Right at the heart of Sniper: Ghost Warrior Contracts, tucked beneath all the archaic design and clunky controls, is an interesting kernel of an idea. After all, stretching out everyone’s favourite bit from Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (that being ‘’Ghillies in the Mist’’) and expanding it into a Hitman-esque sandbox is certainly a tantalizing proposition.
If you’re the type of person who likes to inhabit the role of a sneaky deadeye, or if you generally fancy yourself to be an ace marksman, then this should theoretically be right up your street. Because Contracts strips away pretty much everything else associated with the FPS genre, in favour of deepening your go-to playstyle. This tighter focus means that there’s room for more nuanced sniping, with the player having to figure out how a bullet’s trajectory will be impacted by various factors, including: the calibration of their scope; the elevation of their prey; the speed of the wind; and the calibre of their ammunition.
Less about twitch reflexes or arcadey action, this grounded approach should generate compelling scenarios that rely on proper tactics. You know, the kind wherein even the slightest miscalculation could mean the difference between victory and failure. Indeed, if it all worked as intended, CI Games’ latest would be an absolutely riveting experience, along the same lines as Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain.
Just like Hideo Kojima’s 2015 masterpiece, Contracts prioritises emergent gameplay and an open-ended structure by dropping you into a series of non-linear maps. Each of these has a number of objectives for you to complete however you see fit, although the de facto assumption is that you will be using a sniper rifle at some point. Once you’ve selected your first target, it’s completely up to you to select a vantage point, do some reconnaissance, strategically plot out your movements and then orchestrate a perfect shot, all before slipping away to the extraction zone undetected. Or you could just run in guns blazing if that’s more your style. It’s entirely your choice.
Taking out a bounty with surgical precision, knowing that it was your plan that got the job done and not a pre-ordained sequence of events, has the potential to be a uniquely rewarding gameplay loop. That’s what the game seems to be going for at least and – when the stars align – it occasionally succeeds, making you feel like a finely-tuned instrument of death. It even has this snazzy ‘’bullet-cam’’ effect that it reserves for particularly impressive shots and when this happens it’s hard to deny the pure endorphin rush you get. I mean, who doesn’t like a bit of ego-stroking now and again?
Yet the fantasy scenario described above is largely just that: a fantasy. For when all is said and done, the reality of playing Contracts is nowhere near as thrilling as it ought to be. On the contrary, it’s a pitiful mess comprised of baffling design choices, unresponsive controls, a dreadful U.I and some of the most persistent glitches that I’ve ever encountered in a video game. In fact, excluding a few cheap thrills, I would say that I hated virtually every minute of this excruciating chore, with it draining the last residues of my willpower just to reach the halfway mark.
It doesn’t even take long for the cracks to manifest, as almost every single mechanic will fail on you at some point and it’s only a matter of time before you encounter a game-breaking bug that forces you to abandon your hard-earned progress. Speaking of which, if you’re unfortunate enough to buy this defective shambles, let me prepare you for the recurring frustrations that you’ll have to contend with. And oh boy are they numerous.
Each play session begins with a catatonic loading screen, as your handler drones on about the sex-trafficking, human-rights-violating, cocaine-smuggling warlord of the week. I’m not sure why it bothers with these superficial intros, because they don’t really offer much in the way of context and the villains are all portrayed as interchangeable, eastern-European stereotypes anyway. Not one of them is given an ounce of characterization elsewhere, as they’re just cookie-cutter NPCs that are no different from regular grunts. Half of them aren’t even afforded unique lines of dialogue! It’s not like Dishonored either, wherein a briefing might clue you in to a target’s routine or highlight specific vulnerabilities to exploit. Nope, that would be too useful.
Why it takes longer to load one of these modest levels than it does the entirety of Red Dead Redemption 2 is a mystery unto itself, because the end result is always a poorly-rendered district of Siberia. Anyway, once that’s over and done with, you’ll be dropped into the mission area with a minimum of five ‘’contracts’’ to complete. These invariably take the form of either sabotage opportunities, assassination bounties, or mind-numbing scavenger hunts and you will need to fulfil a certain quota of them in order to progress. There will also be an assortment of optional challenges, should you wish to earn a little extra in-game currency or upgrade points – though God knows why you’d you want to prolong this drudgery.
After you’ve selected your first objective, the next thing you’ll want to do is open the map and get your bearings. Alas, this can be more trouble than it’s worth, as you’ll be confronted with a migraine-inducing screen that is littered with near-indistinguishable markers. Exfil locations, fast travel points, hiding places and even fuse boxes all register as cyan blobs, so you’re unlikely to get much use out of this navigation tool. In fact, the only thing it’s really good for is setting waypoints in the general vicinity of each objective, but even that function can be hit and miss. Sometimes it will just refuse to let you move the cursor at all, whilst on other occasions you might set a destination only for it to disappear once you close the menu.
Nevertheless, let’s assume that you have managed to put down a waypoint. In order to actually see it, you’ll need to activate your ‘’seeker mask’ (which is essentially Contracts’ equivalent of Witcher senses or detective vision). Now that might not sound like a major issue and it probably wouldn’t be, were it not for the fact that these optics are so garish that they impair your vision more than they enhance it. Indeed, with the filter turned on, everything is smeared in a hideous orange tint and the screen is cluttered up with distracting geometric lines that have no purpose other than to annoy.
Not only that, but the HUD tries to draw attention to every conceivable object in your periphery, through an overabundance of noisy symbols. It’s pure sensory overload, to the point where nothing is specifically being highlighted because everything is. Certain ‘’points of interest’’ also get their own distance measurements (which are helpfully displayed in white text, even though half the game takes place in wintery snowscapes) to confuse things further. In short, there’s simply too visual information here for you to process, yet keeping the visor on is an absolute necessity if you want to follow those waypoints.
On that note, let’s assume that you’re now making tracks in the direction of the chosen contract. Dotted along your route will be patrolling soldiers, whom you’re free to deal with at your discretion. This could mean sniping them from a long distance, deploying an explosive trap, or moving in for a discrete knife kill.
The latter approach comes with its own set of issues, as the stealth system here is obscenely janky. For a start, everyone’s cone of vision is limited to just a tiny sliver, meaning that you can waltz right past most enemies and they will be none the wiser. Meanwhile, if you do need to go prone, then your character has a vexing tendency to get caught on anything that remotely sticks out in the environment, with so much as a slight incline causing you to become irreversibly trapped.
He’ll get stuck between trees, behind small rocks, on household stairs and sometimes he’ll seemingly be paralysed without any provocation whatsoever. That last one happened to me on several occasions, even when I was walking on perfectly flat land, so I know it wasn’t my fault. Worse still, to get out of these glitches you’ll have no choice but to jump up and down repeatedly, naturally giving away your position and ruining any tactical espionage action that you may otherwise have been enjoying.
Presuming you don’t get caught on a rogue twig, you’ve still got other unintended obstacles to worry about, like how crawling through grass completely obfuscates your vision. Granted, it wouldn’t make much sense for you to be able to see perfectly in this situation and I understand that the developers can’t make you overpowered whilst in cover. But equally, you shouldn’t have your entire FOV taken up by an ugly, blocky texture that induces motion sickness every time you budge an inch. I mean, one mid-game level takes place in a large field and after 5 minutes of wading through the low-res foliage, I felt an urge to lie down.
There are just better ways of doing this kind of thing, for example, in MGS: Snake Eater (a title that cracked this over 15 years ago!) they make the greenery slightly translucent so that you can still make sense of your surroundings. Or if that’s too immersion-breaking for you, then why not just have the leaves brush aside when you move past them? It’s not rocket science!
If you’re able to stomach the abject nausea that accompanies moving through grass, then you’ll eventually be in a position to strike one of the guards. You’ll creep up behind him and prepare to click in the thumbstick for a stealth attack, only to find that the usual contextual prompt isn’t appearing. You give it a go regardless, thinking that perhaps the reason for this is that the training wheels have been taken off and that you’re no longer going to receive any visual cues to help you out. Yet when you do hit the button, nothing happens. You just stand there helplessly, as if you’re trained killer has been overcome with stage fright.
This is not an isolated occurrence by the way. The button inputs in Sniper have a very non-committal relationship with their corresponding actions. It’s less that you’re issuing commands to your avatar and more that you’re offering vague suggestions for him to potentially consider. For instance, sometimes you’ll press ‘’X’’ and he will clamber onto a ledge, whereas other times he’ll just shrug his shoulders like a disaffected teenager who hates their job. Suffice it to say, it’s very irritating.
Now seeing as you failed to carry out that aforementioned stealth kill, your whereabouts have obviously been compromised and the whole area has been placed on high alert. Which means it’s time to abandon the flimsy pretense of being a covert operative and switch to your secondary weapon – either an assault rifle or a shotgun – to see how the game holds up as a traditional FPS. And in case you can’t detect a pattern emerging, it handles this side of things just as badly as it does everything else.
Again, it’s all so last-gen with soldiers having no self-preservation instincts – often comically lining up to be dispatched – and the firearms feeling weak sauce thanks to the lackluster audio-visual feedback. Not to mention the fact that toggling between gadgets is a royal pain in the ass that’s barely worth the hassle, especially when you consider how ineffective most of them are (the grenades seem to have a blast radius of about 2 feet).
Having said that, whilst open combat is incredibly outdated, it’s also a lot more efficient than going through the rigmarole of wobbly stealth. As such, you’re probably best-off rolling with it, so that you can get the job done quickly and press on with your journey. Incidentally, you’re likely nearing your destination now, but before you get there, you’re going to hit an obstruction in the form a towering rock formation. Luckily there is a way over this via some conveniently placed railings, which means it’s time for arguably the worst aspect of this whole ordeal: the first-person platforming!
These mechanics can be rough at the best of times, but words cannot express just how poorly they have been implemented here. Your depth-perception is completely warped (so you can’t adequately judge gaps), your jump distance is inconsistent to say the least, and the controls are totally unreliable. Plus, whenever you shimmy along a ledge the erratic camera-bob seems to imply that your head has been placed on some kind of gimbal, acting independently of the rest of your body.
So yeah, Uncharted this ain’t and there’s inevitably a load of bugs further complicating matters, as you clip through ceilings, teleport into new positions and get caught in looping fall animations. The wall jump proves to be a fickle mistress as well, operating on different rules from a moment-to-moment basis. The tutorial vaguely stipulates that you’ll need to aim for an overhang in order to grab onto it, but what that means is anyone’s guess. There’s no reticule to line up with, so are we meant to just eyeball it, or is the center of the screen where we need to look? Or maybe it’s where your hand is gesturing? I really want to know, as none of these options appear to yield positive results and I consistently end up falling short of my target.
Not that it matters, because even if you successfully make the jump, there’s no guarantee that your character will actually grip onto anything. He’s just as liable to faceplant the wall and slide to his untimely demise. Actually, it can be quite difficult to grab ahold of ledges in general, no matter how many times you hammer that X button. This is especially grating when you’re trying to claw your way out of sub-zero water to avoid freezing to death. In fact, on reflection, I think that’s the thing that killed me the most in this game: not rival snipers, sentry guns, or landmines, but my own protagonist’s stubborn refusal to pull himself out of icy lakes.
Still, if you manage to overcome all of the above then you’ll soon make it to the top of the cliff, prompting your handler to announce that you’re on the outskirts of an enemy base. However, his dialogue is rudely interrupted by two nearby NPCs, who are engaged in a spot of ribaldry about how they’ve had carnal knowledge of one another’s spouses. Given that this is a recycled exchange that you’ve heard from about 10 other guards already (I guess they don’t have much else to talk about) you decide to eliminate them in order to focus on what’s being said over your radio.
Yet doing so triggers your handler to start prattling on about how you can dispose of bodies in nearby containers and suddenly he’s talking over himself! As if that’s not bad enough, those guards you killed are miraculously continuing their witty banter from beyond the grave, so their audio is now overlapping with your schizophrenic partner’s to form a cacophonous din. You won’t be able to make heads or tails of any of this and you’ll just have to hope you don’t miss anything important in the shuffle.
But let’s put those sound issues on the backburner for now. After all, you’ve finally made it to your sniper’s nest, where you’re overlooking a high-security compound that is positively teeming with infantrymen, enemy vehicles and CCTV cameras. Before you start picking off targets, you’ll want to do a bit of recon to ensure that sure you’ve considered all avenues. There are several ways of doing this, from finding an isolated guard and coercing him to giving up the whereabouts of his buddies, to flying a drone in for a closer look. Alternatively, you might want to stay rooted where you are and use your binoculars to manually tag individual threats.
After scouting the area, it’ll be time to go prone, produce your sniper rifle and finally experience the game’s USP. And to be fair, this is the only part of Contracts that approaches any semblance of quality and when you get into the swing of things it’s admittedly quite gratifying. Popping off consecutive headshots from half a kilometer away, getting bullets to pierce through several guys at once, nailing an officer as they dash past a window – it all makes you feel pretty cool, even if you get the suspicion that the game is nudging some of your bullets in the right direction. As aforementioned, it’s reasonably well fleshed out too, with options for calibrating your scope to different elevations, multiple ammo variants and the ability to use a bipod for stabilization.
Everything is going well for once, until you notice that someone is firing a mortar at you from behind a sandbag fort. You can’t quite get a bead on them from your current position and so decide to edge forward slightly for a better angle. Only instead of crawling, your character inexplicably rises to his feet and leaps off the cliff, like he’s committing ättestupa. Out-fucking-standing! All that progress gone, in a heartbeat, because apparently the sprint command works on an unintuitive toggle system here.
If you’re anything like me, this will be the point where you snap, decide that ’enough is enough’’ and uninstall the game for good. And take it from me, scrubbing this time-wasting garbage from your library will be the most satisfaction that it ever gives you. I know I might sound a tad bitter about this, but I gave Contacts plenty of chances to win me over and it just kept punishing me for it.
Sniper Ghost Warrior Contracts review code for PS4 provided by the publisher.
Sniper Ghost Warrior Contracts is out now PS4, Xbox One, and PC.