First Impressions.

I have recently.. err.. purchased Just Cause 2 and Sniper: Ghost Warrior. After countless re-installs JC2's first not-even-a-mission has become possible, and thus I have actually been able to play some of the game. First thing to note- this shit is fun, and so far, it seems that's basically what the developers Avalanche Studios and Eidos Interactive had in mind. The game, aside from the plot, does not seem to be presented in a way that asks of its player a great degree of, well, perception of reality, or at least it wants you to forget that for the time being. The protagonist, Rico Rodriguez or 'Scorpio' is seldom dealing with high risk, high threat situations by any conventional means to the ordinary human, or the skeptical physicist in this case. However, should one put aside their aforementioned perception of reality (you are playing a video game, inb4 Crysis) then I believe this game provides a quite refreshing gameplay experience. Basically, it's more than a metric shitload of fun to fly across a sparse landscape into a crowd of militants, armed only with remote explosives, launch oneself further into the air and descend with either an oddly timed parachute, or in your idiosyncratic 'sugar possum' style. From memory I have been playing on the Medium difficulty, and so far it has actually been rather challenging, if predominantly due to my affinity with approaching these dire situations with a degree of recklessness, and a Ph.D in abandon, the enemies do a fair job of hunting you down, and also of being present in mass numbers, making for an often tough time for Pterodact- I mean Scorpio.

The game (apologies) looks pretty, as we have now come to expect from similar sandbox style games. The terrain so far has remained a little uniform, though not to the extent of Far Cry 2. The graphics are reasonable, though I played for the first few missions not in ideal graphical settings, and dark hues resulted a little grainy. Also, the character animating with regard to voice dubbing is pretty average in a lot of scenes, but sometimes is not noticeable. The main issue really is the motion blur, which is used by developers as homeopathists use distilled water or alcohol, and aside from making aiming and looking around a bitch, it to me just doesn't add any degree of realism, and frankly, if it did, I probably wouldn't be writing this review as I would have offed myself as an infant soon after becoming capable of turning my head. It just needs to get the fuck out.

The black market system seems pretty nifty, the idea of being able to summon shit for you bidding at almost any time is great for keeping up the antics, which in turn adds to the number of utilities you can order from the market as your Chaos Meter increases.

As with a lot of similar style sandbox games, the draw to dick around and try to make the lives of civilians hell often outweighs the draw to help some random bloke increase his cred/wealth/pension/whatever. This, as you can imagine, becomes intensified when they give you the ability to launch yourself to almost anywhere at pretty high speed, and the capabilities to summon fire engines 'n' RPGs 'n' shit.

Overall, I've had a lot of fun so far, despite the intense motion blur, and I look forward to continuing and probably reviewing the game at the end.

As for Sniper: Ghost Warrior, I had only really done a tutorial and most of the first assignment, but so far I am very much allured. The tutorial is quick and effective, not over-complicating a mechanic which is tried-and-tested in the FPS genre, and the fact that you don't start out as a rookie is great. I really look forward to getting rid of the red sight and testing my skills, but even so, a lot of the shots feel damn cool. It aint all "shoot this dictator" either, you come into quite close range with a lot of d00ds. At one point I thought I was going to be taught how to assassinate a goon from behind in close quarters, expecting a "press V to slit throat" or something similar, only to have him turn around and start wailing on me with his assault rifle. So the game isn't limited to just a few targets, nor to just taking single, defining shots which allow you to win forever and prevent a war. It's also great to see that having your position compromised does not end your entire existence, as I half expected it to. As with the melee range goon situation, once he turned around I was still left able to fend for myself as a certified no-scope legend, as one should be.

The atmosphere of the game is great, and waiting for the call from d00ds who appear to be your superiors is always intense. Note that you don't always have a team or a partner to guide you or give you intel, which is great.

I probably haven't played it enough to uncover any major flaws, the shooting seems clean (as you'd hope it would be), it looks nice and as I stated in an earlier prophetic post the engine is delicious, characterization and plot line is certainly lacking though thus far, which I suppose I suspected in a game which promotes mindless 2fort sniping (just joking, it aint like that), but it would be nice to know a little more about myself than my code name, or that I am better at hide-and-seek than the new recruits.

Concluding, the atmosphere has really got me hooked, you have a grappling hook, if one that is a little mundane after JC2, and the stealth and shooting mechanics are great, but it needs more than the tension to get you truly involved.

If you see any typos feel free to tell me, footy's about to start and I don't want to edit shit now. Barlow :(