Offering the chance to pick off Nazis while sniping in the shadows, can Sniper Elite V2 live up to its wonderful promise or does it fail to hit the target?
By Leo Stiles
I’m that guy all regular Call of Duty players hate. Camped out on the high ground, opportunistically picking players off with rifles in a sneaky underhanded way.
So when a game offers me the chance to place a few well place bullet in the skulls (and other parts of the body) of assorted Nazi troops, I’m there with bells on.
Sniper Elite V2 throws you into the boots of a Yank sniper in Berlin as the Allies tighten the noose around the neck of the Third Reich in the dying days of World War II and puts you in competition with the Red Army in a race to salvage German scientific technology and personnel.
The game itself is a curious and viscous blend of stealthy third person sneaking and run and gun shooting that is both frustrating and extremely gratifying in equal measure.
The core of the game is picking off your enemies with unseen precision shots from your sniper rifle and whatever other flaws the game might contain, the sniping mechanics are spot on, with tight responsive controls allied with enough complexity (wind and breath plays a part) to require some real skill to be good.
Awareness of your surroundings and knowing when to take your shot is essential because every shot fired risks your position being identified and when that happens, a small army of Hitler’s finest are dispatched to your last known location with unnerving precision.
Killing Nazi is usually reward enough for a video game but Sniper Elite also has a points system that rewards you for range, conditions, stealth and types of injuries caused.
This last aspect is actually one of the game’s main selling points with fatal shots rewarding you with slow motion tracking shots and an X-ray of the bullet obliterating your target in near pornographic detail.
Now I know that this is a gimmick but I’d be lying if it doesn’t raise a smile every time a poor German soldier has his family jewels obliterated in a shower of messy gore. Guilty pleasures really don’t come any better.
So the shooting is fun – pity about the rest of the game.
Sniper Elite is an ugly game and suffers from the brown syndrome that plagues just about every WW2 game ever made. I suppose bombed out city’s are not big on colour and variety but destroyed Berlin is one ugly place.
Rough and ready graphics I can live with, but the stealth aspects of the game left me frustrated to the point of control pad damage.
Stealth makes sense for a sniper game but the level of AI inconsistency and the difficulty you will often have when knowing whether you are hidden or not often ends up with each mission just becoming a hornets nest of enemies that you start to take out with your sniper rifle but inevitably have to get up close are personal the majority of the time.
Enemies have an uncanny ability to spot you from over a half a mile away, while you struggle to pick them out with a telescopic zoom. Worse is the crouch mechanic that gives you a little stoop and renders you invisible. Straighten up even slightly and the alarm is triggered.
The game even goes as far to acknowledge this imbalance by giving you access to traps such as tripwires and mines, essential for covering your tracks with early warning blasts as Jerry storms up the stairs to your position.
These inconsistencies completely undermine the thrill you get from the actual sniping and require players to be far too patient and forgiving of the flaws.
This is a real shame because the thrill of taking out the enemy with precision shots is undeniable and if these flaws could have been balanced in some way, this could have been a modest triumph.
Instead it is game that squanders its best moments by not caring about the little things.
Format: Xbox 360, Playstation 3, PC
Developer: Rebellion Developments; Publisher: 505 Games
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