Silent Scope 2 Dark Silhouette Preview

Konami's Silent Scope is a very novel take on the arcade light-gun game. With its cabinet-mounted, fully functional sniper rifle, the game quite refreshingly sings you the same old tune: shoot, on rails, a whole bunch of onscreen enemies, before they shoot you. And given the way that the sniper scope mixes things up, a much more engaging kind of hand-eye coordination was required from you. Silent Scope 2 continues this theme, and it's a much larger game. The PS2 port of the sequel, though, which is due out next month, will be missing the essential factor in the equation: the sniper scope. In its place is a workable control scheme, luckily, that seems to do its best to capture the essence of the game. For what it's worth, however, the rest of what makes Silent Scope 2 an amusing arcade experience--namely, a campy story and a campier presentation--is not lost on the PS2.

Some terrorists are planning on using a prototype of the deadly VX gas missile to terrorize the British Isles. Britain quickly dispatched her legendary Alpha Squad of crack commandos, only to have them vanish. You, as one of two equally crack snipers, are to track down Alpha Squad and eliminate the terrorist threat.

You'll find yourself in a variety of environments during your travels, from European streets to remote wilderness areas. And though you're strictly on rails all throughout the game, you'll find that most of the environments are very conducive to the type of peek-and-shoot pace that the game excels in. Your partner's presence in the missions also lends a bit of tension to the proceedings. You'll often find him in your sights as you maneuver through the screens, and your first instinct is always to shoot. Stock innocent bystanders, too, populate the levels, contributing to this subtly.

The game's mechanics are extremely simple, though they're definitely more complex than those of other light-gun games. Essentially, you point your cursor at any point on the screen and shoot. If something was on that spot, then you got it. Otherwise, it registers as a miss. In the arcade, of course, you aimed your gun at the screen, and the reticle followed. The PS2 version, though, alters this formula. You actually move the reticle directly onscreen with the left analog stick, and you shoot with the X button. The circle button, meanwhile, allows you to shift to (and from) your sniper scope--something that you could simply peer into in the arcade version. The square and triangle buttons, finally, serve to speed up and slow down your reticle while in the sniper view, respectively. The drawbacks of these compromises are obvious--it's far more cumbersome to manually shift views, especially when you're pressed for time.

As per the conventions of the genre, you have both a life meter and a time limit. If you take too long to shoot at an enemy, he or she will shoot you, and you'll lose a unit of life. You can replenish your life meter by fixing your sniper view upon the creatively endowed women in nurse uniforms who often pop up throughout the environments. Time, in any event, is easier to replenish--you net a few seconds for each enemy you kill. But once the timer is up, your game is over.

Though the regular action sequences in Silent Scope 2 are relatively well paced, boss encounters are gingerly smattered throughout both the arcade and original modes. During the boss encounters, you'll fight both humans and vehicles, each of which possesses weak points that you can exploit for the purpose of a one-hit kill. Since hitting the weak points is relatively challenging--and even more so when using a PS2 pad--you can also opt to pick at them bit by bit.

The PS2 version shares many of the arcade game's modes: the story mode (now "arcade"), the shooting-gallery mode, and the duel mode. The last one was one of the arcade's most interesting--you and your partner would stand at opposite ends of a game area and attempt to locate and pick each other off before the other noticed. The setups were pretty varied--everything from remote windows within a city environment to moving Ferris wheels. And with the PS2 version's i-Link support, they could even be duplicated, provided you have two TVs, two PS2s, and one interested friend handy. The PS2 version also has an original mode that's essentially a riff on the arcade mode.

Konami's US division is apparently hoping to market a proprietary gun peripheral along with Silent Scope 2, which will hopefully return some of the essence of the game that was lost in the translation. While it doesn't boast a full-featured rifle scope, it does have a built-in trackball that you could presumably use to aim the scope within the game. No such peripheral was included with the preview build we received, though we wish Konami good luck in bringing it to North America.

Silent Scope 2: Dark Silhouette is slated to hit North American retailers in mid-September. If we hear anything further about it, we'll let you know.