this wasn’t a game I really wanted to stare at for too long. Because in the end that made me a bit too aware of how hollow it feels. Sniper Dan is a competent game, but once you’ve shot your shot, that is about all I can say.
