Sniper Elite 5

 

I've been playing all of these Sniper Elite games routinely as they come around. They all offer co-op campaigns, and not much seems to change between them. The biggest jump was from 1 to 2, I hated the first game and I thought 2 was pretty enjoyable. 2, 3, 4, are largely feel like the same sort of game and even roughly use the same engine just various upgrades and tweaks to it as the years go on. For Sniper Elite 5 I was expecting more of the same and thats fine, because I think I rated 2,3, and 4 all the same rating of 7/10. Will this one be the homerun, or just another alright decent co-op campaign?

We choose the second hardest difficulty, as the game suggests thats what you should play if you're a veteran of the series. Before each mission you can choose a loadout, and theres a handful of snipers to choose from, as well as secondary submachine guns, and then pistols. Most guns are locked, and you have to complete various challenges on each level to unlock them. We pretty much ignored this part of the game, and if we accidentally unlocked a weapon here or there, cool. But the system wasnt that engaging or fun really, it could of been more exciting to unlock new weapons but they didnt seem to be a big focus of the game. You can put attachments on your weapons too, but again it wasnt that big of a deal, except maybe putting a silencer on the machine gun. I only switched weapons a single time(!) in the whole game, and my co-op partner used the default stuff the whole time too.

Anyways, the story and plot this time around is...weak. The story is this typical modern "diversity" thing where theres these two strong girlboss women characters fighting the fight and giving you orders and stuff. This scottish black lady and this french woman. They dont really have any depth outside of being shoehorned into the game seemingly to push some progressive agenda. Because the personality and writing here is just very boring. Luckily the cutscenes are pretty short, each level you just get a brief slideshow introduction overview of what you'll have to do and maybe a minute here and there of these characters and then you're off to deal with the big open maps as you please.

The first impression was that somehow the graphics are worse in some areas than previous games. I don't know what it is this time but they've somehow screwed up the engines anti-aliasing, or this game just has more objects and details in it, but theres "jaggies" or jagged lines all over the place and it really kind of ruins the presentation. The graphics overall have impressive moments, but still it doesnt feel like its this high value AAA game, its rough around the edges. Some of the lighting looks good like that beach level where the sun hits off all the rocks and everything looks wet, the draw distance is great which is essential for a sniper game, but yeah not amazing. It seems like most attention to detail went into the models and especially kill cam shots with the classic X-ray system. Not much has changed or been improved here compared to previous games, if anything I suspect the X-ray system has gotten slightly worse or less in depth. There weren't that many crazy killshots this time around, and especially when shooting through one enemy, the kill cam doesnt seem to keep going showing you multikills which is disappointing. Sometimes I would shoot two guys lined up but the second guy wouldnt even be affected it was weird. In previous games it would show you the bullet going through multiple enemies.

The first time we played this game we were struck with how challenging it was. I guess we werent in the right mindset at the time so we dropped it for a week and came back later. We couldnt get past the first level and was dying constantly. It's a game that rewards strategy and playing slowly and really scoping out the map (literally with your binoculars) and planning your approach. Once we realized that it was almost smooth sailing. I'm saying "we" a lot because its a very engaging co-op experience. You have to coordinate almost every move with your co-op partner. One wrong move could mean one of you goes down and then you have to help eachother up or its mission over, so you cant be too far away from eachother. Although, the controls can be janky at certain times, like pressing E to help eachother is hard to get activated sometimes. The controls in other areas of the game are rough too, sometimes you can press a button to hop over an object, other times you cant. Its inconsistent. And in the heat of battle or trying to escape, that can be really frustrating. The mechanics of the game are largely unchanged from previous games (if my memory serves right). I still find it odd how these are games about being this really tactical 'realistic' sniper assassin, you can dial in your scope distances, you have to account for bullet drop, you have to choose ammo types like armor piercing in order to go through helmets - Yet there is this mechanic where you hold Spacebar and your character holds his breath and the game literally will tell you exactly where to aim to account for bullet drop. Like, in Sniper games (and real life sniping) I thought almost the whole point is learning exactly how to account for bullet drop and learning how to aim, but in these games it basically has a built in aim-bot. Weird. I'm sure on the absolute hardest difficulty it takes it away, but still its odd that its even a feature regardless. The game is still lots of fun and still can be brutally challenging, though.

The levels do have a good variety among themselves. There are 9 of them, though the last one is hardly a level (I'll get to that later). So 8 levels. Some of them are pretty memorable, theres one where you arrive on a beach from a little rubber boat and have to infiltrate some headquarters, another one where you are on the hills overlooking some big fantasy looking castle you have to infiltrate, and theres a lot of missions just around the fields of France sniping your way inside bases and various underground facilities. There is a few night time missions too which seem to reward stealth gameplay but we didn't really want to do that as much as just going guns blazing. Each mission is at least an hour long, which I kind of found to be a bad thing. Would have preferred half as long missions, but double the amount, because it makes it feel better paced and give you good stop and start points to take a break and go get a glass of water or something. Also, our games crashed multiple times or had network disconnects, and since the missions are so long, it makes you replay the entire mission. You cant just reload from a checkpoint, that was pretty frustrating. Overall the mission design and variety was decent, but it really is more of the same. None of these games really have these super memorable "blockbuster moments" like something like the Call of Duty campaigns where years later you can remember key plot points or "explosive moments" theyre all kinda just you start off on some field or mountain and snipe enemies standing around their fortress, make your way inside, grab some documents or explode some things, then leave.

A big obsticle in the games mechanics are the alarms and sirens. Much of the games strategy and thought revolves around preventing enemies from turning on alarms, causing waves of respawning enemies. So you scope out an area and look for the alarms and either snipe them to destroy them or walk up and disable them manually. Sometimes the alarm icons can be confusing or glitchy(?) because you shoot at it over and over but it still gives you an icon that looks like its still enabled, it was weird. But the whole dynamic of revolving combat around these alarms is something familliar to the whole franchise, I think its a good system and makes sense.

The game is non-linear like the previous ones, meaning it gives you a handful of objectives to complete but you can do them in any order you want. Also, the objective marker usually doesnt pinpoint exactly where you must look, but gives you a large general circle of where to look. Sometimes it was quite annoying having to blindly search around an area after every enemy was dead just to find that one object required to progress (Such as this random radio on a table on a second floor that we could not find for an hour) but usually it worked fine enough and made you use your brain in order to complete objectives. The objectives were nothing special or memorable, just go to some area and pickup an item, destroy an object, blow up a tank, or kill enemies, that kind of stuff. No hostage rescues, or big imaginative things going on.

A major new mechanic that Sniper Elite 5 introduces that gives it a distinct personality from its predecessors is the Invasion mechanic. It really is true that FromSoftware and the Souls game design has a significant impact on gaming culture and trends in general, because even Sniper Elite is having the same sort of mechanic brought into it. Yes, at random times, a random real life player can 'invade' into your game and hunt you down. Thankfully, this isnt as annoying as it might sound. For starters, as soon as you get invaded, it gives you a checkpoint so you dont just waste tons of progress every time you get invaded and killed by some pro player. Second, there are phones scattered around the level that you can take which show you exactly where the enemy player is at the given time. Of course he can just sprint away (because it tells him you've spotted him) but it gives you a broad idea of where to look for him. If you successfully kill the enemy player, you get another checkpoint AND your co-op partner gets instantly brought back to life if he died. So in every mission we would get invaded (even multiple times) by enemy players - but we never thought it was a detriment to the gameplay. It was actually really exciting and hype. We had lots of fun trying to hunt these players down, and getting a headshot kill camera on another real player felt really great like a total fuck you "You think you can invade me? get shit on, buddy". It added a lot of tension to know some real experienced player could be lurking around one of these giant maps searching for you and your buddy. Really, I thought it was a brilliant addition to the game. Even something like trying to sprint to the level exit while knowing theres an enemy player searching for you, dodging past his bullets zig-zagging, was a ton of fun. If any game is going to co-opt this Dark Souls mechanic, Sniper Elite is one of the more appropriate choices, with the giant open maps and non-linear gameplay. This alone is what makes SE5 stand out from the other games. It could of been really easy for them to fuck this mechanic up, by say not giving you checkpoints, or not having the phone to find eachother, but they pulled it off surprisingly well.

After the initial difficulty hump and calibrating our senses and expectations of the games mechanics we got adjusted to what the game expected of us and the difficulty wasnt that bad anymore. The game has 3 skill trees that you can dump points into after each level, its very basic stuff like more health, more ammo, enemies automatically getting marked when they shot at you, carry more items, and so on. So I guess putting points into these skill trees also helped a fair bit. As the game goes on, you start to feel like a killing machine getting back to back long distance kills and getting in a real flow with the combat that feels satisfying and good, because the kill shot graphics and sniping mechanics are rewarding and fun to engage with. The second last level we struggled with, though. It's this giant city level at night where there are constantly sirens going of that you seemingly cant disable. So we would just go around shooting enemies and get overwhelemd by the infintie enemies. We were also getting invaded by other players the whole time, making it that much more a pain in the ass. It got to the point where we desperately disabled invasions for the level so we could have some breathing room to wrap our head around whats going on. Turns out, I suspected it was this kind of psuedo forced stealth level. Since as soon as you get found out, you get swarmed by enemies, really what you have to do is simply not kill any enemies and sneak around. There is a secondary objective you can find by picking up a piece of paper that lets you disable radio communications, I figured that would stop the alarms - we snuck our way over to it and disabled the radios but still we could hear alarms. Ok then, that was stupid. From there we just slowly made our way to the objective (without shooting anyone loudly) and managed to make our way past the whole level. So at times the game heavily rewards stealth. From there we invaded this submarine complex, and it was easy going. Blew up a few submarines and level complete

Then we figured, okay, we're at the last level. This is gonna be hard. This is it. We entered the last level and we were sitting on a hill over this big mansion with the objective like "Kill commander". We're thinking "okay, we have to infiltrate this big mansion and figure out how to do this crazy level" -- Nope, to our surprise the commander just lazily walks outside, we headshot him, and boom end credits. What? 15 second last level? Ok, thats pretty disappointing. What a waste of assets! they had this awesome mansion level where you could have worked your way to the big bad end villian but they just make him walk out like a sitting duck for you. Did they run out of dev time or what? I thought that was odd.


All in all Sniper Elite 5 delivers an experience much like the previous games, I dont know if they will ever make an outstanding Sniper Elite game, for the past 10 years they all seem to hit just the same for me. They're all decent games, fun co-op experiences, but they never achieve true greatness, impactful memorable plots or cutscenes, or reach amazing heights. I think if they just had more interesting unique set pieces, level designs, and memorable villians and enemies they could eventually one day create a masterpiece, because the formula is there, its just everything around it seems a bit unimaginative every single time.

7/10