![]() In terms of the levels on offer this time around, it feels as though Rebellion really has gone all out with a campaign composed of non-stop bangers. At its best Sniper Elite 5 feels like a great big action-packed puzzle game stuffed full of challenges to be solved as stylishly as you possibly can. Your choices with regards to the weapons and gadgets you can tool around with during missions are enhanced to an impressive degree here too with the inclusion of workshops dotted around environments that allow you to unlock and equip new scopes, stocks, barrels, triggers, suppressors and so on, making for a game that offers you every incentive and opportunity to experiment freely with how you to choose to go about taking on its challenges. Going loud, when the occasion calls for it here, feels as slick and smooth as moving from cover to cover and silently picking off your foes from the shadows. Much work has been done over the years to make the all-out action elements of Sniper Elite feel viable but it's always been a little too clunky for comfort in our opinion, until now. Yes, you can still slowly and meticulously work your way around the labyrinthian levels on offer here, ensuring that nobody ever lays an eye on you - you can even choose to pacify or use non-lethal bullets and traps if you think you're hard enough - but it feels more organic this time around and getting caught out more easily allows for a change of plan in the heat of the moment, with slick and quick transitions from whiffed silent shots to CQC takedowns. Here that clockwork rhythm is interfered with, and it makes for a much more free-flowing experience that forces you to pull up your inventory of tricks and traps and get stuck into using them in tandem with your surroundings in order to pull through. Sniper Elite now feels as though it wants you experience the heat of close-quarters encounters, the tension of having to constantly relocate from enemies as you search for routes forward, as much as it does the thrill of coolly picking off an elite Nazi Sniper from several kilometres away - and this is a decision that fundamentally alters the basic rhythm of the game for the better.Īs good as Sniper Elite 4 was, and it was very good indeed, it too often allowed you to sit back, to settle into a slow routine of just waiting for a big blanket of noise to arrive in the form of AA gunfire or a passing plane and then clearing out your enemies from range, rinsing and repeating until the numbers were sufficiently thinned. ![]() This is an entry that cleverly steps back on some key aspects of what's been added to the franchise over the years, most notably removing much of your ability to work under a constant blanket of sound cover. No, the big change here, the change that makes this feel like Sniper Elite firmly planting both feet in the top tier once and for all, is in the underlying flow of the game and how its merged with mechanics that, for the first time, really do allow for you to seamlessly switch things up between stealthy sniper ghost and absolute Rambo party time without deteriorating into a situation where you'll reach for that reload button. This isn't just the best looking adventure that Karl Fairburne's ever been on, it doesn't just have the biggest, most free-flowing levels this developer has ever put together or the most convincing enemy AI in the series to date. Being detected in any way meant an instant revert to a previous save and, although we've given in to some of the more bombastic aspects of the game as Rebellion has finessed the mechanics and AI around "going loud", we've never really been 100% comfortable outside of a pure stealth route.Īnd so it is that Sniper Elite 5 really does feel as though it ushers in a new era for the series. ![]() The Sniper Elites of old, for us at least, were save-scummy affairs first and foremost, games we simply had to play a certain way, remaining as a ghost as we spirited through enemy lines, picking off grunts, officers, generals and celebrated Nazi bastards. It's been seventeen years now since we first got a taste for Rebellion's superlative Sniper Elite series and, in the years that have followed, it's a franchise that has steadily grown and evolved into a sure thing, a safe bet, in terms of serving up slick, satisfying and highly replayable slo-mo sniper action for fans of exploding skulls and X-Ray testicle shots alike.Īs fun as it's always been, this is a series you can sense has been restlessly shifting over the years too, as it attempts to find some sort of perfect balance between its sneaky stealth shooting and the all-out action gameplay that results from best laid plans gone awry.
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