Sniper Elite: Resistance
Review
Putting A Flaw In The World War II Machine
by Jordan Helsley
reviewed on PC
Eventually, I holed up at a position on a low wall, butting myself up against it and an adjoining box to my left, always remembering the first rule of this deadly game: protect your flank. I kept my head down and used the third-person camera to survey the area, including the small courtyard below, looking for any movement. If the heart rate of my character was linked to my own, it might have jumped, as I spied the telltale glint of a sniper scope down the path to my left. I thought I was the cat, but I ended up the mouse, and were it not for my trusty box, I'd already be a dead one. Acting with speed was the only advantage I had left, and as I awkwardly stepped away from the ledge, aimed, and fired, I knew it was just as likely that I had placed my head or my body or any other vital piece of meat into the enemy's awaiting scope. I only let out a breath when the slow-motion camera shot of a bullet flying through the air revealed that it would soon obliterate the jaw of my opponent in gruesome detail, rather than a vital part of my anatomy. The bad guys won this round.
Measured Resistance
Using Invasion Mode (which carries over from Sniper Elite 5, and is entirely optional) to step into the shoes of a Nazi "Sniper Jäger" focused on ruining another player's run is desirable because it distills the experience of Sniper Elite: Resistance down to its most basic parts. Sniper vs sniper, good positioning vs bad. And while the allied sniper has to contend with the (often inconsistent) AI soldiers, you are free to roam as you try to head off the snake in the grass before he completes his objectives. It also exemplifies that the game is at its best when it's slow and methodical. You're focused on a goal, the location of which is often obscure, and it allows you the freedom to pursue it. Take things too quickly, however, and your opponent can use their superior tools to take you out. As the Allied sniper in these engagements you can use Focus, which normally allows you to see enemies through walls in a reasonable-size area around you, to get what is effectively a radar-ping of the Jäger's direction. When he's close, the entire border of the ring will ping, and he can end up another silhouette for you to track. The Jäger is incentivized to keep their distance to avoid this mechanic, while the Allied sniper wants to get nice and close.
Therein lies the first problem with Sniper Elite: Resistance - the sniping is superb, you're just often asked not to. Each of the game's seven campaign missions (plus one tutorial, and one finale that can be completed in mere seconds) drops you into a vast landscape full of possibilities. Often there are open fields, various roadsides, and a large building where at least one of your objectives is located. You will almost invariably end up inside of a space that feels downright claustrophobic compared to the exterior sniper heavens. This trade-off is necessary to ensure that the spaces you're inhabiting are varied and interesting (and they succeed in that regard), but the close quarters combat and movement is distinctly lower tier. Not only are your weapons far less accurate than you'd want them to be, but there's also a lack of precision in your character's movements. Whether it's getting "sucked" into a cover position, colliding with the environment as you try to line up to climb a ladder, or just some broken collision on something like stairs, things often can, and do, go wrong in high-pressure situations in enclosed spaces.
Stretching Your (Sniping) Legs
There’s a lot you can do in the great outdoors, though. It’s something that will come as no surprise to seasoned Sniper Elite players, but long-range reconnaissance, sniping, and even subterfuge remain thrilling in these wide open sandboxes. You’re still engaging with distance, wind, bullet drop to achieve a satisfying (though unchanged) x-ray shot of some soldier’s insides. You can still plant a grenade on a corpse to trap an unsuspecting investigator at some other point in time. There’s still enough freedom in map traversal to lead you to interesting collectibles or unlockables in some overlooked shack, or to find a secret entrance to your ultimate objective. Even in my fourth playthrough of one particular level, I found new nuggets of story, an alternate entry point for subsequent play throughs, and a new vantage point to survey the landscape. It took matching up with a co-op sniper for me to realize that one particular underground bunker had an entrance that ended up being in front of my eyes the entire time. These little pieces that make for worthwhile replayability are definitely a strong suit.
Outside the Campaign (and the aforementioned Invasion) there is a surprising amount of worthwhile combat to engage in. A four-player survival mode tasks you with defending positions, which can be a joy when your series of traps come together nicely. The 16-player multiplayer mode can offer tension and joy repeatedly over competitive matches. Most challenging, though, is a series of Propaganda missions, each unlocked by finding a poster in the campaign missions. They advertise time-limited objectives, and are split between Sniping, Stealth, and Combat types, but in practice they end up being this mix of frantic planning and intense calculations to complete the mission before the time runs out or you get riddled with bullets. They're bite-size experiences where the fun is in the optimization over several runs, and it's a shame there aren't more of them.
An Experience In Need Of A Tailor
No matter which avenue you choose, each mode has a significant amount of customization available for you. Most weapons and attachments will be unlocked via challenges in the mode in which they're being used, and they offer tangible differences in the gunplay. With metrics such as sound output to go along with the standard fire rate and control variables, there's plenty to consider when compiling a loadout for a given situation or playstyle. The somewhat janky nature of your character's movement and collision make the multiplayer occasionally frustrating, but seeing others dealing with those same issues right in front of your eyes can be satisfying in its own right. On the standard difficulty, the AI-centered modes can offer an inconsistent experience as their logic breaks down or someone's eagle eyes penetrate a solid surface. Each mode has positives and negatives, but I particularly enjoyed those co-operative-style modes because the difficulty is also highly customizable.
I spent most of my time in the campaign (about 8 hours for a decently leisurely playthrough) and on normal difficulty so some of my issues may not stand up to advanced difficulty adjustments, but core elements of the stealth gameplay sometimes broke in absolutely baffling ways. Some enemies can spot you, and recognize that you're not just another bad guy, at extremely long distances. While this often means their detection meter slowly builds up before you duck out of the way, other times they lock in so hard that apparently a toe sticking out from behind a wall is enough to send them into full alert. A time or two I got spotted through a solid wall, completely undoing a long and arduous stealth mission. Once, an omniscient tank gunner alerted his tank-mates to my presence in a stone bunker and began firing away. Through the onslaught of machine gun and cannon fire, I escaped to the opposite side of the bunker to discover that several soldiers nearby were completely oblivious to the action 30 feet away. They only realized something was wrong when they heard the gunshot of my silenced pistol removing the first enemy in my new, away from the tank path. Fortunately, both the autosave and manual save options allow for a forgiving experience. Playing with some sliders remains an option, but could be problematic because outside of some of these outlier situations, things felt exactly as I wanted them to.
A Straight Shooter
Despite its issues, Sniper Elite: Resistance doesn't fall too far from the quality the series has become known for, but it doesn't make any leaps, either. Except for a few crashes (which were more likely caused by my machine than the game itself) it ran smoothly throughout my time with it. Sound design remains strong, which is a requirement considering how integral sound can be for the gameplay. The story is okay in that it's pretty boilerplate for Nazi occupied France, but it represents yet another theatre of the war that is often overlooked, and its connection to the bigger picture is tangible. It looks fine, won't blow anyone away but also won't hurt any eyes overall, but I think the characters look pretty bad up close. This is often represented in a jarring look from main character Harry Hawker (the first time the main series has changed its player character, though Harry was the co-op partner previously) as the third-person camera swings in close to his bug-eyed and inexpressive face. And as delightful as slow motion shrapnel-filled explosions and bullet-based surgery sequences are, they really don't hold up to any visual scrutiny, if you want to go that far.
It's easy to see Sniper Elite: Resistance as one of the few games extending the life of the "B game" because it really is. It's not completely unpolished, nor does it lack heart. Some of its jankiness can even be amusing, such as the time I sniped an officer 100 feet away, only for his hat to land next to me a few seconds later. Some inconsistencies can nevertheless be as frustrating as the fights against other players can be thrilling. It's a relatively brief experience that's banking on a bevy of modes to maximize replayability, and it does that well, too, as long as the player meshes well with the core gameplay and, more critically, can customize the experience to their liking. Whether or not it's "worth it" is more broad than all of that, though. It's telling that this is the first entry in the series to forgo a number without being an entry in the Nazi Zombie Army spinoff (or VR, if you count that). It does not make any significant advancements in the long-running series, but it also doesn't falter harder than the others, either.
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7.5
fun score
Pros
Great sniping environments in which to use satisfying gunplay and customization to achieve plenty of gory one-shot-kills. Plenty of modes and side objectives to keep things interesting.
Cons
Interior gunfights are messy because of imprecise movements and environmental collision issues. Enemies are simultaneously oblivious to everything and eagle eyed observers.
