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Sniper Elite 5 brings us back to the world of Karl Fairburne, still making his way through World War II.
Sniper Elite 4 took him to Italy, in 1943, but now the year is 1944, and he’s in France, here to uncover Project Kraken, starting off by taking out enemy elements along the Atlantic Wall, before moving on to occupied France, and since an early thing I spotted in the settings was that you can specify whether the Kill-Cam shots happen occasionally or frequently, so of course, I went with the latter. Why not! 😀
At first, the game was starting to feel quite very linear without multiple paths to get to your destination, but that was just the initial section of the first mission. After that, there were 2 or 3 areas to check out, and I could go to them in any order, with more to be revealed as I went. That’s because you think there’s a particular number of elements to a mission, but if you pick up intel as you go, it’ll reveal more elements for you to investigate, all with a view to 100%-ing the mission.
That said, there’s so much terrain to traverse, so it’s unlikely you’ll encounter and wipe out all the Nazis on any given mission, unless you literally scour every inch. And the same goes for picking up collectibles.
If you’re wondering how many missions there are, then there’s 10, the tenth of which is part of the DLC which didn’t come with my review code.
Sniper Elite 5 is not without its problems, however, and these are ones which have happened before.
Obviously, you’ll want to use the main sniper rifle the most, because it’s the greatest fun to get a result out of, but as you pan across a shot to aim at a baddie while looking down the scope, it feels very slow to turn, so I have to go back to the regular view from my eyes, turn, and then go back down the scope.
Then there’s finding collectibles in the game: For example, for some antiques in the second mission, Occupied Resistance, the game stated the marker was somewhere other than where they actually turned out to be, so I’m running around looking for a marker, but the number of metres of distance to get there was increasing the closer I got, and so I realised something was wrong. So, generally, ignore the marker to a degree, and bear in mind that if you can’t find something on the floor you’re on, it may be upstairs from where you are. I wish the game would fix this positioning, as well as telling me to go up- or downstairs if required. I get that it doesn’t want to make the game too easy, but a little bit of assistance would be nice.
Plus, as before, the A.I. is a problem at times. These Nazis are a bit thick, and in one video when they were in the next room, they just kneeled from a distance, firing at a all near me, endlessly, rather than coming to check if I was alive or dead. Additionally, if I give a little whistle, they’ll then come running, and I can gun them down like skittles!
However, there are some gorgeous graphical textures such as some very cool sand dunes mission 3, Spy Academy, and I’ve started getting into livestreaming more with this game. Normally, I’d try and complete a game, editing out the deaths and so on, but if you tried that with this game, it would take forever because YOU DIE A LOT! So, why bother with all that hassle? It’s been more fun to go a bit more guerilla-film-making style and run-and-gun, dying whenever, and if the livestream runs quite a while, so be it.
Plus, as with Sniper Elite 4, the game does auto-save frequently, and you can still save at ANY time, which is very handy for those tricky situations where you need that safety net; And, it’s still fun to sneak round the environment when you know a baddie is trying to track you down, so you take the route round to follow him from behind and shoot him in the back of the head! HA!
I play the game in 4K on my PS5, but I think the livestream goes out as 720p, then eventually resolves to 1080p HD. However, since I’m recording the footage, I’ll still make some brief clips to go out in 4K and you can see both the clips and livestream playlists in this review.
Thanks to our friends at Rebellion Developments for the review code for this game.
Sniper Elite 5 is out now on PS5, Xbox One / Xbox Series X/S, PC/Steam, and PS4.
Important info:
- Developer: Rebellion Developments
- Publisher: Rebellion Developments
- Players: single-player, multiplayer
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GRAPHICS SOUND GAMEPLAY ENJOYMENT |
10 10 8 10 |
| OVERALL | 9.5 |
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.