EPTIf ya’ll don’t know what happens in a Sniper Elite then sit there and I’ll tell you. You play as Johnny Snipeman, square jawed burly American tasked to backpack around various World War 2 warzones in order to shoot Fascists in the head. What distinguishes it from the many other Nazi hunting simulators that not so long ago would be coming out like every half an hour is that Sniper Elite wants the player to do a bit more prowling and a lot less Audie Murphy-ing. You do this for a bunch of levels and then the credits roll. Sniper Elite 4 is, you might imagine, the sequel to Sniper Elite 3 and it’s one of those trite sequels where it’s pretty much the same game with a few things that make the game better and a few things that make the game worse but since odds are you’ve not played either I’ll just carry on regardless. .
So Sniper Elite 3 is basically good. It’s a game about functional contradictions: there’s a lot of stealthing involved but you use it to kill shitloads of enemies. Even in combat you get to stealth! Sort of. It gives all the appearance of being a meatheaded one vs a hundred action shooter but punishes you pretty damn hard whenever the Goosesteppers draw a bead on you. And that’s sort of what I like about it, it’s a novel take on a extremely tired premise, a thinking man’s manshoot if you will. It’s hardly a new concept in Video Gamelandia to attempt to blend action and stealth but Sniper Elite excels by disempowering the player just enough that trying to take down a level full of Sauerkraut Connoisseurs without employing a certain degree of subtlety, patience and cunning the whole way through just ain’t gonna work out for nobody.
Sniper Elite 4 brings us to Italy, makes all the levels much larger and packed with loads more members of the Mein Kampf Appreciation Society. Making the levels larger is a good idea for a game about shooting rockmelon sized targets a couple football fields away but a tradeoff for the vastly increased enemy count is a much more powerful Barry Scopegun and I’m not quite ok with that. A big part of what made SE3 function is that each individual enemy constituted a major threat and I find that action games lose a certain something when killing individual enemies starts to feel trivial. Some of the new tools and abilities given to Blake Headshot include suppressed Sniper Rifle rounds, almost silent sprinting while crouched, ample shrubberies all over the place for easy concealment and being able to move and fire properly as well as having vast ammo reserves for the non-Rifle ammo. Functionally the game still plays like SE 3, ie, pick off targets with the Rifle and relocate as needed, but a crucial aspect to what made the game function isn’t quite as felt as it used to be. But it’s not so far removed to become a deal breaker and for what it’s worth SE 4 is a solid game mechanically.
Secure in the knowledge that SE4 gets right what it needs to get right all I’m left with is snarky comments about all the other things it gets wrong, so here goes. For starters the plot is bullshit. I decided early on to skip all the awful dialogues barring the head villain’s final monologue and it turns out his master plan involved shooting rockets at Uncle Sam, which come to think of it is pretty much the plot of SE3 except that head villain was just trying to make a really big tank. I’m amused when World War 2 games try to contrive some situation where the Germans feel like credible threats as opposed to a deadly nuisance that stands absolutely no chance of victory past the battle of Stalingrad but continues to fight on thanks to their delusional, stubborn Fuhrer.
Storytelling 101 dictates that the bad guys should be powerful and frightening but considering this is an army that has no air support (it got bombed), limited supplies (they got bombed) tanks that get bombed all the time (provided they have enough fuel, which kept getting bombed) it’s hard to feel scared of the Strudel Fanciers Club and more just peeved at their recalcitrant ways. The more I’ve studied the European Front the more I’ve come to the conclusion the Russians don’t get enough credit for handling all the dirty work. Yeah it’s a shame their strategy for halting the German advance is akin to feeding orphans into a woodchipper in the hopes that some will jam the whirling blades with their spines but hey they did all the hard work and here’s the Western powers rocking up like a bunch of Johnny-come-latelys and bathing themselves in all the credit and glory. Boy I can understand why there’s still some resentment between those two.
I’ve heard it said that the best thing about Nazi’s is that you can do anything to them you want, nobody’s going to feel bad for the Holocaustiers, though I feel SE4 challenges this notion somewhat. For one thing the game has one of those Kill-Cams that pauses gameplay so we can witness a rifle round in slow motion as it sojourns through a Kraut’s internal organs. I can’t help but wonder that if this were anybody else whose mutilation the game felt was so special it must be savoured in such a way and so frequently it might be considered a bit fucked up. Now, this Kill-Cam is nothing new (staple of the series, really) and can be switched off so it won’t mess up gameflow (which I did), the unintended monstrousness of Angus MacBang continues with a strange feature added to his binoculars: telepathy. Point them at a Subscriber of National Socialism Monthly and amongst the relevant data is a small bio, like “Conscripted in 1940” or “Worries about his Brother on the Eastern Front” or “Wishes he could just be home with people he loves and not about to be shot in the head”. Now that the enemy has been humanised and sympathetic I can’t help but think monster is us for revelling in all the splattered brains. More than it would normally, I mean.
One final note and this has to do with the preorder bonus. In SE3 there was a short bonus level where you got to kill Hitler. Grenade him, shoot him in the monobollock or the toothbrush ‘stache, all good fun. SE4 has another level where you have to kill Hitler. Now, considering this is set in Italy, surely the target should have been for that pouty fucker Mussolini instead, no? Can’t help but feel an opportunity was missed here guys.
