If Call of Duty was all sniping...
Sniper: Ghost Warrior 2 is the sequel to 2010's surprise budget hit. This game uses the CryEngine 3, which gives it beautiful graphics. The core of the game remains the same. It has a fun, dumb action movie feel, with a very linear single player campaign, and bare-bones multiplayer modes.
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Multiplayer lets the game down
Sniper: Ghost Warrior 2 is not a subtle game. The story is silly, but takes you through lush jungles, to Sarajevo and mountains in Tibet. Some segments see you working with a Spotter, or supporting another team. In these parts you are guided through where to look and who to kill. How hard this is depends on the setting. Medium difficulty gives you a red dot that helps you allow for distance and wind when shooting, but this is removed on Hard.
The multiplayer portion is small. It sets two teams up sniping against each other. This makes game pretty quiet, as searching for other snipers is a slow, painstaking process. There really needed to be more creative game modes to make multiplayer worthwhile in Sniper: Ghost Warrior 2.
Playability
The controls are well handled. You can hold your breath, which momentarily slows time, allowing you to take a more accurate shot, and in general it plays like a standard first person shooter. The night and infrared vision modes are well done, but you rarely need to use them creatively.
While it never reaches Dishonored or Hitman levels, there is a puzzle element to watching and learning soldiers' movements, and it's fun to get through a level undetected. The good looking environments don't allow for much exploration, and there isn't the same level of fascinating detail like there was in Dishonored.
Quality
Enemy AI can be a little hard to predict. When you're sniping from a great distance, and being guided by your team, this isn't a problem. When you're fighting on your own, deciding which enemies to take down first doesn't always give you predictable results. If you are detected and rushed by a few soldiers, you will find the pistol woefully underpowered to protect yourself! You can take out an enemy very close to another without problem sometimes, but if you miss, generally you'll alert everyone to your position. But not always...
Conclusion
Apart from the dodgy AI, Sniper: Ghost Warrior 2 is an enjoyable, if short, sniping adventure. It doesn't have the gory bullet cam of Sniper Elite:V2, but it's still a solid sniper game.
