Contracts Is Secretly A Great Immersive Sim


Sniper Ghost Warrior isn’t a household name, for unfortunately good reason. CI Games’ series struggled for legitimacy across three intensely janky first-person shooters – first trying to be Eastern European Call of Duty and concluding with a homage to Far Cry. You’d be completely in the right to have skipped over the original trilogy.


It wasn’t until the spin-off series Contracts began that CI found their rhythm, unwittingly creating a better time loop stealth-action game a whole console generation prior.

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Contracts is something of a soft-reboot, relying on a number of the same scaled-down fundamentals as Arkane’s Deathloop. You have a set of five locations to visit, each with one to two targets you need to assassinate. You can replay these scenarios over and over, and tailor your kit to what suits you best. Though the story doesn’t acknowledge or address your ability to revisit levels, it offers something far more valuable: actual consequences and motivation to approach things differently.

Contracts makes managing this repetition stuff look so simple, typically by restraining you. Unlike in Deathloop, you can’t just loot the most valuable equipment and upgrades – you have to specifically invest and earn them. The best gear requires not simply the base cash payout, but challenge points. How do you get challenge points? By completing the level in a variety of wildly different ways.

Many of these challenges run counter to one another. In one instance, you have to snipe two mob bosses from 400 feet away, which requires patience as the one boss is nervous and only in range at one section of the level for a limited time. Yet the same map asks for you to clear the entire level only using your knife, which makes the boss’ paranoia an asset as he leaves himself vulnerable in a room with poor sightlines for his men to save him. You can essentially skip an entire region of the map if you shot him from afar. And that’s just one objective on one map.

How you kill your targets matters in Contracts. One target is overwhelmed with guilt over the fascist regime he’s helped put in place. Stuck answering to a crazed scientist obsessed with eugenics, he’ll actually help you by offering intel before you take him out; it’s a last-minute attempt for him to atone that grants you an entire additional route you’d have never learned about if you’d shot him from afar.

Even sniping individual guards carries a risk. Whatever the difficulty setting, guards in Contracts are no slouches, responding immediately to dead bodies and hunting you relentlessly. On certain maps, they’ll go so far as to call in mortar strikes to flush you out. Not to mention enemy snipers on the lookout, including rival assassins who are hidden as bonus targets. Suddenly there’s a measurable weight to pulling the trigger. Is now the best time to make your play? A risk-reward conundrum that you need to think about rather than mindless shoot your way through.

Your personal agency is further emphasized by what gear you take with you, which is limited for each run. With sparse ammo caches and limited carrying capacity, you have to think things through. Each gadget has an offset due to skill or circumstance. Your drone can be spotted, shot down, and blocked by a jamming station under heavy guard. Throwing knives and silenced weapons that don’t hit their mark can still give you away. Decoys, grenades, and motion trackers can help with one challenge but be useless for another.

Camo is crucial, with different upgrades for woodland and tundra regions. Body armor can’t be replenished, and your health underneath is fragile. Throw in realistic ballistics with multiple ammo types for additional spice, in case there weren’t enough options to choose from already. Before you’ve even started your mission, you’re making crucial choices that alter how the mission plays out. You’re altering your potential options to solve the myriad puzzles ahead of you. While some additional gadgets are on-site, many are of the garden variety grenades and knives, rather than more elegant options. Not to mention there’s only a handful of medkits, rather than a bunch of convenient infinite health restoration stations.

This isn’t for lack of accessibility; across multiple difficulty options and other settings, you can still control how much of a challenge everything is. But there’s a good reason to push yourself further. Where your average military shooter makes you grow impatient and blast everyone in sight to just get to the next morsel of plot, Contracts calms you. It slows you down and makes you take in every detail. The levels wind together intuitively, featuring multiple routes despite only basic mantling as far as parkour is concerned.

This delicate balance of ensuring there’s always some risk makes every little flourish stand out – creeping around in the brush to free a captive prisoner only to have to evade mines with your mask’s detection mode, stalking before striking to tell which scientist is the real one and which is her double.

Contracts demonstrates many of the qualities of a great immersive sim. Like in Thief, you feel as though you’re navigating a living, breathing world where you can make mistakes or pull off incredible plays and the game reacts accordingly. The player is challenged to think harder in kind, experimenting across each playthrough.

Sure, Contracts is clearly on a budget. Its writing, while amusing at times, is a very dry dark comedy about being an anti-hero Bond henchman wannabe. It lacks flash, but that’s the thing – a flash is brief. Substance lasts and matters. Even now, years later, Contracts surprises me with a bit of dialogue acknowledging my performance, or I find a new way to use a tool that I hadn’t considered before.

Contracts is the closest we’ve come to a true hybrid of Arkane’s Dishonored and IO Interactive’s Hitman, particularly the World of Assassination trilogy. The difference is that it doesn’t need a morality system because the upgrades and challenges are rewarding enough on their own. Each success adds momentum to your daring, pushing you on long after clearing the main objectives of each map. Nobody needs to lead you along on a string to inspire your curiosity. Contracts respects that you’re able to figure things out for yourself.

The end you’re working towards in Contracts isn’t to stop the fun, but to keep evolving and escalating. You get both a reasonable skill floor to start at and a fantastic skill ceiling to reach for, one step at a time. A game that grows with time is precisely what I want from an immersive sim and a time loop game. However disappointing some more recent immersive sims may be, the success of Contracts gives me hope that better things are yet to come.

Contracts absolutely earned its sequel back in 2021, going so far as to take a victory lap with a free epilogue featuring a whole expansion pack’s worth of new targets to track down. I can’t wait to see what thrills they have planned with the power of the PS5 and Xbox Series. In the meantime, both current entries are regularly on sale for dirt cheap, are backwards compatible on each system, and run beautifully. At last, investing in a Sniper Ghost Warrior game isn’t a shot in the dark

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