Game Overview
IGI 2: Covert Strike takes up where its predecessor left off by having players once again take on the role of the skilled operative David Jones, this time as he becomes involved in a conspiracy that extends across Siberia, Libya, and the Caspian Sea. While the fundamental gameplay is still that of a tactical first-person shooter with a strong focus on stealth, the game features bigger and more vertically structured sandbox levels which provide a great deal of freedom when it comes to approaching missions. To carry out their infiltration of heavily defended installations, players can make use of the terrain's elevation, drainage tunnels, guard towers, and access points from the rooftops to avoid the enemy strongholds.
The stealth mechanism is now more lenient but also more sophisticated—enemies have specific alert states (suspicious, searching, engaged), and players can now employ non-lethal takedowns and tranquillizer darts to deal with threats without causing permanent casualties. Each mission includes several entry points and a number of extraction zones, which promotes multiple playthroughs using different tactical strategies.
The selection of weapons and gadgets has increased a great deal, providing players with more opportunities for creative problem-solving. Together with a wide variety of real-world firearms—each of which can have suppressors, scopes, and laser sights attached—Jones is now also equipped with a motion tracker, lock-picking tools, night-vision goggles, and explosives that can be remotely detonated. There has been a huge improvement in environmental interactivity: players are now able to climb ladders, shimmy along ledges, swim through underwater tunnels, and even hot-wire vehicles if they need to carry out an emergency exit.
The game features a contextual action system, which means that when players interact with objects such as computers, generators, and fuel pumps, they can set off a chain reaction—for example, by cutting the power to switch off the security cameras, overriding the elevator controls, or sabotaging the radar arrays in order to delay the arrival of enemy reinforcements. As before, ammunition is still very scarce, so players have to loot it from enemies who have been defeated and must be careful about the fights they enter.
IGI 2 includes 19 extensive missions which alternate between stealth infiltrations, full-scale firefights, vehicle pursuit sequences, and even sniper-cover tasks in which you have to keep allied NPCs safe from a distance. The enemy AI has been completely revised so that guards now communicate with each other by radio, coordinate the patterns they use to search an area, use flashlights to investigate strange noises, and recall your last known position—this means that you have to keep moving to a new location every time you've been spotted. The game has a dynamic difficulty system that causes the enemies' level of alertness and accuracy to change according to how you've performed in earlier missions.
Since there are no save points during missions on the greater difficulties, the tension stays high, although the inclusion of several difficulty levels and a "training ground" mode assists new players in getting used to the game. The final aim is to uncover a nuclear weapons conspiracy spanning four countries, using all of your tactical ingenuity, marksmanship, and ability to think on your feet to survive—demonstrating that in the world of covert warfare the most dangerous thing is not the largest gun but the sharpest mind.
