Silent Scope Complete Impressions

At a press event held today in San Francisco, Konami had a version of its upcoming Xbox light-gun game, Silent Scope Complete, on display. Silent Scope Complete is a combination of all four Silent Scope arcade games, including the original Silent Scope, Dark Silhouette: Silent Scope 2, Silent Scope 3, and Silent Scope EX. For those unfamiliar with the Silent Scope series, the franchise gained popularity as an arcade shooter, where your task was to take on the role of an antiterrorism sharpshooter. In the game, you used your scope to focus in on bad guys from great distances away, and the goal was to eliminate them in one shot. Scoring was based on how precise your sniping was.

Because many gamers complained that the PlayStation 2 releases of the series lacked light-gun support, Silent Scope Complete will feature support for the Xbox-compatible Mad Katz light gun. The controls on the gun were a little awkward to get used to initially, since the scope-focus button was housed on the handle, near where your middle and ring fingers rest. As enemies pop up onscreen, you have to move the light gun's target by moving the gun over to where the enemy icon appears, and then press the scope button to zoom in. From there, it's just a matter of aiming and shooting. Though there was a bit of delay in movement of the target compared to our movement of the gun, overall the game felt quite responsive and actually proved to be pretty fun to play with the gun.

Though little was mentioned in terms of any visual upgrades to the game, what we saw of the game seemed to feature a slightly cleaner look than the arcade versions of each game. It was also mentioned that Silent Scope Complete will contain all the bonus content from the PS2 versions of Silent Scope. Silent Scope Complete is due for a February release exclusively for the Xbox, and we will have more coverage of this game in the near future.