Sniper: Ghost Warrior: Contracts 2
Infiltrate bases and turn skulls into jelly in SNIPER: GHOST WARRIOR: CONTRACTS 2
Clumsy titling aside, Sniper: Ghost Warrior: Contracts 2 wastes no time getting to the good stuff. You’re Raven, a killer-forhire dispatched to the Middle Eastern state of Kuamar to prevent a war. Your target is Bibi Rashida, Kuamar’s de-facto head-of-state after her husband was assassinated. Rashida’s military response threatens to destabilize the regions and cripple Western economies. Your job is to clean this up by taking out Rashida herself.
All this is communicated in a direct, matter-of-fact briefing that encapsulates Contracts 2’ s pragmatic, no-nonsense design. Having gradually refined Ghost Warrior over five games, CI Games clearly understands the experience it wants to create. Contracts 2 delivers it with a quiet confidence that I thoroughly appreciated.
Your efforts to dismantle Rashida’s regime is spread across five missions so big they’re referred to in-game as ‘Regions’. These vast expanses of terrain include multiple objectives and various paths between them. Some locations you visit, such as a giant medieval castle that has both an inner and outer fort, would form the entire level of any other game.
Contracts 2’ s missions are divided into two categories. ‘Classic’ contracts are familiar infiltration affairs, where you use a combination of sniping and stealth to sneak into locations to assassinate targets and sabotage equipment. But newly introduced to Contracts 2 are ‘Long Shot’ contracts. These involve slipping through guard patrols to reach designated Overlook positions, lofty perches from which you snipe at targets over a mile away.
Each long-shot objective is an elaborate sniping puzzle where you use your sharpshooting skills to manipulate both enemies and the environment. An early example requires you to assassinate a target located at a solar farm, but the target is hiding inside the farm’s main building. To draw them out, you must disable the farm by shooting the control panels enabling it to harvest electricity. Doing this without raising the alarm also requires you to carefully eliminate the guards patrolling the facility, prising them apart with distractions, and lining up shots to kill multiple guards at once.
LEGALLY BINDING
The puzzle-like structure of these missions elevates Contracts 2 beyond a simple head-popping simulator. Contracts 2’ s blend of classic and long-shot missions helps fix a problem Ghost Warrior has struggled with for a while. Sniping in and of itself can get repetitive quickly, but physically infiltrating bases is the opposite of how a sniper operates. By combining Splinter Cell- like stealth missions with long-range shooting puzzles, Ghost Warrior can have its cake and eat it, providing both elaborate sniping challenges, and all the dynamism and gadgetry that stealth gaming offers.
The excellent presentation extends to the writing and voice acting. Contracts 2 isn’t an exercise in
Each long-shot objective is an elaborate sniping puzzle
jingoistic self-aggrandisement like Call of Duty has become. Rather, it takes a cold, pragmatic, and darkly satirical view of contract killing and deniable military intervention in the Middle East.
While Contracts 2 is undoubtedly the slickest Ghost Warrior game yet, there are a few lingering idiosyncrasies, particularly within the save system and enemy AI. Regarding the former, Contracts 2 employs an autosave system that disables itself when you’re either in combat or close to an enemy. It’s an unnecessarily convoluted system that could be easily avoided by simply letting players quicksave. As for the AI, it needs a secondary state between ‘passive’ and ‘every guard in the area knowing exactly where you are’. Stealth games are always more fun when they give you a chance to correct a mistake.
These issues aside, I’m impressed by Contracts 2. I like its approach to executing its design, that it doesn’t get distracted by tacking on a multiplayer mode or adding a loot system. The maps are fantastic, and the sniping is great. A perfectly enjoyable stealth sandbox.