Sniper Dan
Genre: Puzzle / First-Person Shooter
Players: 1
The Nintendo Switch 2 Difference
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Review:
Sniper Dan is a Puzzle game with First-Person Shooter elements released in 2026 on PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch, and Nintendo Switch 2. In this game, players take the role of an employee at a company that helps folks with various tasks and problems. And he helps them from a distance using a sniper rifle.
Right from the start, the comedy of this premise is immediately apparent, reminiscent of the Simpsons episode where Homer gets a handgun and proceeds to use it to do mundane things around the house… naturally with destructive consequences and a horribly irresponsible disregard for safety. In Sniper Dan, it’s much the same, though the destruction is relatively minimal, and as for safety, you’re expressly told not to fire at people or animals (when you do, they disappear and you get a penalty to your score). I have some issues with this that go beyond the way it dampens the comedy of the game, but I’ll get to that later.
Mostly, this game realized how absurd its premise is, and doesn’t take things too seriously. You’ll use your sniper to help folks hammer in loose nails sticking out of a board, to release a life saver ring to help a struggling swimmer, to open a stubborn tin of caviar, and other tasks that are similarly unsuitable for a lethal weapon. In fact, in the game’s menu screen, you select where you want to go on a map by, what else? Shooting at it, of course.
One of the things going in this game’s favor are its simple, cartoony 3D visuals, with bright colors and characters that look more like Playmobil figurines than real people. This is backed by a whimsical soundtrack that I found to get annoying pretty quickly. Overall, the presentation here is good, though there’s certainly room for improvement, especially since there’s plenty of aliasing here and the framerates can drop at times.
When it comes to the gameplay, this actually seems closest to a Hidden Object-style Puzzle game, with players searching around busy locales for the tasks they need to complete, as well as discarded banana peels to clean up (by shooting them), fireworks to set off (by shooting them), and coins to collect (by… you get the idea). Completing tasks and shooting coins gets you money to spend in a store to buy upgrades, and… okay, now it’s time for me to start complaining.
Right from the start, your fire rate and reload time is agonizingly slow, and your clip size is tiny, for no good reason. The game does have brief moments where an emergency pops up and you need to respond quickly in real-time, but for the most part there’s no need to rush, so the game throttling your ability to act by limiting the speed of your shots is just frustrating… and then the game’s in-game shop offers to sell you marginal upgrades to your weapons, basically forcing you to grind in-game to get the ability to play the game without these tedious restraints.
Another issue is that many of the tasks you’re given are vague and don’t really tell you exactly what it is you’re looking for. One task tells you to free some lobsters, and I looked all over the area for lobsters before eventually discovering that what the game actually wanted me to do was open a lobster trap that a woman trapped herself inside… apparently while she was role-playing as a lobster. To be clear, she wasn’t dressed like a lobster or even wearing red, I was just supposed to infer that because she was inside a lobster trap, the game meant I needed to help her.
For another task, I was told to help unclog an engine… on a map where multiple cars and boats are in various forms of distress, some with smoking or burning engines. The game does offer little brief one-sentence descriptions of tasks when you look more closely at them, but they’re often unhelpful. You also have hint “tickets” you can use to help point you in the right direction, but you have a limited number of these, and when you use one up, that carries to future levels.
As if that wasn’t enough of a problem, the game’s rules are frustratingly inconsistent. The game punishes you for shooting people or animals, right? Oh, but one goal is to shoot someone’s peg leg to shorten it, which I did… but then later on I see another character with a peg leg and shoot that leg too, only to get penalized. At another time, you play a minigame of sorts where a giant squid creature is trying to steal donuts and you need to shoot its tentacles before they can snatch the desserts… but isn’t that shooting an animal, the thing you’re specifically told not to do? Ugh.
Before concluding, I should point out that this game supports the use of the touchscreen, which is great… but you can’t fire shots this way, and still have to use ZL or ZR to do that… so, not so great.
Overall, I still like Sniper Dan, and I think it has a fun concept and it does deliver that concept with a good amount of humor. But the gameplay has multiple problems with unclear and inconsistent instructions, as well as deliberately poor pacing early on thanks to how slow your gun is at the game’s start. Overall I think if you like Sniper Dan’s concept, you’ll probably enjoy it, but it definitely doesn’t seem as good as it could have been.
tl;dr – Sniper Dan is a Puzzle game with First-Person Shooter elements where players take the role of an employee at a company that helps people with various problems by shooting at them with a sniper rifle. This works out as a quirky take on the Hidden Object-style Puzzle game, and while it has a great sense of humor, it’s bogged down by unclear goals, inconsistent rules, and terrible pacing at the start. If you find the concept amusing you’ll still probably enjoy this, but it definitely doesn’t reach its full potential.
Grade: C+
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The Nintendo Switch 2 Difference
Sniper Dan (Nintendo Switch 2)
Genre: Puzzle / First-Person Shooter
Players: 1
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Review:
Sniper Dan was simultaneously released on both Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2, and while the Nintendo Switch 2 release isn’t a “Nintendo Switch 2 Edition”, it does receive a 100% discount if you purchased the Nintendo Switch version of the game. The good thing about this is that this effectively means you get two copies of the game if you have both a Nintendo Switch and a Nintendo Switch 2. The downside is that save data isn’t transferable. Okay, but what benefits does the upgrade have?
I do think the resolution is improved on Nintendo Switch 2, but not as much as I would like – this game still suffers from a lot of aliasing. The framerate drops of the Nintendo Switch version are gone now too, so that’s an improvement. However, overall this definitely doesn’t look like a massive overhaul, or even one you’re likely to notice if you’re not looking for it.
One improvement the Nintendo Switch version has that is very welcome is the addition of Mouse Mode support. Now, this isn’t dynamic Mouse Mode, so you’ll need to decide between controlling the game with Mouse Mode or controlling it with standard gamepad controls, but the good news is that Mouse Mode works great here, and really feels like the way this game was meant to be played.
Finally, there’s the loading times. On Nintendo Switch, it took me 27 to start up the game (game saves load automatically) and 6 seconds to load into a level, while the Nintendo Switch 2 version took 10 seconds and 4 seconds, respectively.
Overall, the big change here is the addition of Mouse Mode controls, which is an excellent addition and well worth the upgrade, especially since said upgrade is free. And while the underlying game still has its issues, I think Nintendo Switch 2’s Mouse Mode controls make it the ideal way to play the game, at least outside of the PC platform.
tl;dr – Sniper Dan is a Puzzle game with First-Person Shooter elements where players take the role of an employee at a company that helps people with various problems by shooting at them with a sniper rifle. This works out as a quirky take on the Hidden Object-style Puzzle game, and while it has a great sense of humor, it’s bogged down by unclear goals, inconsistent rules, and terrible pacing at the start. If you find the concept amusing you’ll still probably enjoy this, and the Nintendo Switch 2 version’s Mouse Mode controls are an excellent addition, but it definitely doesn’t reach its full potential.
Grade: C+
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