Like other arcade games before it--Crazy Taxi, Dead or Alive 2, and various zombie games, among others--Silent Scope will help give a major push to a new console system. And, while the PlayStation2 might take its initial bows with nothing but praise, Silent Scope likely will be a magnet to the iron filings of controversy: it involves guns, blood, and body counts.
In Silent Scope, you become a sniper within an elite counterterrorist organization. Tasked with rescuing the kidnapped daughter of the U.S. President, the player must take out any terrorist targets carefully, without injuring hostages or innocent bystanders. Silent Scope features a bandoleer-full of cool missions that take the player to such diverse locations as cities (downtown), freeways, and sprawling estates. Players also must carry out challenging objectives from various land, sea, and air perches.
While Silent Scope might be the first console game to recreate accurately the feeling of being an antiterrorist sniper, one must remember that Virtua Cop introduced the concept of blowing the bad guys away to Sega Saturn users years ago. In fact, the game pays homage to Virtua Cop in that the entire targeting methodology looks and operates the same way.
Because the game's onscreen targeting system has an adjustable zoom on the scope, it provides a level of accuracy that heretofore was unknown in console games. All the better to see the highly detailed graphics that have been taken straight from the arcade original (although manhandled and retrofitted by Konami's art team to fit into the PS2's more texture-space-challenged RAM allocation).
Minus the physicality of the arcade game's "big gun," the home game is surprisingly similar in play. There are beginner and advanced modes, which takes into account that most folks, although the game might make them feel like super agent-snipers, can't really shoot like one
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