Over the course of my time with Rebellion’s Sniper Elite V2, I’ve found myself quoting Valve’s 2009 Team Fortress 2 video “Meet the Sniper” almost incessantly. As far as I’m concerned, quotes from that particular video either apply perfectly to everything that has happened during my time with the game thus far or don’t apply at all.

More specifically, I’ve found that the “professional’s standards” according to Team Fortress 2’s sniper don’t really apply to my experiences with Sniper Elite V2 and, I’m sure, every other game in the Sniper Elite series.

The aforementioned “professional’s standards” are as follows: “be polite, be efficient, and have a plan to kill everyone you meet.” Of course, I adhere to precisely none of those standards. In my opinion, the enemies I find myself assassinating in Sniper Elite V2 deserve no politeness.

As far as the other two standards are concerned, I frequently find myself without the skill necessary to achieve efficiency. Instead, I just count myself fortunate that I have much more sniper rifle ammunition than I need to accomplish my objectives.

I also don’t typically come up with plans to kill everyone I meet. Since I’m a rather terrible shot in games that revolve around sniping, my main plan is basically, “introduce bullet to head from such a distance that the bullet can’t be traced back to my location.”

If that fails, I often just resign myself to my fate, which usually consists of either fighting my way out of my current location or dying in the process. Some of the time, I manage to gun down enough enemies to clear a path to my objective or escape route. Most of the time, however, I miss a crucial long-distance shot and suddenly find myself being gunned down instead.

That’s quite enough evaluation of advice from a Team Fortress 2 character. I think it’s high time I began discussing my thoughts on Sniper Elite V2. As I often do, I’ll begin that discussion with the game’s plot. Your character, legendary U.S. sniper Karl Fairburne, reprises his role from the original Sniper Elite and finds himself confronted with several new missions and targets.

Sniper Elite V2 takes place during a pivotal point in military history. More specifically, the game takes place just before the end of the Second World War. During this point in history, the world’s superpower nations begin to transition from World War II to the Cold War.

As such, certain Nazi scientists must be terminated before they can pass along their V2 rocket technology to the Soviet military. However, some of these scientists have instead elected to aid the United States in a similar effort to halt the encroaching Red Army.

That’s where you come in. You must ensure the survival of any scientists who wish to defect to the U.S. and use your legendary sniping prowess to eliminate those who would assist the Soviet Union. You’re subsequently dropped into a war-weary Berlin in order to begin tracking down and eliminating your targets.

The question of how you go about accomplishing your missions leads me to begin the discussion of the various gameplay aspects of Sniper Elite V2. I’ll discuss most gameplay aspects in as much detail as I can.

Obviously, your character is a sniper. This means, among other things, that you want to see your enemies before they see you, assuming they see you at all. To aid you in the process of analyzing your surroundings, you’re equipped with binoculars.

Using your binoculars will allow you to keep track of the general locations of enemy troops. With that knowledge, you’ll likely have an easier time keeping track of such things as which troops might prove problematic for you as you go about your various objectives.

If you find yourself wishing an enemy soldier or two would just get out of your way so that you can proceed undetected, yet you believe killing them might compromise your position, you can always create a distraction.

Your main way of doing this consists of throwing a rock at an object near the soldier(s) in question to temporarily draw their attention away from their posts. You (somehow) have infinite rocks in your possession so you can create distractions essentially whenever you feel doing so is necessary.

Of course, as a sniper, you’ll need to be well-equipped in terms of firepower if you want to stand a chance of killing your targets without getting gunned down yourself. To that end, you’re equipped with three time-period-accurate weapons on each mission.

Namely, you’ll have your trusty sniper rifle for long-range assassination and two sidearms for close-range encounters. One of these sidearms is usually a light machine gun, and the other is a silenced pistol.

On most missions, you’ll have quite a lot of ammo for your sniper rifle, but you’ll often find yourself with significantly less ammo than for either of your sidearms. I have a feeling this is probably because the game figures you shouldn’t need your sidearms very often if you’re sniping efficiently and remaining undetected. After all, the game focuses on sniping, and it had to stop players from going guns blazing in each mission somehow.

Regardless, it can still be quite annoying (and often fatal) when a Nazi sneaks up on you and you’re fresh out of ammo for anything but your sniper. As I said, I suspect this is the game’s way of attempting to teach you to conserve your ammo where you can.

It should be noted that you can pick up a slain enemy’s gun should you happen to run out of ammo for one of your own. The trouble with doing that is that enemies don’t exactly tend to carry around copious amounts of light machine gun ammo.

A moment ago, I mentioned my suspicion that the game might enforce less usage of sidearms because players should be doing their best to snipe efficiently. By “snipe efficiently,” I basically mean two different things: make your shots as accurate as possible so as not to waste ammo, and don’t let your fairly loud sniper rifle compromise your position if you can avoid it.

Personally, I’m not exactly great at either of those aspects of gameplay, but I usually somehow manage to make things work. For example, when it comes to not letting the sound of a shot from your rifle compromise your position, you can take advantage of sounds in your environment.

Allow me to illustrate what I mean. If there’s a tank passing by or a missile launch test going on, you can use that noise to mask the sound of your shots. If a shot is masked by a nearby loud sound in your environment, enemy soldiers likely won’t immediately know what happened to their comrades you just shot. Thus, they’re less likely to be able to figure out your position unless you’re out in the open.

There’s one final gameplay aspect of Sniper Elite V2 that I’ve yet to discuss. In my personal opinion, I left this particular aspect out of my discussion until this point so that I could save the best for last, in a sense.

I’m referring, of course, to the popular “bullet-cam” mechanic introduced in the original Sniper Elite title. This mechanic allows players to watch their sniper rifle bullets much more closely than normal as they fly across a battlefield and pierce their way into their unfortunate target’s body.

This mechanic has been expanded upon in Sniper Elite V2, by which I mean players are now often able to see the extent of the damage their bullet causes when it hits their target. Skulls fracture, teeth shatter, or worse, depending on where you manage to hit your target.

I’d like to begin my closing statements by acknowledging the presence of gratuitous violence introduced into Sniper Elite V2 via the aforementioned “bullet-cam” mechanic. I’m well aware that levels of violence such as this might cause discomfort in some players. Heck, there were a few shots I landed that even managed to make me cringe, which very rarely happens.

If you can deal with things like that, though, I consider Sniper Elite V2 to be quite an enjoyable game. I don’t feel qualified to state unequivocally whether or not the game offers an authentic sniping experience. I do, however, feel that the experience the game offers is still enjoyable, regardless of whether it’s truly realistic.

I suppose I shall close this review by stating that sniping is obviously dangerous and challenging work. Despite that, I always found myself wanting to progress through Sniper Elite 2‘s campaign just to see how well I could perform in terms of efficient sniping. I can definitely still use some practice, which is why I’m glad Sniper Elite 2 is as enjoyable as I find it to be.

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Sniper Elite V2

$21.24

8

Score

8.0/10

Pros

• Gameplay is Easy to Learn, Yet Difficult to Master
• Score System Challenges Players to Improve Over Time

Cons

• Players May Dislike Detailed Levels of Violence
• Certain Missions Can Prove Too Open-Ended

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