Sniper: Ghost Warrior - Second Strike DLC

This text is focused only on the ‘Second Strike’ DLC, my review of the base game is available here: https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198029593711/recommended/34830/ --- After finishing ‘Sniper: Ghost Warrior’ I decided to check its Steam Store page to read the reviews written by other players only to realise that there’s a DLC available. Somehow I completely missed it years ago when it was originally released and out of sheer curiosity I decided to check it out now. It promises, and I quote, ‘refined AI and new challenging levels’ and obviously I know that it’s nothing but PR talk, but since on sale it costs less than 1$ I thought ‘What the heck, let’s give it a shot’. Story is direct continuation of the base game: our protagonist, sergeant Tyler Wells, eliminated General Vasquez and got a new task: to locate and take out Jesus Santana, the only person able to take over general’s position in the corrupted regime. It’s basically more of the B-movie script and just like in case of the base game it’s not completely terrible so I'm not going to complain. New campaign (although I’m not really sure if I should use this word since it’s basically 3 really short missions) is called ‘Unfinished Business’ and I was able to finish it in about an hour. To my surprise it starts alright: there’s quite a lot of actual sniping, no direct firefighting and devs had some cool ideas (like one section where we're locating other snipers by the sun reflexes on their scopes; it’s nothing original but a nice addition to the game). For a moment I was actually thinking that maybe ‘Second Strike’ will not be that bad. Spoiler alert: it is. As it turns out all fun ends pretty fast, because there's a ton of stealth sections (and they are just as bad as in the base game), a lot of direct firefighting and enemies are still total morons with almost 100% accuracy (so much for the 'refined' AI). Therefore almost entire gameplay of this DLC is pretty much everything that was wrong with ‘S: GW’ and on top of that 'Second Strike' crashed twice, both times in the second mission of the DLC's story, while the base game was super stable and worked like a charm. There’s also separate mission/mode called ‘Challenge’ and it’s by far the worst thing not just in the ‘Second Strike’, not in entire ‘S: GW’ but in the whole franchise. The idea behind it is simple: hardest difficulty setting, no HUD, no manual saving (only checkpoints) and finishing entire mission in one go (yup, we’re starting over anytime we quit the game) and I really like that concept. Unfortunately the way it’s designed doesn't do 'Second Strike' any favours as it highlights all the issues I mentioned here and in the review of the base game, so in the end of the day it’s just terrible trial & error marathon that ends when we finally find the ‘right’ road to go and 'right' order to eliminate the enemies on the way. Doing anything else than what it was in mind of developers results in alarms and almost instant death and since there are no manual saves here this entire mode is the great example how things like this should not be done. By the way - according to the story told in the ‘Challenge’ mission Wells should stay quiet and undetected as long as he can, because the task is super secret and if he gets compromised he's on his own. Therefore using the silenced sniper rifle that was part of our inventory for the most of the base game would be the most logical thing to do, however devs had other ideas and 'Second Strike' forces us to use the new gun that doesn't have any silencer and is loud as hell. As the result, every shot (even when the game requires us to take one), means all enemies around immediately know where we are and all hell breaks loose. Makes perfect sense, right? To make it even funnier, since HUD is turned off almost entirely (the only visible part of it is the marker showing where we should go next) we don’t even know how many bullets we have at the beginning of the mission. 5? 50? Or maybe 500? Brilliant idea, really. In the end of the day ‘Second Strike’ turned out to be basically more of the base game and unfortunately in this case it doesn’t mean more fun, but more pain. It feels like total waste of time and money, so I can’t recommend getting it even on sale (when it costs less than 1$), because it’s simply not worth it. --- EDIT (July 21st 2025): I just noticed Steam shows I spent 0,0 hours playing this DLC, however total time spent in the base game is displayed correctly (and it includes 'Second Strike'), so I guess it's not much of an issue.