Sniper Ghost Warrior Contracts

 

I've finished every other Sniper Ghost Warrior game so might as well play the Contracts games as well. As usual, didn't know anything about this game before launching it, just that its another game in the series by CI interactive.

First impression is the main menu is a flashbang. Not good. Why is it blindingly white.
Anyway, the game starts with cutscenes about Serbian politics and evil corrupt powerful people wanting to do big bad evil things in politics. Yeah the story is boring, its just "Government bad, you are a sniper assassin to fix the evil bad powerful rich people problem". Ok whatever.

Then you get to the mission selection screen, it shows a little map of all the locations you have unlocked and you can only do one at a time, theres a Loadout tab where you can buy new Primary weapons (Snipers) and Secondary weapons (Assault rifles or shotgun) and you can buy different pistols. You can also buy new Gadgets here. Theres a Skill tab where you can allocate your skill points.

The game starts off with a tutorial and already I was annoyed. It gives you a message to put the enemy in the middle of the screen to tag the enemy, but it wasn't working. I Spent like 5 minutes trying to make it work. I was zooming in with my sniper on him, nothing. Turns out it only works with Binoculars. Why not say that in the damn message? Why not say "Use BINOCULARS to tag enemies" This is foreshadowing of many bullshit moments to come.

The game does a horrible job explaining its self and its mechanics, they are so unintuitive and obtuse its downright frustrating. Take level 1 for example. I get past the tutorial, and choose the next mission. It gives me a few objectives and I start the mission. Each mission is a decent sized big open map, lots of open fields, mountain sides, and military bases. You can press Control and it gives you this yellow highlight vision which highlights things around you and also shows you objectives. So I press this button and go towards the Yellow objective. I complete the yellow objective by shooting some guy or whatever, and then I suddenly have no objectives anymore. Instead it tells me to go to the Extraction point. Okay, that must be the end of the mission. So I go to the extraction point, a screen pops up that says the mission is 5% complete and I close the window and I'm still standing in the exact same spot with no objective anymore. Uhhh, what? What now? I open the map screen and see more objectives to complete, but the thing is I have no idea if these are optional side quests or if its what I have to do to complete the mission. Why did it say go to the extraction zone? Its just totally confusing. I don't want to spend an hour doing a bunch of random side quests if I don't have to. So after minutes of confusion I finally just went around and completed every objective, they're inside of these blue square zones, well Blue usually means Side-content in games but whatever. It turns out yes, you have to complete every objective to actually finish the mission. Every time you finish any objective it tells you to then go to the extraction zone. Why? I still have no idea. I guess if you want to quit to the main menu and go change your equipment , thats why? But it makes a big deal out of it, it highlights like 10 extraction zones every time you complete an objective, it makes it seem really important. Its just designed like shit. Like what it should say is "You can optionally go to the  extraction zone to return to the Loadout" or whatever, not make it seem like its mandatory and how you progress. Just confusing as fuck. Even more stupid is that its not clear how you even exfiltrate to go back to the loadout screen. You can click Continue or Exit...well Exit sounds like you're gonna cancel the mission and lose progress, so I didn't want to click it. Well you don't lose progress, Exit just means return to Loadout/mission screen. Why doesnt it say that? Why doesnt it say "Return to Loadout" , and even if you do Exit, you dont lose progress. But then on the next screen theres no Continue button. Ok so how do you continue? If you click the mission again, it says you will lose progress. (I did this once and lost progress and was pissed) To actually continue from where you left off, you have to quit all the way back to the main menu, THEN it says Continue. I mean what a fucking mess. Who the hell designed this?


Anyway, how is the actual gameplay?

Its a Sniper game, so you'd think the sniping would be fun. The problem is, it kinda isn't. The sniping mechanics are kinda stupid and annoying. I've beaten every other Sniper Ghost Warrior game, Ive beaten every Sniper Elite game, I've played all sorts of Sniping based games - I've never seen a game where after 100 meters your bullet starts flying around in the wind like a paper bag. Its rediculous. What this means is you can rarely just aim at an enemy to shoot them, okay, fine, makes sense, you have to account for wind. Its just such an absurd degree here that you'll be aiming nowhere near the enemy to hit them. Like I'm pretty sure you can adjust sniper scopes to account for this in real life. There is notches on your scope which say how many meters away you should be aiming at various brackets, so if a guy is 300m away you should aim at that line. And there is a little white symbol thing which tries to show you the direction of the wind and where your bullet will start to fall.. the issue is you have no real idea how far away enemies are, until you pull out your binoculars and Tag the enemy first. The only way to tag enemies and see their distance is to do this every single time. Why cant you tag enemies by looking at them with your scope? This makes it a tedious process everytime you want to shoot someone far away you need to first use your binoculars. But worse , the tag goes away pretty fast, so you have to do this constant loop of Binoculars, Try to shoot for the meters with the sniper notch, Binoculars, repeat... Anyway, I appreciate they tried to make in depth sniping mechanics, having to account for wind and bullet drop, just the execution is a bit much here. Its not like I want Sniper Elite gameplay where it tells you exactly where to shoot, but something in between would be nice.

There's different enemy types, you have regular soldiers, and then big tanky soldiers that wear super armor that some snipers wont even kill with a headshot. There is another enemy which is these Snipers that stand on rooftops, a scope icon appears when they spot you, and what this means is you will randomly just get one shot out of nowhere. Its extremely annoying and becomes a huge problem, which I will mention later on. Thats pretty much the extent of the enemy variety, though. There are some turrets but they arent too much of a threat and don't shoot very far and you just need to shoot them a few times to blow them up.

The sniping has more features, it of course has the bullet camera, like many other Sniping based games, if you get a particularly good shot it will give a super cinematic slow motion cutscene showing you the bullet mid air and hitting the enemy. This is cool the first few times, but guess what? You can't skip it. Why can't you skip it. Sometimes this scene lasts 30 seconds long no joke. It goes all super slow motion with a bunch of different jump cuts its just silly at times. The fact you cant skip it pissed me off quite a few times. Although the game does have a nasty gore system. You can get headshots which blow their head apart, you can blow their arms and legs off, its gruesome and I guess "well done" for a gore system. A few times I would be grossed out and just look at some guys head after a headshot in shock, so there is that. It makes the combat feel viseral and impactful.

It's not just sniping, I used the assault rifles quite a lot too. Specifically the AK47, I didn't bother using many other guns because the AK47 has the biggest Ammo Capacity, and ammo is kind of hard to come by instead of just searching every corpse and the few ammo caches around. But its not just a Sniping game, theres quite a bit of moments where it feels like a Call of Duty game, running around shooting enemies with machine guns. I would usually quickly swap to the sniper to shoot further away guys, and then get close with the AK and shoot nearby enemies, swap to the sniper for the higher armored enemies, and so on. Worked pretty well, and the gunplay is decent and satisfying enough , good animations and hit impacts and such, ragdoll physics when you kill enemies, the shooting isn't bad, but many mechanics around it is.

Like the controls can also be a mess. Why is the heal button the same button as throwing a grenade? You press F to use your currently selected gadget, be it Grenade, Flash bang, Health kit - whatever. Why isnt there a dedicated heal button? A lot of times I would scramble to heal myself only to throw a nade at myself. The game does have regenerating health, but its slow and healing yourself is instant. Even weirder sometimes I would have the med kit selected, and try to heal myself, and instead he would use this Adrenaline shot , which is just faster health regen and is worse than a medkit. I dont know why that was happening. The controls just suck. Not just that but moving around, interacting with objects is also clunky too. You press E to interact with stuff, but you also press E to pickup weapons and loot corpses, I would constantly accidentally pickup weapons, loot corpses I didnt mean to, or interact with stuff I didnt want to. Even worse is I would try pressing E on things like Generators and it would say "Disable" but it never did anything. Is it just bugged? Who the hell knows. Even climbing down a ladder is messed up, Its hard to even get the "Press E to climb prompt"  The game features some platforming, and climbing segments, so the climbing mechanics are back from the previous games, but this time its more like Mirrors Edge where you climb up and it shows your hand aiming to the next platform and you have to hop around to different climbing platforms, yeah the controls arent great


The graphics are impressive enough however. It uses CryEngine to decent potential, good lighting and draw distance, the enviornments and sky boxes can look pretty, although there is the odd hilariously low resolution PS1 tier textures, Still, at least the game looks decent enough, the guns look okay except the snipers are kinda too big and bulky, though the graphics can be very vibrant colorful and saturated which is nice to look at it. Not many complaints about the graphics, thats maybe one of the only good things I have to say.

The game has a handful of missions, each with their own map. The first one was wintery mountian sides, and the second too, but this one is more coastal and has you assassinating some guy at the docks.
Basically every mission is the same sort of thing, you're in a semi-open world map, big open fields and various different military compounds, you have a handful of objectives like "Go here and pickup X, Go here and Kill this guy, go here and flip the switch" like thats pretty much every objective. The game also does not have objective markers. On your map it will show you the general rough area of where you should be, but it doesnt point you exactly to where you have to go. This is both a pro and a con. On the one hand yeah I dont think every game needs to handhold and point you exactly where you have to go, but on the other hand this is just a dumb budget Sniping game, its not trying to reinvent the wheel or reward exploration, no objective markers here does little besides cause needless frustration and annoyance. Especially in the early game when you dont understand whats going on because the game is so unintuitive and poorly explains its self. Even weirder, you cannot select objectives on the map. You can see objectives, click on them and it will zoom in to the area, but you cant 'track' it to point you towards the general area, you can only set a custom waypoint. So what I would do is just enter a map and set custom waypoints constantly to the nearest objective. I guess these objectives are "Contracts" , hense the name of the game, but when you think Contracts you think optional side missions, guess not. There are however optional side missions called Bounties, this is just kill this particular guy that pops up, I guess to give you more money and perk points, but I really did not care, but this is what I mean, at first its hard to tell whats optional and whats not, it should do a better job pointing that stuff out. You also can weirdly enough also fast travel around these maps. As long as you are not in combat or not during an exilftration segment you can instantly fast travel to various different points, which helped a lot to bypass lots of combat segments when I just wanted the game to be over faster. its funny you can skip like entire encampments and obstacles this way, the game just seems poorly designed.



The game has a lot of moments that just downright were upsetting annoying and miserable. Theres one mission where you go into a shipyard theres a giant boat with a drawn on shark face, and theres tons of these snipers that keep one shotting you. You get these icons of the red scope that means youre gonna randomly be one shot. You dont know this of course until it happens to you like 20 times first, so I kept wondering why the FUCK am I getting one shot? Even after you realize its these snipers its still a pain in the ass to take them out, its just not a fun mechanic. I understand the concept, but being one shot is just so annoying. Like MAYBE if there was more of an indication, like as soon as theyre gonna one shot you it makes the screen pulse, or some noise, or I don't know. Maybe instead of one shotting you every single time, it makes you go to 10 health instead of 0, I'm not a game designer, but this shit sucked. Not only that, but finally after meticulously spending 20 mins killing all the snipers guess what? I randomly got BLOWN UP BY A MORTAR. Holy shit that was frustrating. Its not just snipers that one shot you, you also randomly get blown up. Really miserable gameplay experience. I finally got past it and get into some ship where I'm supposed to plant some C4, but I randomly get killed by some guy standing above me shooting through the floor.

Look, this wouldn't all be so bad; but the games save system is also atricious. You would think that everytime you complete an objective it would save, right? Nope. It doesnt. It only saves when you randomly walk around the map and reach certain save triggers, or when you go to an exfiltration zone. So I would keep completing objectives, then randomly get one shot, then go back 15-20 minutes. Just a total fucking slog. At one point I just started completing objectives, then  instead of proceeding I would back track and walk around randomly until it triggered one of these save triggers and I got the save icon on the top right. Just designed like absolute shit.


By this point I've gotten the game more than half finished, I buy all sorts of new snipers but most of them suck, the Dragonauv was trash and barely did any damage, I just ended up buying a sniper with the highest "Stability" hoping it wold mitigate the bullet swaying in the wind, well the sniper had high Damage so it also one shot most enemies so I just used it for the rest of the game. The weapons are not that interesting. Also guess what, I didnt realize until the second last mission that you can customize and add attachments to guns. Want to know why I missed this? because on the menu theres a little gear icon, I figured ok I'll click the gear icon maybe thats how you change attachments. And clicking it did nothing, just take you to the usual purchase new weapons screen. Turns out you have to RIGHT CLICK THE GEAR ICON to customize your weapons. WHAT THE FUCK. Just every aspect of this game is poorly designed unintuitive bullshit. Even after I realiezd you can customize weapons its not like I missed much, you can put a few new barrels, minorly changing recoil, or silence your weapons, thats about it. I added a Red Dot sight to the AK at one point but it looked so bulky and hilarious that I took it off quickly after, it takes up half the screen. Like the ugliest most reiduclous Red dot Ive ever seen in a game.


As for the skill upgrades and skill tree its the typical generic stuff. One tree for your suit. One for your Mask yellow vision stuff, one tree for gadgets. I mostly just focused on getting Armor upgrades because I want to be able to take more damage, which was kinda noticable, I also unlocked the ability to automatically tag enemies that are within 25 meters which ended up being really helpful, and I also unlocked the ability to see enemies through walls towards the end of the game which was extremely useful. The other stuff isnt that interesting, stuff about gadgets like using drones and holding more grenades..like who cares.

Towards the end of the game theres a few more "interesting" missions I guess. One mission where you have to go assiassinate these people doing eugenics, a mission where you have to break into some guys mansion and assasisonate him, a mission where you have to free a prisoner, and the final mission of killing the Serbian president. Decent enough I guess, but the general frustration level of the game never really went away much. Even at one point like the Mansion mission, I got stuck in a deathloop. Whenever I would die, I would load my save and immediately within 2 seconds be dead again. I dont know what the hell happened there, its like the AI glitched and my save glitched to where I was already being shot at as soon as the game loaded , despite enemies being nowhere near me when It saved. I thankfully got out of it by loading over and over and frantically spamming buttons but it just goes to show another aspect of the game being screwed up.

The later missions are typical mountainside, grassy green areas, more wintery military compounds, train stations, nothing really stands out or is that memorable its just very generic, which isnt always a bad thing, if only the game was not so painful to get through.

The final area is full of these one shot snipers that had me pretty pissed off dying over and over, you have to assassinate the president but hes behind bullet proof glass and I spent like 30 minutes just trying to pick off these annoying snipers one shotting me, then you have to go down in some warehouse and plant C4 on some train carrying missles. It was almost fun at times, but the issues never really went away. Finally I finished the last mission, you get a cutscene saying basically good job these were evil people, and then saying expect the sequel. Thats Sniper Ghost Warrior Contracts.

Its mostly a slog of tedium, frustration, annoyance and pain, with a few enjoyable moments sprinkled in. Almost every aspect of the gameplay and mechanics are designed poorly, with unintuitive wording all over the place, the sniping bullet drop and wind sway is ridiculously over the top, the save system is a mess, the levels and objectives forgettable, oh and theres only like one single song that plays during combat and it plays for the entire game and its just mind numbing. The annoying bullet camera you cant skip frequently adds extra annoyance also. Maybe the only good things I can say is the graphics at times are pretty, sometimes the combat can be mildly enjoyable with the gore and pulling off impressive long distance shots, the AK47 can feel satisfying at times, I appreciate they tried to do something different compared to the previous Sniper Ghost Warrior 3 open world kind of Far-Cry clone, this one is comparitvely more linear and mission structured, still the execution is mostly just awful and I could not wait for those end credits to roll so I could uninstall and be done with it.

4/10