Sniper Elite 3: Review
Sniper Elite 3 puts us in dusty Africa. This is a welcome change with Germany being such familiar territory. The most common color you will see in this game is brown, but that is not a bad thing. Sniper Elite 3 is beautiful, but not without flaws. Unsightly texture flicker is hard to ignore when everything else is so stunning. Glitching through a wall or the floor also can but a damper on the fun, especially if you spend a long time slinking around.
Sniper Elite 3 is a very gameplay driven experience. Each mission has a rough voiced sniper explaining the target and the environment. He will typically offer you tips on what you should bring. It is very difficult to care about the story at all. These cutscenes are mostly a slideshow. You will occasionally get the cutscene put together with gameplay graphics. These cutscenes are also quite slapdash. So the emphasis here is gameplay.
In Sniper Elite 3 you usually have the option of stealth or action. You control the character in the third person, aiming over the shoulder or down a scope. The fast paced action path puts you at risk, and even on the normal difficulty you will die quickly. You must utilize med kits to heal yourself. Healing takes a few seconds and you can be gunned down in the process. This game does a great job of offering realism, while offering tips and assists to keep it practical. Your binoculars are very useful for tagging objects and enemies. Once tagged, the vulnerable areas on the vehicles glow red. You will spend a lot more time blowing things up in this game than you may think. An issue arises with the action approach. The priority over animation this game takes, combined with the camera being quite close to the character's back can cause for some pretty serious confuse in run and gun situations.
However the best trick here is the X-Ray killcam. These killcams appear randomly when you fire that last killing shot. You may choose how often you see these, and you can skip them with a press of a button. It is simple, guily pleasure watching your bullet tear through the nazis lungs, brain, testicles, intestine, whatever. You can even incapacitate enemies just to kill those who try to aid them.
Sniper Elite 3 isn't a perfect game. The delivery of the story is boring and the game could have used some more time in the oven. However it does a few very important things well. First of course, is sniping. You must aim above the character and compensate for the bullet drop. Each weapon has its own stats, so the shooting does feel different from rifle to rifle. The load times are fast and the option to quicksave is one of many PC conveniences that this game brings home to the console. All in all Sniper Elite 3 is an uproariously exciting game that every action gamer must try.