I’m hiding on a bridge in the middle of the night. The night is calm and quiet. I’ve spotted my target across the river, a high-ranking Nazi officer patrolling the docks. Lifting my scope, I line up the shot while hiding from watch towers at the bridge’s end. I pull the trigger and watch as the officer crumples on the pavement. While the officer was dead, my shot rang out in the night, calling every Nazi to my position. I hide behind boxes of supplies as enemies hunt incessantly for me. Eventually, the search is called off and I can continue my mission.
These encounters are the highlight of Sniper Elite: Resistance. Unfortunately, they are few and far between. What you are left with are missions that are focused more on hunting down the elusive contextual button prompt and are held together by a next-to-nonexistent narrative. It is a serviceable stealth game that lacks the intricacy or excitement of its peers.
Functional storytelling
You follow Special Operations Executive (SOE) agent Harry Hawker’s attempt to stop a Nazi chemical weapon in occupied France. After a brief meeting with the French resistance, Hawker hunts down information and attempts to sabotage the Nazi superweapon. Beyond the introduction and the closing cutscenes, the narrative is strictly used to set up the next mission. There is little characterization of Hawker, his allies, or his enemies. Any attempts to create dramatic tension fail since they are stock characters at best.
Despite Hawker not having a personality, he still comments throughout each mission. Whether it is to confirm the next steps of an objective or to remind the player of the usefulness of tall grass for the 15th time, Hawker’s chatter is both dull and repetitive. It is one thing for a character to talk too much, but it is another annoyance when that chatter does not add anything to the story, world, or characters.
Shoot or sneak
As a stealth-action game, Sniper Elite: Resistance stays safe within the genre’s conventions. You can run, shoot, and hide reasonably well and have a few tools to distract or disable guards. None of these tools are unique as they are the same bottles, grenades, and med-kits seen elsewhere. Each map may be large, but the stealth challenges remain simple. Even with each map’s multiple pathways, you are still hiding behind the same walls and in the same patches of grass. Worse, the maps have a surprising sense of rigidity with invisible walls sending players down those paths.
Even if you get spotted, combat remains exploitable. Yes, you go down quickly if you are caught out in the open, but if you hide behind a doorway or above a staircase, an army of Nazis will run straight into your line of fire. An alarm may be raised but that can be quickly silenced if you shoot it and even if you cannot, it will just add more Nazis to the meat grinder you set up behind that door. Searching enemies can restock your ammo and healing supplies, so as long as you do not run out into the open, you will outlast them. This takes out a lot of the tension from being spotted, especially if you are near a building or some sort of entryway. Some maps have more open environments and make this strategy less effective, but then you can turn to the classic stealth strategy of running away until the alarm shuts off. If you do choose to wait it out, it does take a while for the enemies to settle down so you will be spending a decent amount hiding in that tall grass.Â
Press triangle to sabotage
Even when the stealth and combat do click, the mission structure often loses the excitement of the action. Each mission has a set of main and optional objectives with the main objectives usually involving reconnaissance or sabotage. Both of these make heavy use of contextual button prompts with multiple objectives boiling down to infiltrating a location, pressing triangle as Hawker gives some commentary, and then exiting the area. Sometimes that infiltration turns into a search for where the contextual button prompt is hiding with you having to find a key or explosive to unlock the prompt, but there is very little freedom in navigating these objectives.
The side objectives fare a little better with both button-fueled sabotage and more open-ended assassination targets. While the optional sabotage and intel-gathering objectives fall into the same issues as most of the main objectives, the assassination targets allow you to make use of your tools as a stealthy sniper. You can snipe from afar or sneak in and deal with your target up close and personal. The sniping itself is relatively simple but when you snipe, you can either risk alerting enemies or attempt to mask your sound within surrounding noises. Whether it is rolling thunder or a misbehaving generator, you can time your shots to eliminate your targets without giving away your position. You can be rewarded with a gory X-ray shot, but admittedly I found them to break the pace and intensity of the actual mission and quickly turned them off after a couple of shots. Regardless, these assassinations are the highlight of the game.
You can also keep exploring for optional collectibles and secrets, yet it all feels unnecessary. There are pure collectibles that you can hunt for experience and some background knowledge, but there are also propaganda posters and optional infiltration points. The propaganda posters unlock missions that are challenge rooms that focus on stealth, combat, or sniping. They are tangential and with how underwhelming the combat tends to be, not worth it. The infiltration points give you optional entrances for repeated playthroughs, but the rigid objectives of the main missions discourage replaying said missions. There are even upgrade stations that are honestly unnecessary considering how effective you are with your starting weapons. Sniper Elite: Resistance has a fair amount of fluff that may not hinder the game but does not help it either.
Conclusion
Sniper Elite: Resistance can have exciting moments. Getting spotted while finishing your last objective and making a hasty escape from the area can be exhilarating. However, these moments are squandered by rigid mission structures and stealth mechanics that have been implemented in more interesting ways in other games. It is a serviceable game that is functional but not exceptional.
Sniper Elite: Resistance releases on January 30.
The Review
Middling
