Set in the late days of World War II, Sniper Elite V2 puts you in the role of an American sniper tasked with stopping the Russians from recruiting Germany’s top rocket scientists. As the game begins, you’ll quickly realise this is not your typical WW2 shooter. Instead, it’s a tactical sniper simulation layered on top of one.
At the start of each mission, it behooves you to stay stealthy and observe your surroundings before making a move. Break out your binoculars and you can scan the beautifully destructed cities and locations for hostiles, then make a plan of action. It’s up to you how to play each level, and unlike other WW2 shooters, V2 genuinely gives you options: take enemies out stealthily from behind with your silenced pistol, go in guns blazing with your Thompson, pick them off at range with your sniper rifle, or some combination of all three. The majority of the time, though, you’ll be using that trusty rifle, the game is called Sniper Elite V2, after all.
So once you’ve scouted the area and made your plan, you have to execute it, or more specifically, execute the enemies standing between you and your objective. Line up a nice sniper shot and pull the trigger and the view switches into the X-ray kill-cam: you watch the bullet leave your rifle, fly toward your target, and pass through whatever vital organs or bones stand in its way. It doesn’t trigger on every shot, but it does on most of the kill shots, and for the first couple of hundred times it’s genuinely cool. It does get repetitive, however, and the constant gore may be too much for some players.
As you progress through the story you unlock various new weapons, though sadly most offer no significant advantage over your defaults, the sniper rifles being the only real exception. Beyond carrying three main weapons, a pistol, submachine gun and sniper rifle, you can also use mines, grenades, various other explosives, rocks and stationary weapons to work through each level. The single-player campaign is fairly long, around 11 hours on hard, but that length isn’t really a bonus, it’s more of a hindrance, because the more I played, the more I noticed how repetitive it is and how stupid the AI is. I’d take out one of two patrolling guards with my rifle and the other would freak out for a minute, then simply go back to his patrol. Enemies would run one after another straight at a machine-gun emplacement I was manning, and there’s the issue of respawning foes in areas you’ve already cleared, just to pad the level out.
Overall, the game is good, but not great. It has really good graphics, the best bullet physics of any game I’ve ever played, a unique X-ray kill-cam, good co-op multiplayer and a decent story. But it also has a few graphical anomalies and animation issues, the AI can be very stupid, and it gets repetitive over its long campaign. My recommendation: rent it first, or wait for it to go on sale, rather than buying it outright.
