Sniper Ghost Warrior Contracts — E3 Demo Preview
It’s no secret that CI Games’ Sniper Ghost Warrior 3 missed the mark on some occasions. It was a game that wanted to fulfil all three pillars labelled in the title, but some elements of the open-world title felt lacklustre, which is why the developer is changing things up a bit with Sniper Ghost Warrior Contracts, a game that we got a hands-off demo and a gameplay session of at E3 this year. And so we suited up for the cold weather and hunted our target down in LA.
You see, the level we played took place in Siberia (as does the entire game), and it’s much the same as we’ve seen before — there’s a Russian bad guy with a dangerous experiment/weapon and he needs to be taken out. The trouble is, you need to deploy and exfiltrate to be successful in the mission and that means you can’t just snipe your target from afar and expect to be a success.
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Another big change this time around is the fact that the game is level-based as opposed to open world, which makes it feel a little like IO Interactive’s Hitman in the sense that you have a target, and CI Games has constructed a sandbox map with multiple choices as to how you approach things, with extra objectives in there as well. You can replay each level to get a higher score or a more perfect assassination, and there are even Rivals that come into the map as well, who are after the same contracts as you. It all feels packed with stuff, but time will tell whether this is actually to the game’s benefit or not.
When it comes to the actual gear, of course, we have the sniper in our hands and we’re tasked with using it to take targets out at long range. Those who want an assisted experience can have a UI indicator which shows where to aim to account for wind and bullet drop, but we were told by art director Rick Nath that these assists can be totally removed for those who want a more hardcore experience. You even have to calibrate your scope by looking at the target’s distance when you tag them and then adjusting the scope accordingly.
Just like with Sniper Elite, hitting that perfect shot slows time down and gives you a closeup of the bullet hitting your victim (although without x-ray vision), and you have to be very careful where you’re slaying enemies, as you need to make sure their body isn’t discovered and the alarm raised, as that makes everything much harder for you.
Enemies start running around looking for a sniper once this happens, and so you want to make sure you calmly tag enemies, pick them off one by one, and hide bodies where they can’t be found, like in bushes perhaps.
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It’s not all sniping though, as you also need other gadgets at your disposal. A silenced pistol is at your side for close-quarters firepower, albeit with limited ammunition, and there are also silent takedowns to perform on unsuspecting enemies, mines that can cover your rear in the event of someone sneaking up on you, and more. There’s a lot to toy around with, and it just compounds the Hitman comparisons further.
You earn cash and tokens from your time in these sandboxes, and these can be spent on upgrades for your character. That’s why there’s an incentive to be as ghostly as possible when you’re after your target. That’s also why it’s worth going after the side challenges and extra bounties on the map since the extra challenges yield extra rewards.
At the heart of it lies the same Sniper Ghost Warrior experience we all remember, with a focus on first-person sniping that can be as hard or as easy as you wish. The format has changed but the moment-to-moment gameplay is much the same, so if you’ve played 3 and want to see what’s up here, you should know that before you gear up for this Siberian adventure. That said, the level-based approach makes us interested to see what Contracts can deliver since it looks to be more of a sandbox experience this time around. If these maps all feel fresh and engaging to explore, we could have a dramatic improvement on our hands when it comes to the series. We’ll just have to wait and see whether that’s the case.
Sniper Ghost Warrior Contracts 2 Demo
Aside from the clunky title, Sniper Ghost Warrior Contracts 2 wastes no time going to the right things. After a briefing explaining your motivations and a Quickfire tutorial mission that introduces you to the basics of sniper, you will travel through the Kuamar Desert and sneak up to the first position of viewpoint.
Is it time for the first stealth killing? Maybe 15 minutes. It`s time for the first sniper killed? Also 15 minutes, depending on your approach. In half an hour, you sit on a cliff and explore a container port more than a kilometer away. You will never physically visit this port, but your presence will be felt, mainly in the skull area. Ghost Warrior strikes a clever balance between simulation and accessibility in its default settings. Zeroing is a manual process that requires you to determine the distance from a target. You can scan them with binoculars when they`re in plain sight and find out for sure, but if necessary, I should often use the altitude reference chart in the upper left view of the bezel, which tells me, “Hey, this guy should be about as big in your range when he`s 800 meters away.” Properly deriving the distance of an enemy sniper by imagining how they stand against the altitude map is the new highlight of my career as a video game sniper. The missions of contract 2 are divided into two categories.
“Classic” contracts are well-known undercover tasks where you use a combination of sniper and stealth to physically sneak into places to assassinate targets and sabotage equipment.
But the contracts newly introduced in contracts 2 are “Long Shot” contracts. This includes sliding through guard patrols to reach certain viewpoint positions, high perches from which you will aim more than a kilometer. It`s not just about finding the target, bursting your brain and moving on: every Longshot target is a sophisticated sniper puzzle where you use your sharp shooting skills to manipulate both enemies and the environment. The setup is familiar if you`ve played Hitman`s sniper missions, right down to elaborate environmental murders. The most obvious telegraphed death on the first target was a suspended cargo container precariously positioned above a road that will descend the target trying to escape. You can also sting and hit the level in other ways, for example by opening doors by cutting off a power box with an EMP bullet or causing a jack to collapse on the poor soul working underneath.
The mission I played in my preview was one of the new “Long Shot” contracts in Contracts 2, which are a big draw of the sequel. Unlike the medium-range missions of previous sniper games, which were about 400 meters high, the three targets of this mission were between 1,000 and 1,400 meters. From this distance, you can`t even perceive goals unless they are limited. Also, don`t try to run or drive there. You can only approach these long shots from one point of view at a time, and that`s because the target areas (a port, a communications facility, and a training site) are intimately constructed murder dioramas that the player can tinker with from a distance.
The puzzle-like structure of these missions elevates Contracts 2 beyond a simple head simulator. The design is clearly inspired by IO`s recent Hitman trilogy. Like Hitman, these contracts are designed for replayability. Each mission has its own challenges: kill targets in different ways, get ten kills over a certain distance, kill ten counter-clips with stealth melee attacks.
I left my short sniper elite stay with a greater appreciation of the sniper fantasy that CI Games strives to achieve in Contracts 2. Once you get the hang of it, every murder is like the moment I shot down that guy`s arm in Call of Duty 4 (not in a scripted sequence this time), or even better, the role in Wind River where Jeremy Renner picks up a bunch of jerkwads from God knows where. I felt even cooler when I fired my first unhurried shot in this distant harbor and wondered why I didn`t immediately alert the entire complex. A developer listened during my demo and mentioned that they couldn`t even hear the photo from so far away. Contracts 2`s mix of classic and long missions helps solve a problem that Ghost Warrior has been struggling with for some time. Sniping in itself can be repetitive quickly, but physical infiltration of bases is the opposite of how a sniper works. By combining Splinter Cell-style stealth missions with long-range shooting puzzles, Ghost Warrior can have their cake and eat it.
Apart from these issues, I am impressed with 2 contracts.
I like his Ronseal approach to executing his design so he won`t get distracted by attaching a multiplayer mode or adding a loot system. The cards are fantastic, the sniping is great, the long-shot contracts are cleverly designed and fun to tinker with. A perfectly nice stealth sandbox. When I wasn`t doing mile-long headshots, I`d sneak into camps that would certainly hear me if I went blazin in Scopes. I like how level design naturally brings you to a second phase between the long shots that unfold more like MGSV or Splinter Cell: with stealth murders, interrogations, and plenty of useless and fun gadgets to experiment with at the same time. In my second playthrough, I took an indirect approach by planting traps in a bush and luring guards with a few stones thrown (a classic stealth maneuver). I also experimented a bit with the Remote Sniper Rifle Tool, an automatic rifle platform that can be placed anywhere to monitor an area.
You can mark enemies using binoculars and then tell them when to shoot a shot, which means you may be able to set up synchronized shots with yourself. It`s a nice contrast to the other sniper game series, Sniper Elite, which trivializes wind/distance compensation by showing exactly where the ball will go if you hold your breath. .
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Sniper review. Ghost Warrior 2
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4.8
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Almost all modern shooters have a scene where you have to cover your AI-controlled comrades by shooting enemies with a sniper rifle.
Sniper: Ghost Warrior 2, like the first part, for some reason stretches this scene for the whole game. All five hours of the single-player campaign have to sneak through the bushes, city ruins and ancient temples, getting rid of enemies with surgical precision.
And all the while, Ghost Warrior 2 tries in vain to decide what to impress the player with: civilian killing scenes like Spec Ops: The Line, explosions like Call of Duty, bullet flight and slow-motion kills like Max Payne, or realistic ballistics, like Battlefield 3.
In this regard, the Poles went further than the Swedes: when shooting, not only the fall of the bullet under the influence of gravity is taken into account, but also its displacement due to the wind. And the accuracy of the shot (read: the stability of the sight) is affected not only by the position of the character (standing, sitting or lying down), but also by the pulse rate. Even short runs raise it to 180 beats per minute, so it’s usually worth taking a breath and assessing the situation. It’s a pity that you rarely have to make decisions on your own: usually the target is marked by a partner, and you can miss only because of bugs (sometimes bullets fly through enemies without causing harm) — on the “normal” the calculated hit point is displayed with a red circle.
On high difficulty, you need to take into account the corrections for wind and gravity on your own, but the game remains the same rail shooting range.
When there are too many opponents, you have to sneak past, but there are even fewer options. Don’t even think about crouching if the game offers to crawl on your belly: an enemy standing with his back thirty meters away from you will definitely see a sniper sitting in the bushes. It comes to the ridiculous: enemies notice a hero hiding behind a concrete fence or a collapsed facade of a building. Well, you understand — «Would you kindly?»
In terms of linearity, Sniper: Ghost Warrior 2 will easily put any modern shooter and «soapy movie» on the shoulder blades. The slightest deviation from the orders and advice of comrades is «encouraged» by death and restart from the previous checkpoint, which was ten minutes ago. Therefore, the game quickly teaches you to listen to instructions and follow them exactly.
Often it seems that the authors of the dialogues amuse themselves by adding “Would you kindly?” to the end of each phrase. — although in terms of freedom, Ghost Warrior 2 is at the opposite pole from Bioshock.
Sometimes you manage to kill the enemy that the AI partner was supposed to eliminate, and then you feel like a god who deceived this primitive and boring Polish shooter. But even in those rare moments when the game allows you to take the initiative and decide in what order to eliminate enemies, there is only one correct solution: for example, wait until one soldier comes around the corner, another turns away, and the third goes off for a smoke.
When there are too many opponents, you have to sneak past, but there are even fewer options. Don’t even think about crouching if the game offers to crawl on your belly: an enemy standing with his back thirty meters away from you will definitely see a sniper sitting in the bushes. It comes to the ridiculous: enemies notice a hero hiding behind a concrete fence or a collapsed facade of a building.
Well, you understand — «Would you kindly?»
Enemies in Ghost Warrior 2 not only have x-ray vision, but also hive intelligence. As soon as one warrior notices a sniper’s heel sticking out of the foliage, all soldiers within a kilometer radius will know about it. A similar effect is produced by a bullet that does not hit the enemy: if you miss an enemy sniper sitting on the tower, you can be sure that in a second your position will be known to all opponents. As expected, «the scent is like a dog’s, and the eye is like an eagle» is compensated by stupid and predictable behavior: the fighters either sit behind the box (usually with their backs to the sniper) or rush towards you. So the AI in Crysis 3 isn’t that bad.
By the way, unlike Sniper: Ghost Warrior, built on Chrome Engine, the sequel uses CryEngine 3. Not to say that it gave beauty to the picture — it’s not much better than the original, and in general it seems like greetings from the mid-2000s. But the real horror is not even the scenes on the engine, but blurry pre-rendered videos, reminiscent of the PlayStation 2 era.
In the first we are waiting for the Philippine jungle, in the second — the destroyed Sarajevo sample 93rd year, in the third — the Tibetan mountains and ancient temples. At the same time, the game gradually accelerates, and the final act is better than the previous ones both visually and in terms of gameplay: if the whole Sniper: GW2 were like this, at least a point could be added to the assessment. Even the checkpoints are arranged more intelligently here! It seems that the developers finally realized what they want to do, but they no longer have the resources to remake the first two acts.
10 photos
The multiplayer also suffers from a lack of resources. One mode (Team Deathmatch), two maps (city and jungle), five almost identical sniper rifles (only the semi-automatic SVD differs), no dedicated servers, but for some reason now unclaimed support for playing over a local network. Alas, these are not the main problems, because the multiplayer is based on a meager concept: the snipers of both teams take position and wait until someone can stand it and go on the attack.
Perhaps someone will find it fascinating, but most will prefer to exchange realism for dynamics. However, what are we talking about if Sniper: Ghost Warrior 2 is a linear shooting range in which only rifle shooting is normally implemented?
Text: Denis Kublitsky
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Ghost Warrior. Angular sniper / Overclockers.ua
| Sniper: Ghost Warrior |
|
| Developer | City Interactive |
| Publisher | City Interactive |
| Official site | www.sniperghostwarrior.com |
| Release date | July 2010 |
| Locator | New Disc |
| Genre | Shooter |
The game from City Interactive — it initially sounds like a sentence.
The studio, releasing several shooters of average scall a year, has long managed to compromise itself. There were, of course, more or less decent projects in the swamp of monotony and boredom, but hardly anyone will remember them now.
Sniper: Ghost Warrior is a little different from the typical line-corridor «shooters» of this company. However, this is not the first attempt at a pen in an attempt to recreate the difficult everyday life of a sniper. A couple of years ago, the game Sniper: Art of Victory was released, which could well be called an inept clone of Sniper Elite. Now the authors have moved the action from the era of World War II to the present, increased the size of the levels and finally updated the graphics engine.
The plot is present in the game, but it is better not to delve into its details. In some banana republic on a tropical island, a brave special forces stand up to another dictator and accomplice of world terrorism. The overall goal, like the premises of the campaign, is completely undefined.
After an unsuccessful attempt on a dangerous general, we first begin to save our comrade, then look for some information and a secret mine. Often the goal of each individual mission is extremely simple — to get to a certain point and find something there, sometimes blow it up. The initial missions are not encouraging at all. Especially monotony kills. As soon as you find some secret data on some computer, you are again sent to do the same thing in another place. But gradually the action is gaining momentum, and the game is becoming more dynamic and diverse.
The gameplay is mainly based on stealth missions, when we have to slowly make our way through the jungle, trying to look out for enemies with x-ray vision in the dense foliage faster than they notice us. This is a rather complicated matter, because the behavior of computer doodles is, to put it mildly, insane. Either they show miracles of vigilance and accuracy, being at the other end of the level, or they don’t notice us two steps away from them.
In the original version of the game, the soldiers still managed to shoot with their backs or sideways to us. Subsequent patches have corrected these problems with the animation of computer enemies, and now before putting a bullet in us, the enemy carcass is sure to turn. But their unnatural «torn» movements remained the same.
There are not so many options for passing silently. Usually only one path «is» safe, although it cannot be said that the locations are small. Sometimes you have to crawl at the very edge of the level, periodically bumping into an invisible «wall-limiter». On the one hand, the behavior of enemies is completely subordinate to scripts, and thanks to this, you can calculate their behavior and safely slip past at a certain moment. But this does not mean that another soldier who is much further away will not notice you. Even constant crawling in thick grass will not save you from such «sentinels». The most annoying thing is that it is much more difficult for us to notice enemies in the thickets, and the grass does not block the view for computer AI.
In general, there is some kind of imbalance and lack of thought. As a result, the complexity of individual episodes becomes prohibitive, and some, on the contrary, turn out to be too simple due to the general stupidity of the same AI.
A lot has been fixed with patches and camouflage has become more effective, but the overall unpredictability of what is happening remains. Especially problems with this are manifested at the first levels. After the alarm, all the opponents pounce on you and manage to shoot from machine guns no worse than we do from a sniper rifle. If they were also trained to pursue the goal, then some levels would even turn into hell.
There is a special radar in the corner of the screen that highlights alarmed enemies. Accordingly, if the guys are on guard and get bored, then they are not marked in any way. But if you make some noise in front of them, their red “triangles” will immediately appear on the radar.
However, the mechanism of the radar’s operation is actually more mysterious, because for some reason many of the opponents shooting at us are ignored by it.
Luckily, you don’t always have to stick to stealth tactics. Only in some situations, the authorities put it as one of the conditions for completing the task, but basically no one is holding back your inner Rimbaud. You can safely move ahead, destroying everyone who gets in the way. Then the game turns into the most ordinary uncomplicated shooter. We can pick up the dropped weapons from the dead and move into battle with a machine gun at the ready. But if you expect to use the rifle again, it is better not to do this — after you throw it away, it may disappear.
As for the shooting process itself, the game does not hesitate to copy Sniper Elite with repetitions of especially bright hits and headshots. The trajectory of a bullet is affected by wind and gravity. On medium and easy difficulty, the process of aiming is simplified thanks to a hint-marker indicating the place where the bullet hit.
On hard difficulty, you will have to adjust for distance and wind yourself. There is also a short-term time dilation, which allows you to catch a particularly nimble target in the crosshairs of the sight.
All these auxiliary functions do not always work correctly. In particular, in the mission on the lighthouse, when «slowing down», the position of the point indicating the place where the bullet hit is not true. Because of this, one of the potentially spectacular “sniper” episodes turned out to be boring. Soldier ants run around at the bottom of the lighthouse and regularly send bullets right at us, and we with our long-range rifle cannot really hit them. After another replay of this mission, it turned out that without «slowing down» the accuracy increases dramatically. Fortunately, the described «bug» is extremely rare throughout the game.
In the first missions, you may encounter another problem when enemies do not hear a rifle with a silencer, but they react instantly to a pistol with a similar device on the barrel.
This can be troublesome. But, again, with the latest patches, the described situation is a rather rare phenomenon.
The most silent weapons are throwing knives. They are catastrophically small, but they are replenished after each reload of the save or mission.
There are almost no tactics, as such, in Sniper: Ghost Warrior. Rare missions give some freedom to maneuver. Everything else is staged shooter and stealth. In the end, typical Call of Duty missions generally appear, when a gunner leads us from point to point, without assuming any deviation from this route.
The second half of the game is changing for the better. If at first the gameplay is disheartening with its crooked stealth and gunfights, then the authors nevertheless show that they have some experience in this genre. Crawling on the belly through the thickets begins to periodically give way to open firefights. We are offered to try on the role of different fighters of the special forces, either covering the assault squad from a sniper position, or already in the role of a special forces officer to clear some village or checkpoint.
Heroes can act simultaneously in different places. There is a feeling of a big operation, and we are given a look at it from different angles. There will also be a rescue of a captured comrade, attempts to get out of enemy territory without communication with the «center», a small trip along the river by boat, «shooting galleries» with machine guns and traditional car trips.
In such linear episodes, one cannot rely on the sentinels’ supervision and other shortcomings. All this is not so conspicuous and there are fewer situations where all these “glitches” can appear. There are, of course, problems, but more harmless. Like, for example, comrades hanging in the air above the boat.
It looks like City Interactive has finally abandoned the grey-haired F.E.A.R. and turned to more modern technologies. Sniper: Ghost Warrior is built on the Chrome Engine 4, familiar to players from last year’s Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood.
The picture is quite decent, although not modern. The detailing of objects at a large distance from us suffers quite noticeably, the textures are not very clear, the shadows hurt the eye with square edges and flicker, the rain effects look rough, anti-aliasing is not supported. But all this was inherent in Call of Juarez. But in terms of landscapes, Sniper: Ghost Warrior is a little prettier, because here we don’t have to jump against the background of lifeless prairies, dense jungles and bright tropical sun are around. So the image is more saturated with objects and textures, and this affects the system requirements a little. However, according to modern criteria, the game is still very undemanding, and users of modern video cards will not notice drawdowns from 100 to 50 frames when demonstrating landscapes saturated with greenery in heavy rain.
Only the developers from City Interactive had trouble with water — it looks too simple.
Impressions of the game are rather controversial. The sluggish start is especially repulsive. But then the developers lead us along the usual beaten script path, and the gameplay does not let you get bored. Of course, much has been done rudely and the pace of development of actions does not reach the level of «cinema» of the same Call of Duty or Battlefield: Bad Company. Unsuccessful animation, ill-conceived stealth and a bunch of bugs also do not contribute to the immersion effect. In general, you can talk about software errors in this game for a long time, and installing patches is strongly recommended in order to avoid unnecessary hassle. But, despite all this, in Sniper: Ghost Warrior you can even “kill” a few evenings, while the niche of a sniper shooter is not occupied by anyone. If you have been yearning for the process of tracking down a target in the crosshairs of the sight to the sound of measured breathing and heartbeat, your acquaintance with the game will not be in vain.
