Clumsy title aside, "Sniper Ghost Warrior Contract 2" wastes no time in getting down to business. After explaining your motivations in the briefing and quickly learning the basics of sniping in the tutorial mission, you roam the deserts of Quamar and sneak up to your first vantage point. Time to the first stealth kill. Maybe 15 minutes. Time to first snipe" Fifteen minutes to go; in less than half an hour, you are perched on a cliff, scouting a container port more than a kilometer away. Although you will not physically visit this port, your presence will be felt, mostly in your brain.

After gradually refining Ghost Warrior over five games, developer CI Games clearly understands the experience it is looking for, and Contract 2 delivers with quiet confidence. You are Raven, a hired assassin sent to Quamar in the Middle East to prevent war. Your target is Bibi Rashida, the de facto head of state of Quamar after the president's husband was assassinated by a neighboring country. Rashida's planned military response threatens to destabilize the region, drive up oil prices, and bankrupt the economies of Western nations. Your job is to undermine the regime by eliminating Rashida's cronies, such as rogue hackers and disgraced SAS soldiers, before eliminating Rashida himself.

Your efforts to dismantle the Rashida regime will span five missions. This may not sound like much, but the missions in "Contract 2" are enormous. In fact, the game even refers to them as "regions," which is a fair assessment. Each region is a meticulously crafted expanse of terrain containing multiple objectives and various pathways between them. Some locations have both inner and outer fortifications, such as a huge medieval castle, which in any other game would comprise an entire level.

The missions in Contracts 2 are divided into two categories." The "classic" Contracts are the familiar undercover missions, in which you physically infiltrate using a combination of sniping and stealth to assassinate targets or destroy equipment. New to Contract 2, however, is the "long shot" contract. This involves slipping past a security patrol and reaching a designated overlook position (a high ground from which to snipe a target more than a kilometer away). It's not just a matter of finding the target and moving in to tick off the brain: each longshot target is an elaborate sniper puzzle that uses your sharpshooting skills to manipulate both the enemy and the environment.

In the initial example, you will be assassinating a target at a solar power plant, but the target is hiding inside the main building of the power plant. To draw him out, you first had to shoot the control boxes that allow the farm to harvest electricity and render the farm unusable. Since most of the boxes have several guards lurking nearby, the guards had to be taken down as well to prevent them from setting off an alarm when a bullet hit the control box. Since it takes five seconds for a bullet to travel that distance, one could never be 100% sure if each shot would hit, or if knocking down a particular domino would cause other dominoes to fall, which made for tense situations.

The puzzle-like structure of these missions takes Contracts 2 beyond a simple head-to-head simulator. The design is clearly inspired by IO's recent Hitman trilogy. Like Hitman, these Contracts are built with replayability in mind. Each mission has its own unique challenge: kill targets in different ways, get 10 kills at a certain distance, kill 10 counter-snipers with melee sneak attacks, etc.

Successful completion of the challenges will earn additional income that can be spent on new weapons, weapon mods, and gadgets. The latter include reconnaissance drones and automatic sniper turrets designed to enable synchronized kill shots. Many places where it feels natural to deploy drones are protected by invincible radio scramblers, because the drones are rendered inoperable. However, auto-turrets are very cool, because they allow you to get a better view of the world, and they are a great way to get a better view of the world.

Using them is almost like playing a cooperative game with yourself. By setting it up in a different location, you can synchronize your shots on guards who would otherwise be invisible. However, it was also good to deploy as a backup while infiltrating the facility. It allows for quick action on guards who might cause trouble during infiltration.

While the long-shot mission is the most important new feature of Contract 2, the game's best mission is actually a classic contract. Named "Mount Quamar," the mission follows Rashida's hacker buddy Lars Hellström, who has built himself a supercomputer inside a heavily fortified concrete bunker called the Citadel. First, the Citadel's external communications network must be destroyed. There is a huge satellite array and a water pumping station (presumably for cooling water), all connected by a huge network of underground tunnels. The mission climaxes with a descent into the Citadel itself, slipping through layers of automated turrets and entering Hellström's inner sanctum.

It is a true James Bond experience from start to finish.

The blend of classic "Contract 2" missions and long-shot missions helps to solve a problem that "Ghost Warrior" has had for some time. While sniping itself quickly becomes repetitive, physically infiltrating a base is the opposite of how snipers do it; by combining a Splinter Cell-like stealth mission with a long-shot puzzle, Ghost Warrior has had its cake and eaten it too.

This is because the challenges included in each mission type feel very different and require adjusting tactics and equipment accordingly. For example, long-range sniper rifles cannot be silenced, so it is wise to use other weapons and equipment to deal with the guards. This is because guards close to the overhead point will converge on your position the moment you fire your first shot. On the other hand, the light sniper rifle used in classic contracting can be silenced, giving you more flexibility in when to snipe. However, because they are physically mixed with the enemy, they are more likely to flank you if you stare into their scopes.

Contracts 2 offers plenty of both experiences. Sniping feels authentic and can be adjusted to be as easy or difficult as you like. More generally, Contracts 2 looks and feels great. Movement and combat are weighty and purposeful, and great attention has been paid to animation, environmental design, and weaponry.

Excellent direction extends to the script and voice acting. Contrakt 2 is not a self-promotional work in the vein of Call of Duty. It is a cold, dark and satirical look at contract killing and military intervention in the Middle East. The game is completely open about how your job is to keep oil prices high and Western economies afloat. On the lighter side, "Contract 2" also has some great guard conversations. They talk about their pets, complain about their wives rubbing them the wrong way, and wonder aloud if they are characters in a video game.

There are some peculiarities that remain from past "Ghost Warrior" games, especially in the save system and enemy AI. In "Contract 2," there is an autosave system that disables itself when you are in combat or near an enemy. This is an unnecessarily complicated system that could easily be avoided by simply letting the player quick-save. Also, the AI really needs a secondary state between "passive" and "all guards in the area know exactly where you are". "Stealth games are always more fun when they give you a chance to correct a mistake or stop a guard from sounding an alarm or making a call. Having an entire base light up with just one mistake is more frustrating than fun.

These issues aside, I was impressed with Contract 2. I like Ronseal's approach to executing its design without being distracted by the addition of a multiplayer mode or loot system. The maps are great, the sniping is superb, and the long-range contracts are cleverly thought out and fun to mess with. It's a perfectly enjoyable stealth sandbox.