Sniper: Ghost Warrior has been out for weeks now. I’ve been racking my brains trying to work out if it’s the worst shooter game of the generation. There are so many bad games to choose from but I honestly can’t think of one that’s even close to being as awful as this one. In case you need me to spell it out — don’t buy Sniper. It’s an awful game, where progression is so excruciatingly slow and miserable that I’ve only been able to play it in 15-min sessions.

In the game, you, the player, is Sergeant Tyler Wells. Wells is an elite sniper who does surprisingly little of his job in the game. He’s also noble and heroic.

It’s about half an hour before the game completely betrays its title, although it has a more snappy ring to it than Generic Shooter: Ghost Warrior.

Here are a few things about the game that are bad: the environment, the story, the graphics, the lack of decent weaponry, the AI of the enemies, the grappling hook, the voice acting, framerate, the terrible Chrome 4 engine, the physics engine and the way it pauses for a second or two as you hit each checkpoint.

Here are some of the things that are good about the game. You almost feel pity for City Interactive as the game is just so unforgivably poor. There’s a glimmer of hope in the introductory sequence as a spotter guides you through the rather covert assassination of Mr. Nasty Man.

It works quite well. You feel a bit like a real sniper for as change. Ten minutes later you’re roaming around a jungle, a village, a terrorist camp and blast off packs of baddies with your rifle.

The whole idea is that, because of the aforementioned sniper rifle, you are doing it from ever so slightly further away than you might in another game. Say, Modern Warfare 2.

Which is totally what this wants to be. It’s ugly, slow and bloated, crammed to the brim with all kinds of unnecessary padding and simply not necessary in the first place. It’s not like there’s a drought of quality shooters or anything.

Every time you think you might be onto something (some sniping), it goes off in a different direction. I used the pistol for most of the game and swapped the sniper rifle for a machine gun (from the corpses of my fallen, freedom-hating foes) whenever I got a chance. You’re not so much a Ghost Warrior but rather a poorly-equipped soldier.

It’s hard to tell why Chrome Engine 4 did such a bad job with the game.

It often manages to make you feel like you are wading through an invisible, knee-deep pool of treacle and, seconds later, floating through a parallel version of Earth where gravity doesn’t exist. It’s absolutely baffling.

Many of these flaws are somewhat mitigated in multiplayer, where you don’t have to deal with the AI issues or the crazy difficulty. The game’s Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, and VIP (one player is designated the VIP, which makes him a more valuable target) modes don’t offer anything earth-shatteringly different from other shooters, but intricate maps with countless hidey holes and shadowy spots make matches intense. It feels like opportunities have been missed as stages are compartively small and littered with enough objects that line up that perfect long range snipe against your opponents; you’re more likely to get kills spamming grenades or running around with a silenced pistol.

While Sniper: Ghost Warrior has a few pluses, they’re hard to spot as they are buried under the many design flaws that make the game a frustrating rumble in the jungle.

There are a few good moments in the game. Perhaps Sniper: Ghost Warrior is the kind of game that people want to play: a turgid, unexciting proposition of clamouring through dull, vacant jungles and shooting soulless bad guys at close range, with a sniper rifle, for the best part of eight hours.

The single player campaign will last about 12 hours but you got to have patience to stick to it for that very long.