Sniper Elite

 

At this point ive played most of the Sniper Elite franchise, but I find myself wondering what the original 2005 game was all about. Only until now I actually bothered to go back and check, might as well since I've beaten most of the other games in the series, right?

This game came out in 2005 and it shows. I don't even think its just because of the 2005 era, I've seen tons of games from 2000-2005 look way more visually appealing than this. Everything is flat and dull, with bad textures and it just looks very boring overall. Its drab and gray but the lightning most of all just makes everything look flat and 'fullbright' and static, its awful. It looks more like a 1998 game with more polygon models or something, I dont know. The game has 8 or so episodic like missions, where you pick the episode from the main menu, then choose the difficulty (theres 4, I just picke 2/4), then each of these missions has cut up indiviudal small levels of varying amounts until the actual full episode is done. Sometimes it can be just 2 levels, sometimes 3, sometimes 6! I hated how inconsistent it was in this regard. Sometimes I just wanted to come launch the game and play 1 'mission' from the title screen, but found myself playing 6 individual levels in a row before it was over, begging for it to come to an end.

And thats not even the beginning of the flaws and annoyances I've had with this game. Frankly, I hated it. For the longest time I put the game off because it either seemed intimidating at first, or too difficult, but upon actually sitting down for a few hours its just a stupid, janky, half-baked, tedious mess of a game. The whole experience feels like some early alpha pre-release thing, not some actual game. It's very rough around the edges. For starters, the control are just fucking awful. I've never seen a game where your character slides aruound nonstop as if hes on a permanent ice rink, but thats what you get here in Sniper Elite. I thought it might be some old engine quirk with the game being 2005 and running at too high framerate, so I even manually capped my framerate at 30fps just to test more around what a machine of the time would of had, but no, the ice skating feeling remains albeit a little better. Not only the awful movement, the control scheme just sucks too. Mouse wheel gradually changes your movement speed, like what the fuck? You press Z to go from Crouch to standing to Prone but also if you run while Crouch he stands up anyway so he constantly goes back and forth from couch to stand, its just a mess god DAMN. You have some sort of 'inventory' which controls like some archaic shit from Duke Nukem 3d where you have to press I to bring up another menu on bottom right, then for whatever stupid reason use COMMA , & . to scroll through items, THEN press X to select the item (TNT, Bomb, Medkit etc) THEN press X again to attempt to use it/put on ground but more often than not for the TNT and gadgets he wont fucking put them on the ground except really specific parts then it plays some huge animation and half the time it glitches out - IT SUCKS BAD. The movement feels awful clunky shit, generally controlling your character and going around the enviornment is one of the worst feeling things ive had in a game.

The game is this really annoying 'quicksave-shooter' where youll find yourself wanting to spam F5 to save after everything you do, only to turn a corner and lose all your health to some guy across the map then mash F9. The problem is they cram the levels with so many fucking enemies that its such exhausting trial and error bullshit that most of the gameplay I'm doing is just mashing F5 and F9 over and over between actually playing for 20 seconds, I hate it, I hate it.

Theres so many things to complain about, maybe Ill try saying something nice?

I liked how it actually shown your weapons on your characters back, how theres animations for taking them off your back and using them. Its a cool touch of a sort of realistic gritty warfare or something. Despite the game being this frustrating quicksave shooter, it atleast is self-aware enough to try to decentivize the player from spamming quicksave, because theres this arcade points system and if you quicksave too many times a big message pops up on screen like "Warning, you are saving too much, if you save more it will deplete your score!" -- Like ok cool, its commendable that it atleast tries to dissuade you from save spamming but like, who gives a shit? This isn't pacman in 1980s arcade, I dont give a fuck about my score I just want to progress. And trust me, halfway or so through the game this piece of shit would be absolute torture without spamming quicksave, even with it, its awful.

 
All the levels pretty much look exactly the same, its just these drab gray ww2 city streets, over and over and over. Sometimes you go inside a factory or something but its few and far between. Theres thankfully not much in the way of story or cutscenes, just a short voice over briefing section before each level, and sometimes you get cutscenes of watching the few characters talk to eachother with voice acting that seems like its just the developers working from home talking into a Logitech webcam mic which was pretty hilarious. The game uses objectives system to complete levels, so youll start a level and press TAB to open your really awful map which I never figured out how to use properly, and also see a list of objectives. Of course the controls on this menu suck balls here too so you have to use arrow keys to read the objectives, usually just shit like Secure the area, blow up the tanks, really frustrating escort /defend X person missions, go talk to this guy etc. Theres a red arrow on your compass which thankfully mostly just points you where to go, but its inconsistent with what it wants you to do sometimes and sometimes it doesnt even point anywhere but expects you to go read the objective and walk half way across the map instead of looking at the objective arrow. Its just stupid and confusing. Like at the beginning of some levels you will have 4 objectives, but it will ever only point to Objective 1, you cant manually select any others as far as I know. Pretty much everything about this game is a grueling chore and mindless, tedious gauntlet of suffering through endlessly quicksave spamming and getting shit on by hordes of nonstop ganking enemies with retarded superhuman giga accuracy shoot you across the map with a PPSH insanity. They fucked this game up, bad. I wanted to like it, usually the first game in a franchise is the classic but no, this first one is dog doo. The other ones are atleast enjoyable co-op shooters with more polished mechanics. Fuck this game.

Oh man what else, oh yeah, frequently the game will have you go inside buildings and facilities to do some objective but its a SNIPER game so of course the secondary weapons like machine guns you can pickup are absolute shit. The accuracy on them is trash and its hard to get ammo because you only pickup like 4 bullets at a time from corpses, so these inside sections just didnt make any sense  and just turns into this slowly creeping around endurance test swinging the camera around corners to try to get the visual on the enemy artifically so you can spray him around a corner or something, its bad and it just feels like RNG if im gonna win most of the time. The game has a couple forced or mandatory stealth levels, yeah, really bad too. Just super frustrating , it has stealth mechancis like prone makes you % stealth meter go up, its just so damn boring to try to sneak your way around while spamming quicksave so most of the time I just sprinted across the map and quicksaving when I didnt get caught.

Another really bad thing is by default, the game will spew random tutorial hints at you. Its not like an actual tutorial, its just a lazy menu option called "Tutorial" on/off. All it does is every X amount of seconds it will PAUSE your whole game no matter what youre doing and display a random hint message at you, like the kinds of random messages you see on loading screens in modern games. Most of the time it will have nothing to do with what youre doing. I could be aiming at some guys face a mile away , about to shoot, then BAM my screen pauses and it tells me a hint about "Did you know that you can use TNT to blow up tanks" - What the fuck? Im nowhere near a tank , fuck off, you just screwed up my shot. I had to turn this shit off after like 40 minutes of playing the game, its so bad. They were too lazy to design an actual tutorial level I guess?

I'm just glad this shit is over, the last level is some Airstrip where again, it has nonsense objectives where it has this Side objective where you can do optional stealth to 'distract' enemies and I went out of my way to do it but it seemed like it did fuck all. No clue, waste of time. Then you have to do all this shit with killing enemies on the airfield then a plane shows up and you have to make your way to the plane, killing enemies, then it just gives some ending cutscene of you jumping on the plane, plays some cutscene about the war ending, then credits roll. Took me about 8 hours to beat it. Never wanna think about this shit again, I could of wrote a lot more gripes with the game, like how everytime you pickup ammo it does this long annoying animation that fucks you up, about how switching guns is clunky as fuck and gets you killed cause how long the animations are, but the games just shit, alright? dont believe me, try it yourself, I dare you to get to end credits.

3/10