Sniper Dan Review - A Sniper Rifle That Never Pulls the Trigger on Anyone

Imagine putting a sniper rifle in the arms of a pacifist. Now imagine a game that has a ‘sniper' in its title, but you're not allowed to kill anyone. Well, that's exactly how Sniper Dan plays. Sniper Dan is a small, Roblox-like game that puts a sniper rifle in your hands and lets you use it for everything but killing. As the game states at its very beginning, ‘We don't shoot peeps or animals; we aim to please,' and that might just be the cutest line I've seen in a video game.

Sniper Dan, of course, cannot be taken seriously. The sniper rifle is your main tool and the means to get every job done. At the beginning of the game, you are given a sniper rifle that holds three bullets in its magazine and an unlimited amount of ammo. However, instead of shooting people or animals, you're here to help them with your rifle. At the start of every level, you're given objectives that can progressively expand. ‘Activate the Fountain', for example, will be written on the right side of the screen; how, where or under which conditions, well, it will be up to you to figure out.

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Sniper Dan never lets you forget it doesn't take itself seriously, right down to the supervisor cheerfully welcoming you to a cracked, half-furnished office.

You'll start the game inside the town, where you'll get jobs, shop for items, parts and upgrades, and prepare for the missions. Each level you visit has loads of jobs to do, and to finish the level, you'll have to finish all the jobs. You'll climb the tower, draw your sniper rifle, whose scope can be zoomed in and out, and you'll observe the crowd, trying to spot vague explanations of what to do for each job. For example, one job will require you to take a selfie, and after scanning the area for a while, I spotted a small camera. I shot it instinctively, and it shot a selfie, finishing the job.

Finishing each job earns you money, and you'll spend that money on buying upgrades for your rifle, different trinkets that can help your gameplay, cosmetic items and more. Shooting people or animals will give you penalties in money, and money can also be found hidden all over the levels. To be completely precise here, Sniper Dan feels more like those ‘Find the Difference' or ‘Find the Details' games rather than a proper shooting game, although the shooting is all you'll ever do in this game.

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This is the puzzle at the heart of Sniper Dan: scanning a packed crowd for whatever vague clue solves the job listed on the right.

Seriously, if you want to enter the shop, you'll have to shoot it. Pausing the game is done by shooting your van keys, while upgrading the guns is done by shooting the upgrade store. You don't move in Sniper Dan; you just shoot stuff.

The objective variety is very impressive for such a small game, and for this, the developers deserve my utmost respect. The creativity in hiding the jobs and obscuring their real meaning is really commendable, too. Figuring out what to do with each job was always a puzzle on its own, and I really like that approach. As new levels become available, the places become bigger and more crowded, and some jobs are a real pain to solve. For such a small game, the level of challenge deserves every praise.

Where Sniper Dan does stumble a little is in level design. The jobs themselves are inventive enough that they rarely repeat, but the towns and parks they're set in start blending together the further you get. New locations bring bigger crowds and more props, yet the general layout and feel of each level rarely stands apart from the last.

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Every solved job pays out, and figuring out that a job called 'Blow Bubbles' meant finding someone with dry lips is exactly the kind of reasoning the game rewards.

Regarding visuals, I already said the game is very similar to Roblox. The models look like they literally jumped out of Roblox, and the level of quality here is very low; however, this is totally fine and how the game should look. For me, if it looked any different from this, it would be a miss.

The music that plays in the background also gives a note of that unseriousness. A happy soundtrack completely supports this pacifist approach of the game, and it serves to relax you all the time. Shooting sounds paired with the sounds of reloading and whistling bullets are as authentic as they can be, and this part of the sound design is very well done, I'd say.

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An A rank with a handful of bad hits along the way is about as fitting a scorecard as this game could hand out.

Conclusion

Sniper Dan is the kind of game that will relax you after a long, stressful day, or perhaps after a stressful stretch of a more serious game. You take a sniper rifle in your hands, and you help people by shooting everything but them. If you want a bit of a challenge in a game, Sniper Dan will provide that too, because some jobs can be proper puzzles to solve.

Sniper Dan delivers exactly what it promises: a fun, relaxing experience perfect for filling the empty space between more demanding and more serious titles, and if you're looking for something of the sort, I can recommend this game.