SharpShooter 3D is a Russian ANTIFA made beat ’em up using the Gzdoom source port. Yes, it is basically a Doom mod sold by a bunch of communists/anarchists. Given the current state of Steam and their lack of quality control, it is all too understandable for someone to turn tail and never give such a game a chance. Surprisingly enough, that would be a mistake. It has had actual work put into it and isn’t just one of the countless trash titles littering Valve’s storefront. Moving on to the game itself, we are given the choice of picking from one of three protagonists. Aside from the sprites and a funky melee animation for the female, they are identical, so choose the one that appeals to you most.
Starting off, you will hear some noises and the game suddenly comes into view. There you are standing in front of a dying obese person with a toilet lid in your hands. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out what happened here and you are tasked with getting right out of there and into a nearby city. You can either try to sneak out of there from the vents or run out swinging at everyone in that gas station. The level design usually allows for multiple approaches and is quite decent all throughout. I’m not entirely sure if it is like Postal 2 where you can avoid hurting everybody if you choose to play that way, but I never found a situation where I couldn’t just run away or let the friendly AI handle it aside from the last boss fight.
I didn’t go for that type of playthrough, the temptation of picking up a shiny bottle and throwing it at an enemies head was too much to bear. Every weapon you can get your hands on can be thrown and it feels awesome unloading a pistol into a group of enemies, throwing it into the last guy’s face, and finishing the job with your fists. It is pretty violent and I have no clue if it meant to be unintentionally funny, but it sure is fun. Firearms are rare however, most of the times you’ll have to get in close and personal with objects such as box cutter knives, shards of glass, and power drills to name some of the more common ones. They all break down pretty quickly, so it can be a handy skill to learn how much abuse they can take and throw it at your enemy to give yourself time to pick something off of the floor. Or you can stick to your fists, that is a perfectly valid option.
You can not switch weapons or store anything. To use your fists you have to drop what is in your hands, and that make carrying guns kind of dangerous, as you waste time dropping it to not burn up precious ammo on low tier enemies. It is a smart way to balance it and you can only carry up to four additional bullets aside from the four already in the clip. Unlike you, your foes do not run out of ammo nor bottles to throw at you. They are not common enemies and their wind up until they actually fling it is so long you can easily seek cover or step out of the way in the case of bottles. One trick up their sleeve is the ability to play dead. Make sure you finish them off least you find yourself being suddenly struck from behind. Even on the easiest difficulty, you can’t take much damage, so fighting intelligently is a must.
Quite often you will be accompanied by some of your Antifa mates as you storm down streets and wreak havoc upon the city. They can hold their own and become invaluable as the game starts throwing higher amount of enemies at you. There are some seriously impressive brawls to be had with people being clubbed to death with makeshift weapons and molotov cocktails engulfing others in flames. I have no idea who some of your enemies are supposed to be aside from the police and the homeless, but the actions by Antifa here certainly don’t make them look like heroes. I’m completely and utterly bewildered as to why this communist group is selling this game that doesn’t even cast them in a positive light. Also not helping matters is that they look nearly identical to the mostly black outfits of the rival group we are fighting.
The environments are pretty well made and filled with little details. Darn near every section of a level is so open-ended that it nearly feels like a sandbox, and one can’t help but to explore every nook & cranny, ignoring your actual objective. At a point late into a level, it becomes nearly meaningless since your health is refilled at the start of every stage and your weapons taken away. The act of actually walking away from an unexplored section though, is a diffcult one to take indeed. On the flip side of that, when you start a level and are unarmed, your curiosity becomes invaluable. You’ll never feel lost or turned around either thanks to the good level design and environmental detail to make a map full of landmarks in your head. Being so closely tied to the Doom engine, it does feature its wire-frame auto-mapper of the level should you feel the need to pull it up.
Your objectives are typically simple things such as going back to your apartment or escaping from somewhere. Shallow enough goals to give you a clear objective to pursue, as well as vague enough to give you the room to accomplish it in a multitude of ways. It is no Deus Ex, though it does give it a nice bit of replay value to see what you could do differently. As for the story itself, I haven’t the faintest honestly. I can only assume we are toppling the Russian government given the ending. Up until then it just felt like a bunch of meaningless carnage. The escalation from your brawl in a gas station at the start to the full-blown civil unrest in a shattered city at the end was clearly felt and does get you hyped for what is to come nonetheless.
Some of the larger zones have scooters that you can ride on and use to run over people. There are no innocents here, everyone wants to kill you, so if it moves then killing him before he gets a chance is usually your best bet. Unless they are Antifa…okay, maybe one or two of them from time to time won’t hurt. It nearly feels like a Build Engine game with the amount of interactivity it has. You can destroy a sink and watch water spurt out, screw around with a soccer ball on the field, and turn lights on & off to name some that come to mind. With all this work put into it, it makes it all the stranger that they don’t default the engine to opengl to make use of higher resolutions. And if you do that, the game will appear in black and white until you go into the Gzdoom ini file then change the line “vid_saturation 0” into “vid_saturation 1”. The fact that something so simple hasn’t been done after they put so much effort into the game itself is mind-boggling.
Sharpshooter 3D’s entire existence and the fact that it is actually a good game has left me feeling like I stepped into an alternate dimension. This is seriously the strangest title I’ve reviewed, which is saying something considering how many meme and hentai games I am inexplicably drawn to give a try. It lasted me a tad under two hours and a half, which was just enough to not wear out its simple gameplay and premise. It is what I would honestly call a hidden gem, one that certainly does not deserve to be lumped in with the rest of the shovelware products Steam is pushing. If you are the type that can leave politics out of video games and just play it for what it is, despite who it is made by, Sharpshooter is one title you just have to see for yourself.
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