ISO Stick Sniper review: when technical drawing meets sniping

If you’ve taken up drafting classes and know anything about isometric and orthographic drawing then you have what it takes to be a sniper, according to this game!

ISO Stick Sniper is a simple shooting game by Keybol Games, created for the Nickelodeon Addicting Games website. Sure, it may be marketed as a children’s game, but don’t think that the game is going to be easy. I guarantee you’ll be thinking hard.

(See: How the Pretentious Game trilogy taps on gamers’ imagination)

In ISO Stick Sniper, you take on the role of Viper the Sniper (are you feeling cool yet?), who has been assigned to shoot down the most wanted men on earth. To find your target, you are given an image of the structure he is standing (dancing, exercising, or vibrating) on as well as his exact location on said structure. The image is often a top-down view, but there are also levels where you are given the side and front views as well. On other levels, you are given text-only hints with no images at all.

Apparently, the most wanted men on earth are fond of sitting on gray, weirdly-shaped structures while doing sit ups, playing with hoola-hoops, or making weird dance moves. Why they are doing this is beyond me and I probably don’t want to know. What I’m sure of is that this game is not as simple as it presents itself to be.

Level one starts you off with something easy: a cube. Now everyone knows what a square looks like from a bird’s eye view. That’s easy. But as you move forward, the number of structures you have to compare against the original increases, and become more and more complex until you find yourself looking at optical illusions with weird, twisted multi-level blocks leading to nowhere.

If you have any background in drafting, imagining what multi-level structures look like from above should be quite basic, but unless you’re doing this on a daily basis, you’re going to struggle for a good while. Comparing these structures to the top-down image given to you can be such a task that it makes me wonder how kids are actually going to play this without an adult.

(See: You Can’t Beat This Game review: a single painstaking level of getting from point A to point B)

However there is no race against time if you’re an adult with fully-developed cognitive skills, considering you have an ample 1,000 seconds per level. Children, on the other hand, will need a lot of explanation about the most basic things, such as why a three-storey structure looks flat from the top. Depending on how quick a child picks up on this logic, a thousand seconds may or may not be enough even with an adult helping them.