Hey, good to see I’m not all alone playing this game!
Anyway, yeah, still enjoying it. CI Games has seeming finally found the right gameplay balance that works for them. I’ve been a fan of CI since the beginning, going back to their early days as City Interactive. I can’t remember the first game I ever bought from them (probably “Code of Honor: The French Foreign Legion” or something like that from the early to mid 2000’s), but firing up one of their games always gave me a thrill of anticipation, because the quality would be so unpredictable from title to title. They didn’t develop every single title they published, but their dev houses did do most of them.
Anyway, one of their strengths has always been level design, believe it or not. I get into arguments all the time about that, so I’ll just qualify that statement by saying that for me, the level design has always been one of their high points. Is it triple-A quality? Certainly not. But for budget titles, it’s generally very good with a few exceptions. One of those negative exceptions IIRC is “Armed Forces Corp.” or any other game that they set entirely inside a building. Those are awful.
But I really enjoyed “Enemy Front” (2014), and next to the Ghost Warrior series, it’s probably my favorite CI game, mostly due to its sense of place and atmosphere.
Which brings me back to “Contracts”, which I think also (so far - I’m only on the first big mission) gets the level design just right. Multiple paths are very cool, as are the atmosphere and landscapes. When I get to a facility, I find that they are fun to sneak up on, tag all the enemies I can from various points, and then take them out silently by patiently waiting until they are alone. The ones that are never alone, I leave for an up-close encounter once I’m inside the complex. I don’t worry too much about tagging every single enemy, since it’s kind of fun to be surprised later on.
And I will always appreciate the games (rare these days) that do not re-spawn enemies. They are all right there when you arrive, and once you kill them, no more enemies pop in to artificially make things more difficult.
That said, I would have really appreciated the ability to remove all of the sniping aids, because as it is now, even on the highest difficulty, the sniping is far too easy. Using all of the tools they place on the screen by default, you always know exactly where the bullet will land. Hmm. Just thinking about it now, I suppose I could make those features useless by not tagging anyone, which would then not provide the computer with an accurate distance reading. My point though is that I liked it just fine in the previous games, where all of the sniping aids could be turned off, forcing me to estimate a calculation of all of those factors for every single shot. And when I’d land one of those shots, my god, that was so satisfying!
