Not sure where I got this one. Opening it up, it’s pretty much exactly what I expect – a sort of enemy at the gates vibed cold war sniper game. You’re not fighting nazi’s, but you’re kind of right after WW2 trying to stop nazi scientists from making it to Russia.

I jump in on a difficult setting, and immediately regret it. It seems like the main difference between normal and hard is in hard mode the sniping is ‘realistic’ – meaning you have to account for distance, height, and wind for long range shots. Kind of a cool physics challenge to try to render in this kind of game – but really kills the arcade-y satisfaction of sniping and turns it into a lot of guessing on which notch of air will be the magic spot to actually hit someone’s head at long range.

Game is not too bad from here – you generally enter an area, spawn some enemies, take most of them out with your sniper, then creep around and pick the last few off with a silenced pistol or machine gun. You also have a few neat little secondary items – the grenades are pretty meh, you have infinite rocks to create sound distractions, but then you have some nice little trip mines and land mines. In dense areas with a tiny health bar, placing a few of these to cover your back works well and is quite satisfying.

I completed three or four levels of reasonable play, working my way into nuclear facilities and setting bombs, sniping important enemies and setting up tank traps with backpack bombs.

Then I hit this: the dreaded poorly made escort mission:

A scientist is about to be executed – your job, once you work your way to the vantage point, is to take out his executioner and two guards before they kill him. Then you have to escort him down a road through waves of enemies. The first guard is easy to headshot… the one behind him, just 10 feet further, is nearly impossible for whatever reason. After you kill one you have about a second to hit the second one before they execute him.

So I went through this little sequences of trying to kill the three men in four shots over and over, with maybe a 25% success rate. The problem is, every time you succeed, the scientist takes about 5 steps out onto the road before dying. I’m literally reloading at this point and can’t even spot who’s killing him. He’s made of shredded cheese. Too much wind kills him. He doesn’t understand how to crouch. I hate him.

I check walkthroughs and they all seem to be on a lower difficulty setting. They have 10 seconds longer to hit their targets on every turn. My scientist glances at the son between headshots and explodes.

Fuck this, I’m not restarting this game too on an easier setting, and this escort mission is grade A nonsense. UNINSTALL!!

I give this game a B- : it’s a little obsessed with its cinematic bone exploding sniper shots, the gameplay is passable but a bit clunky for 2012, and errors like this terrible escort design stick out in a game that doesn’t offer users with anything really new or exciting to justify wrestling through the frustration. A FPS about as generic as you might expect from its name. Pass.