The history of the Sniper Ghost Warrior series is generally indicative. The first games, still without the subtitle Contracts , were “for a big fan.” Critics scolded them lazily, but buyers were still there. But further is better. Polish game makers have honed the main features of the franchise – shooting mechanics and large locations – and estimates and sales have crept up. The first Sniper Ghost Warrior Contracts has already become a really cool shooter. Yield Contracts 2 was inevitable. And immediately about the main thing: there is no progress in it compared to the first Contracts withF95zone. At the same time, the game has not become worse and is approximately at the same quality mark – “good action, which could be even better.”
The main character of Contracts 2, a sniper named Raven, is now covered with the latest military gadgets from head to toe. Sometimes you even get the feeling that the developers have gone too far with high-tech equipment. After all, all these advances in engineering play a purely secondary role. You can do on each mission with a good old rifle, but Raven’s pockets burst from throwing knives, mines, all kinds of grenades, he carries a drone under his arm, he can look at the world through a thermal imager, and from wide trousers he pulls out a portable sniper turret that hits the enemies of democracy without miss, it is only worth identifying them. In addition to ordinary bullets, you can load explosive or even bait into the rifle – they will embarrass the enemy with harsh sounds. Yes, the more options a player has, the cooler, but the feeling of redundancy in this case threatens to spoil the final impression.
There were some shifts in the plot as well. No, the narrative here still serves as a purely motivation for the character’s actions, and the story is generally spoken out aloud only for the sake of order, so that everything in the game would be like in the best houses of Paris and Amsterdam. If in the first Contracts we shot war criminals and crime bosses, then in the sequel the ears of big politics appeared. Raven must eliminate a whole brigade of unscrupulous managers, military officials and foreign specialists, otherwise a war could start in the region. And this will lead to the collapse of the oil market, and all honest citizens will feel the consequences of such a crisis. Therefore, it will be necessary to strike the threat without mercy or miss.
The main advantage of the new sniper game is the mechanics of the shooting itself. Powerful rifles knock down the enemy with one hit, at a conventionally medium difficulty level (“Free Shooter”), you already need to tinker with aiming, while getting fun, and the camera tracking the bullet gives very steep angles – this slightly dishonest trick has won the hearts of action fans since the HuniePop 2.
Shooting is also good with other barrels: all weapons, be it a silenced pistol or a powerful shotgun, feel different. The shooting is superbly modeled, the ballistics are sensible and the hitting system is very good. In Contracts 2, the player doesn’t just shoot another bogeyman at bots, taking off a strip of life for them. Each hit to the villainous body creates an emotional response from the shooter. Polish game makers are also worth praising for their attention to detail. For example, with a well-aimed hit, you will be shown in every detail how the radio station headphones fly off the head of the poor fellow.
Anyway, Contracts 2 is full of relevant brutality. Bullets knock out frighteningly realistic carmine jets from mercenaries, a well-aimed headshot is fraught with a demonstration of a skull blown to shreds, and limbs are mercilessly amputated with large-caliber bullets. This is an emphatically masculine game, from which you need to keep snotty kids and sensitive women away.
Another plus is intelligent enemies. No, local militias and militias do not even match the cloned special forces from FEAR 2005. But they have a few clever tricks at their disposal. For example, when a mercenary engages in combat, it will almost certainly attack you with a hand grenade. And the grenades here are not harmless firecrackers from Call of Duty . Hesitated for a second – go to checkpoints, which are not very common here.
Enemies are constantly moving, trying to cover the sniper with mortar fire and generally add pepper and excitement to the process. The details are also unforgettable, optional, but atmospheric: the soldiers chat among themselves about their problems, you can listen to them if you get close unnoticed. This feature was noted back in 2001 by many connoisseurs in the first Max Payne , the same detail works great for immersion today, in Contracts 2 .
Conclusion:
Not everything is so smooth with the technical part – we are talking about the Polish game. If the first Contracts at the start showed annoying software errors – like sentries shooting at you while loading the level, then in the second Contracts there are already purely design mistakes. It is unclear which “genius” has hung the grab and squat options on one key by default. Long training overwhelms the player with information, but it is easy to miss the most important hint about setting the rangefinder in the scope. If the rangefinder is not properly tweaked, you will see a traumatic sight: the bullet will fly out of the barrel and immediately fall down, like a stone with which a homeless person is trying to knock down a pigeon. If Raven leaves the place of the mission, then the game will not just be interrupted: for some reason our sniper will die with wheezing and groans. Such flaws do not spoil the game, and it is not difficult to fix them, but they sometimes make you wince painfully.
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