The Sniper Elite series has always been focused on stealth, presenting players with wide open spaces they must move across pocketed with lethal enemies that can call in reinforcements in a matter of seconds. You need to be careful, but there’s room for some deviation from the sniper rifles that give it its name. We recently had the opportunity to play Sniper Elite 5 for a couple of hours, and we’re happy to relay that the core of what makes the games fun is still there, but the fifth outing somehow manages to bring new life into a tried and tested formula.
A breath of fresh air
It’s impossible to discuss this game without first mentioning the setting. Sniper Elite 5 takes place in France, in 1944. The Nazi war machine occupies most of the country, and the resistance is fighting from within to undermine its efforts. The stunning setting feels fictional, but it’s France as it was and largely remains today. Farms, castles, and small structures dot the incredibly beautiful countryside. You can see from one side of a map to the other, allowing you to identify your main goal and survey the locations between from afar. Visibility of both terrain and enemies is such an important part of a game that relies on long-distance combat, and developer Rebellion has nailed it here.
While the setting is new, the enemy is the same. The familiar metallic bulk that all machines and vehicles of the era had comes across well, but the enemy soldiers are smarter, more aware of their surroundings, and yet somehow more relaxed too. The heat of the region means that soldiers look like they’re enjoying themselves, but they’re also highly responsive. This accurately reflects the tension most soldiers must have felt when stationed in France. Each day was a new opportunity for the resistance to attack, and we doubt anyone could truly relax with that ever-present threat.
You are not a shark among fish
Any Sniper Elite fan will know that there are two main paths you can take in a mission. You can either be stealthy, sticking to the shadows, only ever firing a single shot at a time to avoid being heard, or waiting patiently for hours while your enemies move out of the way along their patrol routes. Or, you can go in guns blazing, shooting every soldier you see before they have a chance to return fire. Explosives cause vehicles to blow up, ending in absolute mayhem.
Sniper Elite 5 still allows you to go down each of these paths, but it’s far more punishing than previous entries. The soldiers stationed around you this time are clever, able to discern the area a loud shot came from, group up, and then search that location. You have to work extremely hard to take out soldier after soldier in the way you might have in previous titles, because a mistake in this game will cost you your life. A handy visual indicator for your last known location helps you avoid the search parties, and you can go around enemies most of the time thanks to multiple routes throughout the location.
We attempted both play styles in our short preview session. But what we found is that you need much more time with the game than just two hours to master the AI to the point that you can run and gun through these missions like a speedrunner, or if you’re trying to finish a mission before dinner. Instead, making use of everything at your disposal provides the best results. For example, we laid a mine on a nearby road to take out a troop carrier. This attracted every soldier in the vicinity, allowing us to take them out quickly while moving through long grass to avoid being found.
A motorcycle followed soon after, and we discovered that you can shoot and disable it, creating an engine issue that disguises sniper shots when timed correctly. This is a familiar mechanic for fans of the series, but being able to create cover along any road like this opens up opportunities for dozens of different approaches to the same mission. It’s a small tweak that’s aided by how much better the game runs, even when twenty enemies are dashing around you searching for that last shot or explosion’s origin. Play things right, and you can stealthily move past every encampment without being spotted, but kills are so satisfying that you’ll struggle to do this. You really are your own worst enemy, like Peter Rabbit choosing not to escape Mr McGregor’s garden unscathed and instead dropping a carrot between his butt cheeks.
A Sniper’s playground
We played through the second mission in Sniper Elite 5’s campaign. Our goal was to get to a nearby castle and pick up plans that a high-ranking officer has been working on. The local resistance proved to be just as tenacious and intelligent as stories from World War 2 would have you believe, giving us intel on multiple buildings around the map where soldiers had built up small bases or dug in to protect routes to the castle.
You’re free to ignore this intelligence if you want to, and the game even accommodates your American rudeness in optional dialogue as you run off before the resistance fighter has finished speaking. When we did follow our friend’s advice, we discovered caches of ammo, powerful weapons, and interesting encounters that made the mission feel fresh even once we’d completed it. There’s certainly a main path you can follow that avoids most enemies, but these optional areas open up side quests and help you complete challenges that all broaden the scope of this single mission.
One outpost was a ruined church and surrounding farm. Here, we discovered a side quest and whistled for any enemy that would listen. When the soldiers approach, you can melee kill them without anyone noticing. Rebellion has done a great job of implementing dynamic cover that reacts to the player, meaning bodies are thrown behind you and out of sight, and the protagonist leans into whatever he’s close to cover, making it feel like you’re the one on the battlefield in the heat of the moment. We later discovered that you can combine this with climbing around locations to great effect, throwing bodies off of bridges to hide them completely, and slowly working your way through every nearby enemy.
There’s no real end to the options you have for attacking a mission. One route can provide a peaceful jog along a river with only minor interruptions from soldiers, while another is an arrow directly through the heart of most occupied locations. The important thing is that it makes Sniper Elite 5’s sandbox missions feel like mini open worlds, full of things to discover each time you return, enticing you with collectibles, side quests, and a combination of in-game challenges and those you set yourself.
Tiny refinements go a long way
The castle at the center of the mission we played forces you to give up your sniper rifle and focus on pistols, traps, distractions, and melee attacks. You must explore the colossal building without alerting a single enemy, or the soldiers in the courtyard sound the alarm and bring the entire map down on your head. The close corridors are horrific for fighting more than a few enemies at a time with an SMG or assault rifle. This has always been a weakness of the Sniper Elite series, but effort has been made in this game to make the experience smoother in every way.
The aforementioned dynamic cover goes a long way to fix most of the trouble the series has had with these close spaces. However, there’s also now much more scope to create noise and draw soldiers away from your position, allowing you to sneak into rooms without killing anyone. You can also opt for the single-shot silenced pistol if you can pull off a headshot. Slow and steady still wins the race, but now it’s a much more satisfying experience rather than a battle with the game.
These improvements have also been applied to the traps you can create. Unfortunately, we didn’t get a chance to lay a mine on a body and throw it into a group of unsuspecting guards, but we did turn bodies into lures that explode or open avenues for more kills. We also experimented with noise mines that let you attract soldiers to a location after you’ve left it. These work well and give stealth purists the vital tools required to get through the game without being seen.
The signature of the Sniper Elite series, the slow-mo x-ray kill camera, is, of course, back in the fifth installment. While we’re sure there have been many improvements made to this feature, it looks largely the same to us. Animations are smoother and more types of kills than ever trigger it, but it’s essentially all the same. That’s not a bad thing though. This kill camera is a staple of the series and it’s just as satisfying here as it was in every previous entry. It’s how we all appease our lizard brain, giving it as much gore as it can handle with ridiculous shots that blow up spleens, massacre soldiers as explosions send vehicles soaring through the sky, and blast our way through every testicle the Nazis dared to station in France.
Absolutely relentless
While our preview was restricted to only one mission in Sniper Elite 5, it felt like it went far beyond that. If you explore every location on the map, complete every side objective, grab every collectible, and really take your time with stealth, it could take you over 5 hours. Conversely, you can quickly rush to the main objective and make a heroic exit as Nazis fire at you from behind in under 20 minutes. Regardless, the game’s sense of tension is ceaseless. You never feel as relaxed as some of the soldiers look, always monitoring the horizon for movement, listening for footsteps, and hoping the soldier you just passed doesn’t turn around.
Even once you’ve mastered the game after it launches on May 26, that tension isn’t going anywhere because of all the potential invading players that could stalk you in any mission. This is an element we didn’t get to see in our preview session, but adding another real human into the mission whose sole goal is to kill you would bump everything up to eleven. The game doesn’t need it, but it’ll certainly extend the endgame for anyone that fancies a challenge.
Overall, we thoroughly enjoyed our time with Sniper Elite 5. The fresh setting and way the game is more open than ever for you to approach how you want work together to create a coherent experience that never unnecessarily pulls you out with UI or button prompts. When battling through corridors with dwindling ammo, throwing a grenade to cause a distraction, or carefully popping heads as you work your way across the map, you always feel like a part of the world. It’s only when the end screen pops up that you remember this isn’t an open world you can explore at your leisure, and in some ways that’s a shame, but it’s definitely the best step forward Rebellion could have taken after Sniper Elite 4.
