A Close look at Sniper 2: Ghost Warrior @ E3 2012

One of the first games that we sat down with at the 2012 Electronic Entertainment Expo is Sniper 2: Ghost Warrior, the next and third game in the Sniper series that directly follows Sniper: Ghost Warrior as a vastly improved game play experience.

Thanks to its new CryEngine 3 game engine, the world in the game -- compared to that of the previous title -- is a huge leap forward, with depth and realism as well as a nicely functioning physics system that has the player interacting with even the smallest elements of the environment. And while those elements are certainly worthy of praise. and give the game much to recommend it, when you combine the realism of the environment with the tightly executed and highly detailed buildings, objects, and natural beauty it is hard not to get excited.

The realism is such that crawling through a bush or scrub plant causes the plant to react to your motion in a very realistic way; while the wide variety of plants that are present in the game -- there are three primary regions included, from the mountains of Tibet to the jungles of the Philippines -- presenting a variety of wildness that is complimented and contrasted by a mixture of rural countryside, town, and city in Sarajevo to fully flesh out this procedural masterpiece. The realistic environmental physics combine with ultra-realistic weapon handling characteristics and an emphasis upon celebrating the procedural process of the Sniper that is a marked improvement over the previous title, which being kind was more of a mix of different war game elements than it was a sniper game, strictly speaking...

Where the previous game to which this is a direct sequel was a bit confused about its focus, featuring a mix of traditional sniper focus with the running-and-gunning and mixed missions that are more commonly found in games like those of the CoD series, Sniper: Ghost Warrior II does not have that confusing lack of focus, being more of the pure sniper focus with light action-adventure elements that are more fitting than that of the previous game. I should really emphasize that to you because it sounds like all that I am saying is that they refocused the game, when in essence what really happened was the folks at City Interactive finally found the calling for the Sniper series!

A Hand's On Demo in Sarajevo

What the game translates to is a balance between Sniping and action-adventure, which when combined with the amazing game world that is made possible by the CryEngine3 game engine provides an easily immersive and fascinating play experience. At the start of the demo we found ourselves moving through a rail yard on the outskirts Sarajevo, being stealthy in sneaking past the military guards who are all over the area, as we make our way along the tracks to one of the service buildings and take out a soldier silently with our knife. No matter how we might have chosen to take them out it would have been a silent kill, since in addition to the knife our character is equipped with a silenced and very accurate sniper rifle and a silenced pistol, but the knife made the most sense...

Speaking of the pistol, while it is certainly useful for shooting the hinges off of a door, or executing a sole enemy with a well-placed head-shot in order to clear our path to reach the perch from which we will take our shot as a sniper, using it for any other purpose -- and specifically as a means for defense -- means that we failed in our primary job as a stealthy sniper ninja dude -- because if we actually need to draw the pistol for defensive purposes chances are we are dead anyway, just like in real life!

After taking out the lone guard with our knife and making our way through the train yard by ninja skill, snaking along under a tanker and boxcar to get past a guard patrol, we reach the ideal perch to make our shot, at which point our partner and spotter begins calling out the targets, and we process them with smooth and professional skill, taking out nearly half-a-dozen before the enemy on the ground below us realizes that something is wrong. Eventually we make a mistake -- perhaps showing too much profile or shooting when someone was looking at the window behind which we are hidden (who can say?) and the situation changes from selective sniping to the need to eliminate the threats closest first -- which we do!

In the end being spotted leads to a desperate choice of staying and fighting or running away to fight another day, and so it goes, a perfect lesson that demonstrates that the developer has finally found the voice with which the game properly speaks and that, we are very pleased to say, speaks in just the right tone.

The Right Stuff

In the first game players took on the role of an elite sniper team sent into a hostile area in an attempt to help the rebels of Isla Trueno, a fictitious Latin American country, fight against the force that toppled their government in a coup d'état, which was fair enough but included a lot of activity and missions that had little to do with the solitary relationship between a sniper and his spotter...

In Ghost Warrior II while the adventure that is presented has the player working their way through the three regions mentioned above, the process by which they do so follows a well-defined set of mission goals that make sense, and with much the sort of focus you expect in a game about the game of sniping.

Our initial impression is more than positive; perhaps if we were not intimately familiar with the first game in the series we would not have been so massively moved and impressed by this one -- but we were and are. The nature of this game and its missions reflects well upon the fact that the developer listened to the players, taking away the run-and-gun levels of the previous games, removing the need to even use assault rifles let alone possess one (if we wanted a game in which we did that sort of combat we would be playing Call of Duty), their corrective actions place a much stronger emphasis upon the Sniper Rifle and, for when the shit hits the proverbial fan, the standard silenced sidearm as we mentioned above.

Perhaps the most stand-out difference in this offering compared to the previous games in the series is the AI -- it is obvious that the developers scrapped the old AI engine (which had a lot of issues) in favor of replacing it with one that has the enemy behaving like an enemy should behave! No more standing around waiting for you to shoot them, or finding yourself being killed by an enemy who somehow makes a spot-on one-shot-kill firing an AK from the hip, a hundred yards away! Instead the enemy acts like they are humans who are concerned with not being shot -- as they should be -- and who effectively use the cover that they have to make your job all the more difficult -- and how cool is that?

Fans of the Sniper as a character will find much to be pleased with here -- and gamers who have always felt that the modern war game treatment of the sniper has always left something to be desired will find great satisfaction here as well -- in fact taken on its own merits, what we have here is a game that, if it is played the way that it is intended to be played, as a partnership between you the Sniper, and your spotter, may very well define the genre.

Sniper 2: Ghost Warrior is set for release on 21 August 2012, for Xbox 360, PS3, and PC.