Slow motion Nazi killing
I tried Sniper 2 a few years ago but never got into and didn't think I would ever play this game until I watched the Quick Look. I guess after Wolfenstein: The New Order I was still in the mood to kill Nazis so I picked this up and was pleasantly surprised.
I really enjoyed the gameplay aspects of Sniper Elite 3. It had the perfect mix of stealth and action and only when I had to take on vehicles did I get frustrated. Around half of the games levels end with you needing to fight an armored car or tank of some kind. This got old real quick. The game is rather short and took me just seven and a half hours to beat even with completing most of the side objectives. I imagine if you went guns blazing it could be finished in half that time on the easier difficulty levels. The levels themselves are open areas with many different paths the player can take to reach the objective on the other side of the map. You can use a variety of stealth tactics to pick off Nazis one by one. A silenced pistol, using environmental noise to cover your sniper shots, or just sneaking your way past everyone.
When things go loud you can pull out a submachine gun, use grenades or other explosives to defend yourself it needed, but I mostly relied on the sniper rifle. Playing on Marksmen difficulty I never found the game very hard even in the later stages with lots of enemies, because it’s fairly easy to run and hide in order to lose your pursuers. Sometimes the best thing to do is find a high level spot and create some commotion to draw out the enemy into the open and pick them off. The slow motion skeletal destruction when killing with the sniper rifle is something you will probably either love the whole game or get sick of it quickly.
My biggest complaint with the game would be its needlessly stupid story. The North African theatre gets so little attention that they could have based the game around more real world events and what actually happened since it would be new to most players. Instead the game is based around a cartoonish evil Nazi with plans to build a ridiculous super weapon. Unlike how the new Wolfenstein created the whole game based around ridiculous Nazi super weapons in Sniper Elite it just feels out of place because the rest of the game is grounded in reality. The story’s ending was also very abrupt and anticlimactic.
As someone who is sick to death of modern military shooters I found this game to be a welcoming change of pace. Watching Nazi skulls explode in slow motion never got old for me. I enjoyed trying to stay stealthy as possible and when the shit it the fan I could create as many explosions without the fear of a “Mission Failed” screen. The whole time playing I kept waiting for some dreaded stealth only mission but it thankfully never came. The game may have horrible story and be a tad short for $50 but I still found it to be a lot of fun to play.
