Hands-On with More Sniper: Ghost Warrior 2

Pop quiz, hot-shot. You and your partner are deep into enemy territory. Three soldiers are pointing guns at your buddy’s face. They don’t yet know you’re there. Do you:

a) Shoot the grenade hanging from one of their belts?
b) Line up a good (albeit close range) position to take them all out with a single sniper round?
c) Slit the throat of the nearest and finish the others off with your pistol?
or d) Shoot the hostage.

Sniper Ghost Warrior allows you to do all these things and more besides. It’s not a free-roaming game by any means but most situations offer multiple resolutions. Sometimes you can sneak past without ever being spotted. You really shouldn’t shoot the hostage.

Namco Bandai’s January release will have you travelling around the world from to the Philippines to Sarayevo, exploring abandoned temples and urban settings. Starting in a Tibetan jungle, I snuck my character, Anderson, through an enemy encampment in pursuit of my rifle that some fool had dropped off the side of a cliff.

It’s an interesting challenge, and I like that the game covers more than just sniping. The radar gives you a good feel for when enemies are lurking around the next corner and your AI spotter buddy whispers useful intel into your comms. The AI enemies react swiftly to missed shots, so you can try to run and gun your way through but on close-quarters levels like this one, you’re unlikely to succeed. As usual, however, when faced with an opponent behind a covered turret, they will tend to run out in front of it and completely ignore the piles of bodies around them.

Once I recovered my rifle, the slow, stealthy pace changed completely. A distant team at a searchlight made it impossible to sneak out, so I shot the lot of them, admiring the bullet-porn cam on when I made a perfect headshot but also alerting the nearby team of guards who found my spotter.

On my first playthrough I opted to shoot the grenade, taking out the entire team. On another playthrough, I shot all three of them in quick succession. It’s not easy trying to aim at point-blank range with a scope set for hundreds of meters away, but it is possible.

The game is filled with these scripted moments but you do have the freedom to choose how you want to deal with them. As well as a handgun and sniper rifle, you have a knife for close-up stealth kills and many of the bodies will conveniently fall into lakes or out of sight behind curtains as long as you’re careful, and Sniper: Ghost Warrior 2 gives you plenty of tools to do so.

Here’s a brief gameplay video:

Sniper: Ghost Warrior 2 will be out on 15th January for PS3, Xbox 360 and PC.