They can be raining bullets on you and it makes no difference to the foot soldiers, yet when you fire a bullet the entire army comes running to your location. What makes it even more maddening is that no one else on the field seems to notice. On the other side of the spectrum, the game is filled with enemy snipers and turret gunners who will spot you from a small country away and fire at you with pinpoint accuracy. There are times when you can shoot a soldier with a silenced pistol, wait a couple seconds for him to react, and then kill him near a friend who doesn’t seem to mind. If the Germans were as dumb as they are depicted in V2, World War II could have been won in a day. Then there are issues with the enemy AI which is inconsistently mediocre at best. He loud, clunky, and awkward - even if he is really awesome at holding his breath and shooting people in the face from a mile away. It’s unbearable! I frequently broke stealth to suffer the consequences of enemy fire because it was easier to take than a five minute walk across a room. I’ve never seen a slower stealth walk in a game before. So, with all these great features you must wondering where the game went wrong? For starters, V2’s heroic US sniper Karl Fairburne walks like he has a stick in his ass. Thankfully, you can customize the enemy AI, ballistics, and stealth abilities to make the difficulty that suits you. All these abilities make the stealth portions bearable, so don’t make the mistake I did and go into the game on Sniper Elite difficulty which takes away all of these features. Enemies will go toward your last seen position, leaving them vulnerable for a flank attack. Finally, you have a ghost image - borrowed from Splinter Cell: Conviction - that will appear whenever an enemy spots you. You also have a stealth meter that surrounds your character, indicating the direction of enemies nearby and their level of awareness. You can mark targets through your binoculars, which will summon an icon, visible at all times (even through walls), above enemies’ heads. V2 adapts some stealth mechanics seen in many recent games. There are some levels that are more open in V2‘s campaign but they are the exception and don’t come until later in the game. You expect an abandoned building to be there for your benefit but instead it’s blocked off. Instead you feel like a hamster guided by a hand within a maze. You rarely feel like a sniper trying to get the lay of the land, working toward a vantage point. Unlike the original Sniper Elite, V2 presents much narrower levels that route you waypoint-to-waypoint, a la Call of Duty. The problem is that the game feels designed around action with stealth as an afterthought, making for a very frustrating experience at times. After all, it would just be another third-person shooter with a sniper rifle if it didn’t focus on stealth. Stealth is the only route that makes sense for a game of this type. Unfortunately, it’s all sandwiched between a rather frustrating stealth game. The fun of sniping Nazis in the head, organs, and testes never gets old due to this great feedback loop. Imagine the slow-mo bullet cam that followed Max Payne’s sniper rifle and combine it with the brutal skeletal damage animations of last year’s Mortal Kombat reboot. At its core, V2 is a glorified shooting gallery that spotlights your shots with brilliant presentation and impact. Well, you can but that game would have to be called Silent Scope.
You can’t make a game where you only snipe. The film is basically a long cat-and-mouse chase between two snipers trying to outwit each other. It’s Enemy at the Gates that really makes me excited about the prospect of a sniping WWII game. Sniper Elite V2 has some moments like this.
The latter represents an escort mission of sorts: A sniper picks off a horde of Nazis as his friends down below hold their ground. When I think of snipers I think of two films - both set against the backdrop of World War II - Enemy at the Gates and S aving Private Ryan. We can all agree that sniping Nazis in the balls is awesome, but is everything surrounding it equally sound in V2? Read on to find out. On the other, you have gore galore and bloody balls. On one side, you have a tasteful campaign based around (partially) historical events. Sniper Elite V2 is the perfect meeting point between shooters today and shooters a decade ago. Sniper Elite V2 comes with a twist, however: What if you could snipe Nazis in the balls? Tantalizing, I know. Medal of Honor, Battlefield and Call of Duty now look to contemporary war zones for inspiration, while other shooters look toward the future ( Syndicate). The appeal of the World War II shooter faded long ago.