Sniper Elite (PS2)

In many shooting games, the sniper rifle emerges as one of the most satisfying weapons to use. The immediate satisfaction afforded by a well aimed shot instantly killing a target makes a player feel like they’re a skilled marksman, these games often playing into the fantasy of an eagle-eyed killer able to eliminate a target from across the map. However, the sniper rifle is just part of an arsenal in most shooters and often a niche choice due to its slow speed and reliance on careful aim. However, Rebellion Developments decided to make their military shooter primarily based around the thrill of sniping, Sniper Elite able to play to the power fantasy tied to using sniper rifles while also pursuing a more realistic approach to their usage than most games would be willing to go for.

 

Sniping in Sniper Elite is the main focus and thus has plenty of intricate options tied to it. When you begin one of the game’s missions, you are able to customize your difficulty in a way that allows you to pick how realistic you want the experience to be. Sniping a foe isn’t just about getting them in the middle of your crosshairs and pulling the trigger, there are multiple considerations to make that will influence how the bullet will fly. The player is able to turn on things like gravity influencing the shot’s flight path, wind that will push it a little off course, and your heart rate and posture determining how steady your hands are. You get to customize how smart the enemy AI is as well and whether grenades are as lethal as they are in reality or more closely match their depiction in media, so if you are coming to Sniper Elite for the thrill of easy one-shot kills, you can pursue it without judgment. However, if you really want a challenge closer to real life, you can turn on all of the options and learn how to adjust your aim to accommodate them so that a well executed shot will feel well earned.

Once you do begin sniping enemy soldiers near the tail end of World War II, you’ll find there are even more factors in play than before. The American sniper you play as, Karl Fairburne, needs to find good perches or areas where he’s better camouflaged to avoid being spotted, and you either need to pick off foes where others can’t hear the crack of your rifle shot or try to time it with sounds that will swallow the noise like artillery firing. There are definitely moments where you feel like a one-man killing machine as you’ve got all your calculations down perfectly and are slowly thinning the ranks of the German and Russian forces, and the bullet camera that activates when you land a killing shot really provides some satisfying pay-offs. Following your shot in slow motion until it blasts apart the enemy soldier can be exhilarating, especially when it’s a high value target or someone like an enemy sniper you’ve been trying to nail for the past few minutes. The bullet cam can definitely get repetitive if you chain together too many killing shots in a row though, but even with the options to make things more realistic, this can still tap into that fantasy of being the ultimate sniper.

 

However, realism comes with a price in Sniper Elite. The story involves Fairburne performing missions in Berlin that are mostly just excuses to introduce new parts of the city or diversify your objectives. While these missions do take you around the city and can lead to interesting locations like the Brandenburg Gate, a train station, and an airport, most of your missions will involve exploring the rather bland city streets of a bombed out Berlin. Grey, brown, and filled with unabashed recycling of building exteriors within a single mission, the levels where you’re sent into the city can blend together as don’t make enough of an effort to stand out visually from each other. This blandness makes it less exciting to play these missions, especially when you consider how long you’ll be staring at the repetitive designs through a zoomed in scope. Your enemies often wear brown and grey as well, and while some of them are people with automatic weapons who will walk around like normal or drive vehicles so they pop against the environment, there are many parts where you will get chewed up by gunfire if you push forward without sniping hiding soldiers. Trying to find the small bit of brown that is a prone gunman waiting for his chance to shoot you amidst these environments can certainly prove to be tedious. There is a small mercy in that you have a compass that will help you determine where a shot that nearly hit you or actually made contact came from and it helps speed up some of the searching. While health packs are rare, you can sometimes get free ones when a new mission begins to alleviate that need to sometimes let yourself be fired upon to find a foe.

Still, being able to shoot fuel canisters on cars and even tanks is satisfying when the game rolls those out, and when the game does a better job of mixing targets in the open and ones who need to poke out a bit to fire back at you, you can find sniping to still be an enjoyable task. However, the game sometimes wants you to completely abandon the premise and starts dipping into play more typical of a regular war shooter. While the large open streets of Berlin suffer for trying to finds small specks in samey environments, sometimes you’re thrown into a building where close quarters firefights are inevitable. When it’s something like a factory with multiple floors you could still conceivably try to use that to your advantage to snipe them from above or below, but this same factory level also has hallways you need to walk through where the soldiers inside will only appear once you’ve walked to a certain spot, a spot where it will be too tight to snipe foes. You do get a range of other weapons, automatics and silenced pistols meant to help you out of a jam if you alert foes, but trying to use these for regular combat is a gamble. You can’t properly aim them so you have to rely on the game’s auto-aim as you blindly fire them in the direction of foes that you’ll hope the game properly targets, and we certainly start dipping into the old war shooter trope of the one man army as you are both the sniper picking foes off from afar and the man running in with a machine gun to mow down the opposition. Shooting with anything but the sniper rifle is dull and unreliable though, but you can mix in grenades in clever ways to flush out foes, and in some places you can avoid going into cramped quarters by wounding an enemy soldier and deviously using him as a lure to draw out enemy soldiers who swoop in to try and save him.

 

Sniper Elite’s approach to mission structure is certainly an interesting one. While the actual goals make for a very forgettable overall story as you just do disconnected actions to foil the Russians as they start to replace Germany as the go-to villains of the time, the levels often involve large maps with multiple routes to the objectives. Depending on the difficulty you will be given a different amount of saves per level, and progress can be hard-earned because of how easy it is to die or make a mistake that can jeopardize the mission like spooking an assassination target. There is definitely some degree of trial and error as you have to familiarize yourself with a level and how enemies will spawn in, and they aren’t necessarily realistic in how they appear so you can’t reliably clear an area and expect it to remain safe. The mission variety at least ensures you aren’t just picking off soldiers from across the map the whole game, the player sometimes needing to be a patient sniper who waits for the one shot on the high value target and at other times focusing more on sabotage as they plant dynamite near supplies that they shoot later to send the place up in flames. Sniper Elite once again finds itself teetering between realism and power fantasy as it tries to mix in the exciting shake-ups with the duller realistic missions like lying in wait for extended periods or slowly pushing through plain parts of the city, and unfortunately that constant rise and fall doesn’t do much for helping either side of Sniper Elite truly find its footing.

THE VERDICT: Sniper Elite can’t ever fully commit to whether it wants to provide realistic roles for its sniper lead or if it would rather play into the power fantasy that having such an efficient and lethal weapon could provide. The difficulty settings allowing you to pick what elements influence your shot is a good step to letting that fall on the player, but while having more complex shooting to serve as a challenge is nifty, the mission design keeps swinging between creative ideas and locations and dull city streets with objectives unbefitting a sniper. When you’re picking off enemies one by one effectively you can feel like a talented professional but then you find yourself using the poor machine gun mechanics or trying to find the one remaining enemy in a broad open area and the gameplay can become quite dull. The flashy bullet cam almost makes up for the inevitable retries as you learn a level’s layout through trial and error, but the constant switching from incredibly satisfying to aggravating or boring is pretty much Sniper Elite’s identity once all elements are considered.

 

And so, I give Sniper Elite for PlayStation 2…

An OKAY rating. In one mission of Sniper Elite you can be poised as the perfect marksman, the player able to make everything click and really get on the kind of tear that rewards your skill and ability to accommodate whatever realistic options for sniping you have enabled. However, then the game loses confidence in its core concept and has you gun down guys with a regular weapon in a hallway. Some missions concoct interesting stealth components like placing explosives you activate later, and trying to snipe a valued target and then picking off the retaliating guards can be exciting as well. However, then you’ll likely end up in Berlin’s streets again trying to find the single small dot in the distance that is an enemy who will tear you to pieces with ease if you don’t spot them in time.

 

Sniper Elite has elements of realism and fantasy that it caters to well at times and poorly at others, and the already mixed successes of both approaches end up even more mixed when thrown together in the same pot. Sniping naturally requires a more patient style of gamer than regular war shooters, but the game can’t settle into compelling gameplay moments for too long before it start trotting out idea antithetical to sniping or sabotaging the interesting side of things with bland backdrops. The actual act of taking out enemies with your sniper rifle is still able to provide plenty of enjoyment when it is working well, but the game doesn’t fully cater to either the mindless or the mindful approach.  It does a decent job for the most part with the concept of a sniper focused shooter, but a bit more polish and creativity in parts would do wonders for helping Sniper Elite maintain momentum. More an amalgamation of the many ways sniping can be handled in games than a true execution of one vision for sniper play, Sniper Elite’s lack of focus means that it doesn’t quite miss the mark entirely, but they could have definitely executed the concept in a more engaging way if they had stuck to whichever side of realism they wanted the overall experience to cater towards.