Sniper: Ghost Warrior 2
Sniper: Ghost Warrior 2 isn’t going to be everyone’s cup of tea. For one, it’s extremely linear and staged. But for me, this was ok. This wasn’t a first person shooter in the traditional sense, this was a lesson in making each bullet count.
Now I’ll be honest, I wasn’t expecting a game changing game here, and I was a little worried that it might come out looking and feeling like a budget game. Fortunately it’s been made with CryEngine 3 so the first thing you notice is just how dammed beautiful everything looks. No really, it’s a visual treat.
But it’s more than just the visuals, in the first mission you are stalking through a river and moving through some reeds. In most games I’ve played you simply glide through vegetation, but in Sniper 2, the reeds pushed to one side, bending down and springing back up when you had passed. It’s the little things that help make games what they are.
Part of the linear nature of the game, and the part that’s gonna upset most people, is that you have to follow your orders. In-fact some parts of the game won’t let you do anything else until you’ve listened to what you have to do. Whilst this does occasionally get frustrating, this is a Sniper game, and that is how Snipers work. The object, as the title states, is to be a Ghost Warrior.
The game has the usual multiple difficulty settings from easy where your enemies all get cross-hairs positioned above them so you can identify them as targets as well as a separate red dot that shows where the bullet is actually going to hit so you don’t have to worry about wind or drop, right up to the difficult setting where you have none of that and you have to accommodate for everything yourself.
The game gives you various challenges, including little gems like your spotter telling you to wait until one guy is standing in front of the other so you can take them out with a single bullet. Hell yes.
You get the usual hold the left stick down to hold your breath, but this also gives you a brief slow motion period where you can nail that head shot if the target is in the right position. And if you do pull off a worthy shot, you’ll get a cinematic cut scene where you follow the bullet and see the impact. Nice.
In-between the set pieces, you’ll have to make your way to various sniping positions and along the way, dispatch or sneak past various enemies, it’s in these connecting moments that you get to decide what to do – the stealth knife kill, or nip from the shadows – whatever it takes to get you to your next designated spot.
Unlike other first person shooters, Sniper 2 isn’t a game that you’ll want to play non-stop from beginning to end. It’s a game that you’ll want to bring out and play over the course of a couple of weeks. It adds a nice variety to you game collection rather than trying to be the must pay game for a given week or month.
And if you’re the kind of nutter that wants to keep on improve your skills, you’ll want to play it through all the difficulties, reducing the in-game helps with each run through.
