Imagine Call of Duty, Splinter Cell, and Hitman combined with an unprecedented sniping system and visceral head-shots.

User Rating: 8.3 | Sniper Elite PC
First off, if you are a twitch gamer and are looking for the next Call of Duty, this is not it. CoD is a great series but for those of us that like to slowly sneak around and take out the enemy from afar, this game is a unique opportunity.

I'll sum up the game since the excellent review already goes over the plot and gameplay. This is basically a stealth WWII game with a large emphasis on sniping. You get several sub-machine guns and a silenced pistol for those quite kills, along with a hefty amount of tools to help you on your mission. You use these just as often as your rifle so calling this game a cross-hairs only title isn't really true. I particularly like the trip-wire grenade that enable you to set up a shield of sorts when you expect troops to come up from behind you.

The game is quite long and will have you infiltrating factories, eliminating officers, taking out artillery, protecting comrades while playing God in a bell tower. One level has you taking out motorcycle couriers that leave 5 minutes apart and go three different routes out of the city. Each time you take one out, the patrols get thicker as they hunt for the guy that's killing their messengers. You need to navigate the ruined city to find a spot to take out the next bike while avoiding the patrols, all in 5 minute intervals. Another mission tasks you with eliminating a group of elite enemy snipers. There are three operating in a city section but you have to find them, they aren't perched somewhere either, they are mobile and actively hunting you too. As I tracked one and got him with my rifle, another snuck up behind me with a silenced pistol, I had to use my sub-gun on him. This isn't scripted and can take up to an hour to track them down, although it is optional if you don't want to take the time to do it. This was my favorite part of the game and I made sure to keep a savegame there so I can go back to it. There's a level that is taken rather liberally from "Enemy At The Gates", complete with ducts, light rays from holes in a glass roof and furnaces to hide in.

Each mission can be done in a variety of ways and while trial and error do enter into finding the best way to do it, you can often figure out what way suits your style. You can run in guns blazing, you can pick them off from afar, you can sneak and use the silenced pistol for quiet kills or you can do all three. I've gone through levels with never using my rifle, and I've gone through some where it was the only weapon I did use.

The head shots are satisfying every time. It's great when you are trying to get a guy that's hiding behind something and you factor in gravity for bullet drop that clips the top of his head. It's pretty gnarly when you get them in the face or throat and chunks fly. The sound that goes with it is perfect too, a meaty smash with some liquid to it. One cool thing about the zoom is the sound follows the bullet. When I picked off a guy running along side a tank, you hear the tanks engine in the respective location of the bullet as it passed by.

My only gripes would be some unexplained story elements, the fact that you're in a German uniform yet Germans will shoot you on sight. The bolt-action rifles fire a bit faster than humanly possible. The G43 and SVT are semi-auto and true to life, but when you upgrade to the M91 - a bolt-action rifle - it fires just as fast. Maybe it's because Oswald used one and shot as fast. It does use Starforce but I had no problems with it. It came out before all the Starforce crap was as known so I can't fault them for it. The buildings are used repeatedly. I was in Berlin and found a nice spot to perch in for a kill, later in the game in another city I found the same building. It's not horrible but occasionally you'll feel a little deja-vu in some buildings. In other games it probably wouldn't be as noticeable, but when you are crawling around slowly and stalking someone you tend to get intimate with the building since you see it for a longer time.

One mission ended prematurely. I was supposed to go to the roof of the train station but when I killed the last guy it said mission successful, even though I never made it to the roof or blew the train. I played the level again and it still did it.

The graphics could be better, it looks good enough but considering it came out around the same time as CoD2, it pales in comparison graphically. Granted CoD2 doesn't render several city blocks and allow you to freely explore in many of the buildings, but the difference is substantial. The lighting effects are pretty screwy too. The characters don't share the same lighting as the level. If you are in the shadows you look the same as if you were in the light. At times it looks like you're lit up.

I could go on but by now you should know if you want it or not. I recommend that you give it a try, it's a unique game that really goes where none have gone before or since. I never went online with it so I can't comment on that. I would've liked the co-op that the console version has, but for some reason the devs chose to omit it. Probably due to the vast hardware differences and ping on PC.

In closing, Sniper Elite is a thinking-man's WWII shooter. You will not find another game like it. If you are looking for something different from your WWII shooter give this one a try, you'll be pleasantly surprised.