Sniper Ghost Warrior Contracts 2 review: between open-world stealth and head-busting puzzle from a kilometer away

I remember playing the first Sniper Ghost Warrior back in the day, but it didn’t take long for me to forget about the franchise in favor of Sniper Elite. Now, with the rumble of the previous installment drawing my attention, I fell into the arms of Sniper Ghost Warrior Contracts 2 to see what all the fuss was about .

And now I get it, of course, because of this mix of slow motion sniper shooting and Hitman big map targets I have enjoyed like a pig in a pigsty. It is not the cleanest game, nor the most innovative, and sometimes it stumbles on the basics, but I’ve had a great time with it.

Between stealth and long-range shooting

Thrown in a fictional country inspired by the Middle East, we will play an elite sniper capable of eliminating targets from a kilometer away if he wants to. Our goal, as usual, is to spread freedom around the world with stabs in the back and 12.7mm bullets.

With five great levels at our disposal, we will have to walk through them in search of medium / short distance objectives or shooting areas from which to execute extreme distance shots. If you have played Hitman and you think about the sniper-style bonus phases, you will have an idea of what the latter consist of.

Shoot a control panel to open a door, wait for the target to be in position next to the arms dealer supplying them, and fire an explosive bullet that explodes on impact, annihilating both in the process. A mixture of puzzle and murder that, in any case, you can complete in much more crude ways.

The important thing is to finish off the target, be it a kilometer away with a perfect shot that nobody saw coming or with a shotgun to the chest when that is possible, but from the name I imagine how clear it is to what Sniper Ghost is. Warrior Contracts 2 knows how to do better.

Exciting and filling targets

For that of being something more than a fairground attraction in which to shoot the ducks – if the fairground ducks had their heads burst into a thousand pieces with spurts of blood and dislodged jaws -, Sniper Ghost Warrior Contracts 2 makes the decision to move between that succulent trick and the game in the open world.

The helicopter drops you in an area of the map and from there you must explore it while you kill putty soldiers, extract information from them and arrive at the areas marked in red that have one of the multiple objectives that you have in front of you before you can jump to the next scenario.

In the best of cases, those will be terrible bad ones with which to finish at long distance as we mentioned before. At worst, ending some installation / supply box / antenna, based on getting very close with stealth and trying to raise the least possible suspicions.

It is not badly resolved and you have a large collection of weapons and gadgets such as drones or antipersonnel mines to complete the objectives, but it goes without saying that it is much more fun and rewarding to hunt down moving enemies from a distance trying not to activate the alarms.

Double A Spirit

With the spirit of double A, his intention to offer replayability based on challenges in which to kill X character in a certain way brings him closer to the challenges of Agent 47, but here the artificial intelligence and the possibilities when it comes to following generated parallel plots by a domino effect they are much more humble.

In any case, it is a good way to give us more hours of play in a title that does not fall short in that sense. I would have even preferred not having to deal with such large maps and ” find me those boxes ” missions if that time had been spent on more challenges of greater depth and ramifications .

The excuse of getting points and money with which to unlock new weapons and accessories is perfect to invite you to explore more and take your objectives more seriously, but with a little thought and savings it is easy to reach the best weapons quite soon. And boy is it appreciated.

The ease with which to compensate for the wind and the distance will not change much because the help point in the scope will be there unless you deactivate it or choose a higher difficulty, but it is fun to play with the different calibers and types of bullet in order to complete some missions or others.

With great maps where you can enjoy long-distance shooting and some very well-inspired indoor infiltration sections, Sniper Ghost Warrior Contracts 2 manages to get more chest with the first than with the second, but all end up enjoying their particular point of fun .

I hope they do well and can go up one more step compared to what is shown in these two installments. The idea is good, yes, but by polishing some design decisions and avoiding fairly basic problems -those moments when you get stuck in a branch and have to go back to the last checkpoint-, we could be facing a franchise with a much more message recommended .