Marine Sharpshooter II - Jungle Warfare

Publisher: Groove Games
Developer: Jarhead Games
Genre: Modern First-Person Shooter
Release Date: Jun 24, 2004
ESRB: MATURE
ESRB Descriptors: Blood, Strong Language, Violence

Number of Players: 1 Player

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.

Minimum System Requirements
System: Pentium III/750 MHz or equivalent
RAM: 128 MB
Video Memory: 32 MB
Hard Drive Space: 500 MB

Recommended System Requirements
System: Pentium IV/1 GHz. CPU or higher or equivalent
RAM: 512 MB
Video Memory: 128 MB

Screen Shots

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