In Sniper Elite the player will adopt the role of an Allied sniper fighting in Berlin in spring 1945. He or she needs a lot of patience to play through this game, because this a third person sniper simulation. Really.

The story goes that the Allies are afraid of that the Red Army won’t stop in Berlin and Allies also don’t want Nazis nuclear secrets to fall in the hands of Red Army. This is the beginning of cold war, even though the hot war hasn’t even ended yet. Player is an elite Allied sniper wearing a German uniform. This means that the targets will be Russians and mostly NKVD.

Graphically Sniper Elite is ugly and it has a really bland color palette. In exchange for that the environments are open ended and this lets player to choose his or her own tactics. If there’s ever going to be sequel, then the biggest upgrade must be graphics: this game is ugly.

Gameplay is different from other WWII shooters. This time player won’t be able to run-and-gun, but he or she has to use binoculars very often to look for targets, then advance into appropriate firing position, take aim (which includes controlling his or her breathing), shoot and also remember to take the effects of gravity and wind into account. The final part is to get out alive. There are many difficulty levels to choose from and I had enough challenge just playing through the easiest mode (Rookie). But then comes the biggest problem: the save system. Game can be saved anywhere, but there are very limited amounts of saving opportunities and this varies from mission to mission. The worst to me was in later portion of the game, where there were zero (0) saving opportunities and the mission itself was a multi-staged headache. It took nearly 2 hours just to get through about 10 minutes worth of gameplay.

Sound effects fit the action nicely, but they aren’t especially remarkable either. Big plus comes from that Russians really speak their native tongue and not English like in Call of Duty for example.

In real life snipers work in pairs and Sniper Elite allows to play through the entire campaign in split-screen co-op with a friend. This is a good thing, because it makes the missions a little bit easier and players can use crossfire to take down the opposition. Ultimately Sniper Elite is too long: there are 28 missions in all and it will take somewhere around 20-30 hours to get through. Missions get repetitive towards the end, so this one game could have been divided into two different games.

Sniper Elite is a good game, but it has its flaws. It also demands from the player a lot more than most shooters do. Patience and cold nerves are the name of the game.