Gameplay

Sniper Ghost Warrior Contracts 2 brings fresh fodder for the sniping game genre. In SGW Contracts 2 you're taking on the role of a sniping expert who gets tasked with taking out high-value targets in a Middle Eastern country which, as expected, is ruled by bad guys who of course are plotting to do evil things to their neighbors and the West. Yup, the story isn't much to write home about, but it doesn't really matter because this game is about sniping.

Once you're in the theater, you make your way to the target zone, usually an overlook that gives you a great view of the mission area, which is often 1 km or more from your location. Using high-powered optics, you then stake out your target: find the mission objective, make note of its movement patterns, study the surroundings, patrols, counter-snipers, etc. Once you got your target where you want it, you prepare to take the shot. Depending on the difficulty setting, this is as easy as lining up a red dot with your target's head, or you have to adjust the scope for distance, wind, bullet travel time, etc. With that done, hold the shift key to stop breathing and boom, headshot.

Just like in previous Sniper Ghost Warrior games, kills are displayed very graphically thanks to a bullet cam that automatically engages depending on how "worthy" your shot was. You can adjust the sensitivity or turn this feature off completely. Players with an IP address in Germany will automatically download a version of the game with reduced violence—you can no longer shoot off body parts. On page 3 of this article, I describe how to circumvent this region lock.

Sniper Ghost Warrior Contracts 2 presents the battlefield sniper in an extremely entertaining way. Most of the sniping missions are similar, but they are made more interesting by various requirements. For example, your target often disappears into a building, so you have to make him come out again. How? Shoot something that attracts attention. But not too much or you'll be discovered. Other missions require you to remotely sabotage equipment, or protect a friendly by providing overwatch.

Besides these long-range sniping missions, there's also missions that bring you very close to enemies, giving you the choice of going in guns blazing or trying the stealthy approach. Stealth is the much better option here, but sometimes a bit tedious, especially without the ability to manually save. While there's auto-saves, these happen in weird intervals and sometimes don't go through properly. I can understand that the ability to save at any time might lead to save scumming, but why not let your customers play the way they want? Maybe make it a configurable option? Such an ability could also be immensely useful in motivating players to just try different approaches to solving mission objectives. Each map has plenty of bonus objectives, like killing five enemies by shooting the grenades on their belts or killing a certain number of enemies within 30 seconds, etc. I found many of those intriguing and had fun (trying) to complete them.

SGW Contracts 2 does come with minor RPG elements. For example, you have a skill tree that lets you improve your character in various fields. There's also new abilities to be learned. For example, you can control a flying drone that has the ability to remotely hack electronics or fire a poison dart. My absolute favorite is a remote-controlled turret you deploy in a strategically clever location. As you make your way through the map, the turret can remotely execute enemies even if they are out of your current line of sight. A brilliant strategic element. Oh, and you can synchronize your own shots with the turret to take out two enemies at once.

As expected from any good sniping game, there's several rifles, machine guns, pistols, and other weaponry. Each gun can be further customized with various scopes, magazines, and bullet types. The bullet types add another tactical option: lure bullets can let you reposition enemies to take them out without drawing attention, EMP bullets will shut down electronics, and explosive bullets take out vehicles.

Overall, I found SGW Contracts 2 a highly entertaining sniping experience mixed with classical first-person close-combat shooting action. Just playing through the story on medium difficulty is completed in seven hours or so, but there's a lot of replay value by tackling the challenging objectives the game gives you. Considering the price of $40 on Steam, it is definitely not unreasonably priced for the relatively short gameplay experience. If, however, you're a fan of fast-paced first-person shooters, this might not be what you're looking for. If you enjoyed Hitman 3 and are looking for more challenges, maybe pick up sniping.

PC Port / Tech / Graphics / Performance

Sniper Ghost Warrior uses Crytek's CryEngine. It's been quite a while since we saw a new game using that engine, which enjoyed legendary status many years ago. A lot of has changed in the world of game development since, and Epic has taken over with Unreal Engine. Polish game studio CI Games, previously City Interactive, has used CryEngine on the first Sniper Ghost Warrior Contracts, so it's only logical to use the same engine in the sequel. Unfortunately, CryEngine still does not have proper support for DirectX 12, which is an upcoming capability that hopefully gets integrated in 2021.

Visuals are very decent despite the dated graphics API. Take a look at our screenshots: Draw distances are amazing—in Unreal Engine, this would be a pop-in fest as assets are loaded from the disk—not a problem here. For a sniping game, this is an extremely important capability because you'll be changing your field of view very quickly when looking through high-powered scopes. Textures are crisp, too, and of sufficient detail not to get blurry when you walk up to them. Geometry of objects in the world, on the other hand, could be better, as some map have areas that look like from a game many years ago, while other parts look extremely nice.

In terms of performance, Sniper Ghost Warrior Contracts 2 is not too demanding. It runs very well on most hardware. For example, for 1080p Full HD at the highest settings, even a GTX 1060 or RX 580 will achieve over 60 FPS. At 1440p, a RX 5600 XT or GeForce RTX 1070 is sufficient, and 4K60 is in reach for the RX 6700 XT or RTX 3070 and faster. The AMD performance results for high-end graphics cards are surprising, though. Due to the DirectX 11 nature of the game, it runs fairly CPU-limited at 1080p. What makes things worse for AMD is that their DX11 driver overhead is bigger than the overhead on NVIDIA. This means the CPU bottleneck is at 143 FPS in our test scene with NVIDIA, while at only 116 FPS on AMD. 116 FPS is not a lot considering the high-refresh-rate monitors on the market. Just to clarify, in this context, bottleneck means that even with our fast Zen 3 CPU, the game will not run faster than this FPS rate, no matter the graphics hardware you have, or resolution. Lower detail settings can reduce CPU usage, to work around that FPS limitation, though. This also explains why many results at 1080p are seemingly bunched up as if hitting an invisible wall.

At 4K, no graphics card gets even close to this limitation, so we can see the true power of the GPUs in our test group. Here, things are surprising, too. Despite their DirectX 11 handicap, AMD's RDNA 2 graphics cards run very well, reaching their expected positioning. For example, the RX 6800 XT matches RTX 3080, and the RX 6900 XT closely trails the RTX 3090. For a DirectX 11 game, these are very good results for AMD, also considering NVIDIA already released a GameReady driver for SGW Contracts 2, while AMD has not. VRAM requirements are light for a title in 2021: just slightly above 4 GB for 1080p, less than 6 GB for 1440p, and around 6 GB for 4K.