Sniper: Ghost Warrior 2 Review

One shot. One kill. One note.

→ March 19, 2013 If sniping in real life – outside of the whole morality issue – was as easy as it is in Sniper: Ghost Warrior 2, then a few soldiers probably could save the world. Unless you’re playing on the hardest mode, bullet-drop indicators and omniscient AI teammates make sure you know exactly who to shoot and when, taking almost all the tension out of pulling the trigger. Ghost Warrior 2 ultimately does exactly what I feared the most when I started: it takes one of the highest forms of shooting skill and makes it repetitive and uninteresting.
Almost every level in Sniper: Ghost Warrior 2’s brief four-or-so-hour campaign boils down to the same thing. You arrive on one of these pretty, CryEngine 3-rendered jungle scenes either alone or with a partner, and then move from position to position, killing everyone as quietly as possible. If you screw up, enemies will rush you with reckless abandon and you’ll probably die, so if you’re playing on Easy or Normal, you’d best kill people in the explicit order you’re told to. Not that that’s particularly difficult, since you seem to always know exactly where enemies are at all times.

You’ll need to do sniper-y things, like hold your breath to slow down time (pretty sure snipers can't actually do that, but it represents concentration), or manage your stance to reduce the sway of your barrel, but all in all every stage starts to feel like a series of target shoots with little variation in terms of goals or setting. Especially so during the canned portions where you set up a rifle and can’t move until you’ve hit the targets you’re ordered to kill. Shooting in Ghost Warrior 2 becomes less an art and more of a mundane task.
Playing on the hardest difficulty helps a little. Here you don't have big marks over every person's head, so you have to actually hunt for targets. You also don’t have

the bullet-drop indicators, meaning that you have to pay attention to the wind and distance to your target, adjusting your aim accordingly. The stripping of these features make some shots a bit more tense, since it really does take time to learn the feel of the weapon, and you might have missed a potential target during your initial scouting. You can’t just do a bit of math (well, mere mortals can't) and figure out exactly where to aim for shots in this mode, you just have to understand how wind speeds and distance will affect your bullet drop. There's a lot of shooting, missing, and then readjusting your aim – trial and error. That’s often not a problem, because in situations where missing a shot might cause a game-over state, Ghost Warrior 2 generally dumbs down the AI enough to give you plenty of time to fire again and score a kill. The enemies might react, but they’ll do so so slowly (not to mention no others seem to hear the percussive bang of your giant, unsilenced rifle) that you have ample time to pick them off. It's a blessing because it helps you get through the story faster, but a curse in that it breaks the illusion that these are human beings with, you know, a desire to live.
Very occasional moments in the campaign try to mix things up, but they feel so trite that they did little more than induce heavy sighs. For instance, at one point in Ghost Warrior 2’s story you lose your rifle and have to retrieve it, sneaking around enemies or killing them quietly with a knife or your pistol. The problem is that after you kill the first enemy you can’t just pick up his weapon. Instead, you're forced to play exactly how the designers intended, obvious course of action be damned. Like a good little soldier, you’re playing by someone else’s rules.
It's made all the more clear how bad an idea that is when contrasted with the best parts of the campaign: when you’re given an area to clear out or get past, and the freedom to do it however you want. You could alert the enemy troops and deal with them head-on, shoot an enemy grenade to blow them up, or just snipe them quietly. Heck, sometimes you can even just sneak past them altogether. Those parts make me feel more like a thinking, elite soldier, but they alone aren’t enough to add more than a bit of flavoring to largely one-note level design. And remember: even if the entire game had this freeform design, it'd still only be four hours long.

Ghost Warrior 2’s multiplayer doesn’t exactly add a lot of diversity to the experience, either. True, lying completely still watching the area in front of you for movement or the glare off another sniper’s scope, or waiting for the sound of a rifle, does create a few moments of high tension. More often, though, it means I'm sitting around for minutes at a time, never seeing anyone or anything, except maybe one of the flickering shadows or other annoying minor glitches that cropped up as I played (on two different PCs). Whole rounds often pass where I’ve fired maybe two shots, and I died many times without ever having a chance to retaliate. The campers among you may find it entertaining, but outside of the very rare intense sniper battle, it quickly became tiresome – especially considering there are only two maps at the time of this review.