Techy Soft 2013: Sniper : Ghost Warrior 2

Sniper: Ghost Warrior 2 features the kind of AI where a missed shot pinging into a rock at a goodly distance can immediately give away the player's position, but the enemy will routinely fail to hear their comrade's freshly squeezed corpse slumping into a wall right beside them, or even the sharp crack of the player's unsilenced rifle from relatively close range.

It has to be said that kills are also lacking the graphic payoff that rival sniping game Sniper Elite V2 offers up. In that game, shooting someone in the eyeball didn't simply have the enemy go limp and fall over, it was more likely that players would be treated to a hilariously overdone slow motion X-Ray closeup as the projectile burrowed through his eyeball, spiraled slowly through his brain (spattering chunks of gray matter all over the place) and then triumphantly emerging from the back of his cranium with a solid chunk of his head missing. Written down, it sounds thoroughly disgusting. In practice, it was a comically overdone, yet ultimately satisfying payoff to a shot well targeted.

In Sniper: Ghost Warrior 2, everyone simply falls over.

Occasionally a kill-cam will leap into action to portray a bullet's magnificent journey into someone else's nutsack, but it always ends up with the bad man simply grunting before promptly falling over.

Not to worry though. If a heavily-scripted four or five hour campaign with dreary fatalities doesn't get one's saliva all a-drooling, why not hop into the multiplayer mode for the intoxicating adrenaline rush of competing against unpredictable human opponents? Filled to bursting with two whole multiplayer maps and offering the ever-popular Team Deathmatch, it's... sorry, I can't take this any further. It's not awful, but for most people the multiplayer will likely prove to be a waste spent watching the scenery for minutes at a time as they attempt to discern miniscule flickerings of movement through their scope.

It probably reads like I despised Sniper: Ghost Warrior 2, though that's not entirely accurate. It was no more boring than certain competing AAA titles that are so petrified of things going wrong that they never allow the player to experiment further than holding "up" during a cut-scene where the entire world is exploding around them. It was simply another bland experience where I found myself listening to someone telling me what to do, who to shoot and when. Rinse and repeat until the world is saved.

According to the ESRB, this game contains blood, drug references, intense violence, sexual themes and strong language.

Here are some screenshots...