Sniper Ghost Warrior Contracts

While casual players will find this first-person shooter to be frustrating, serious sniper game fans will feel it nails the target center mass. Playing as an assassin for hire, Sniper Ghost Warrior Contracts sends you to the newly annexed Siberian Republic, where you have to carry out a series of political assassinations. Dropped into open and varied battlefields which include a nice sense of vertical height and space, you have to use an arsenal of long and short range weapons, as well as stealth and distraction techniques, to eliminate your targets and anyone who gets in your way. It's a good thing you have a new mask with a built-in scanner that can survey the terrain and locate items of interest.

This is great if you're looking for a semi-realistic sniper game, one that makes you account for the wind and distance when lining up your shots, and take lots of punishment when you're attacked yourself. But it's a bummer if you're not looking to get killed every five seconds and miss ever other shot. Even at the lowest difficulty setting, nailing an enemy from far away isn't easy, even though your character is a highly skilled sniper. But even close up, the difficulty skews high; playing on the normal setting, for instance, feels like the hard setting in other games. Of course, it doesn't help that you never have enough ammo, or a silencer for your pistol, or good body armor like your enemies do. There's also some technical issues, like how some surveillance drones would rather stare at walls than look for you. But if you don't mind the realism, the difficulty, and the malfunctioning drones, you'll find Sniper Ghost Warrior Contracts to be a real test of your shooting skills.