Sniper Elite 4 Review

The base of his skull exploded, the medulla oblongata pierced, cutting off all involuntary movement. Under the hot Italian sun, his body dropped to the ground motionless, and I moved on towards my next target. Climbing the dilapidated fort tower above the unfortunate dead Nazi soldier, I could hear airplanes flying overhead in patrol formation. I set up on what was left of a top floor and crouched in the shade, observing the villa outpost ahead of me through my binoculars: twelve soldiers, three trucks, one officer. Laying prone upon the cold ancient stones, I pulled out my rifle, measured the distance - 247 meters - and started taking aim. I adjusted the scope’s rangefinder to compensate the bullet drop, aimed slightly left of the target to compensate for the windage, and waited. Dozens of seconds went by, seemingly an eternity, as the Nazi officer walked towards a balcony and leaned back against its railing. In the distance, I heard the sound of plane’s engines approaching, and braced myself. The officer stood up, the squadron flew overhead, and I pulled the trigger. Just like the others, the base of his skull exploded, the medulla oblongata pierced, cutting off all involuntary movement. Under the hot Italian sun, his body dropped to the ground motionless, and I moved on towards my next target.

Sniper Elite 4 is a marked improvement upon previous installments in the series. Just like its predecessor, the fourth entrant takes everything that worked on previous games and bumps it up a notch, deepening the gameplay and widening the distance while keeping the core of the franchise intact. Sniper Elite 4 is a brilliant game and an example of how to evolve a franchise over time.

I never gave a damn about that zombie crap. Punching Nazis is what really matters.

Following yet again the adventures of dour series protagonist Karl Fairburne, an American Office of Strategic Services operative working for the British Special Operations Executive, Sniper Elite 4 takes place in lovely Italia during the height of its fascist rule. Fairburne is tasked with assisting the Italian resistance in 1943, immediately after the events of Sniper Elite 3.

Keeping up the same overall plot of its predecessors, Karl ends up running into some new dangerous piece of tech developed by the Germans. This time, it’s yet another guided missile -- but air-to-surface instead of surface-to-surface like Sniper Elite V2’s… well, V2. While the exact events are fiction, the tech behind it was actually real, which is always an admirable effort by the part of game developers when dealing with historical subjects.

Like the fact that the Hogwarts Express was a Nazi contraption.

Voice actor Tom Clarke Hill returns as Karl, and continues doing a great job as the gruff battle-hardened veteran. The game also features a proper cast of characters this time around, including multiple snipers and commandos that can be played in the multiplayer mode and appear throughout the campaign. Karl now interacts with them in more meaningful ways than “sniper round to the testicles”, and thanks to Sniper Elite 4’s newfound focus on narrative and cutscenes, those conversations with allies and members of the Italian resistance lend a touch of humanity to the proceedings as our titular sniper learns about the war and gathers information. While Fairburne’s characterisation remains unchanged, those interactions paint Karl as a bit of a jerk, though -- when first meeting fellow commando, Karl folds his arms across his chest instead of returning the soldier’s offered handshake. I tend to like Karl, having controlled him for the past two games, but such a pointless act of impoliteness seems severely unwarranted and out of character.

While there are some Italians around, the majority of people you shoot are Nazis. The game manages to add a degree of humanity to your targets by providing you with intel when observing them through your binoculars; those pieces of information contain soldier's details like "Wife just had a child" or "Convinced he's going to die here", and those little snippets go a long way to making your targets feel like real people instead of cardboard evil Nazis. I actually felt a tint of regret upon taking a life, and the responsibility and faces of every soldier I killed stayed with me.

The binocular intel details are a very nice touch.

I’m also glad to say enemies are no longer Terminators; they can no longer hit you from 300 meters away using an MP40. Now, they often fire in bursts and manage to hit you once or twice at most. They can still see pretty far, but their ability to recognise you also changes based on lightning conditions -- standing in an open road in bright sunlight will get you spotted half a click away, but you can easily hide in the shade 200 meters from your target.

Having played all previous installments thoroughly, I must say my favourite feature among the many additions and changes to this entry is rather simple yet encompassing: the distance. I’m still severely bothered by the amount of bullet drop a Springfield rifle has in 100 meters range, but I understand that is done to marry technical capabilities with gameplay design; Sniper Elite V2 had very close engagements to be an actual sniper title, but Sniper Elite 3 widened the maps and started to make actual use of long distances. Sniper Elite 4 expands the levels even further, so this time the average sniper shot hovers around 200 meters -- it might sound inconsequential, but it is a hugely important step in making it feel like proper sniping and not a third person Call of Duty with scopes.

Seriously, though, the binocular lines are amazing.

Another hugely important gameplay change is the revamped items and stealth mechanics. Mainstays of the series, like crouch, prone, and the silent pistol Welrod are all back, but the options are further expanded with proper melee kills and an Uncharted-esque climbing system. You can climb poles, vault over windows, and hang from ledges with a simple button press, lending a welcome degree of maneuverability and positioning to your endeavours -- the verticality aspect is slightly lacking, but that is unfortunately common in most games of this sort nowadays. Melee kills can be done from ledges and cover, and can be pulled off more reliably even when detected -- as long as you strike in the short reaction time between a soldier seeing you and shooting you. Those melee attacks now have their own X-ray kill camera, too, meaning you can experience the action of your commando knife piercing the innards of Nazis in all its glory.

Technically, the sound and music are amazing. The series theme thankfully returns, but with a slight different orchestration, keeping in tune with the franchise’s tradition. The graphics are top notch, building on Sniper Elite 3‘s foundation the same way it built on V2 and delivering beautiful scenes. The in-game cinematics are especially breathtaking, and I absolutely loved the high-quality hand drawn briefings presented between missions. The game’s performance is also surprisingly smooth for today’s crappy standards, and the whole game just oozes great production values and amazing polishment.

Except for that hair. That hair is stupid.

Bugs were few and far between, but I often had a severely annoying bug happen where the bullet would not leave the rifle. Sometimes that happened for the same reason it did on Sniper Elite 3: because something was obstructing the line of sight from the barrel in first person, even though the scope view and third person camera were clear. It created a severely frustrating situation, especially for those of us that play without aim assist and have a perfectly lined shot ruined for no-goddamn discernible reason. But sometimes it was a straight up bug: I had it happen while crouching in the middle of an open field, and I actually paused the game in order to enable aim assist and could watch incredulously as the diamond marker never turned from grey to red indicating a clear shot -- even though there was nothing but air between me and my targets. Besides that, the only minor bug I encountered were some disappearing skybox mountains in the second mission when looking through the binoculars; slightly immersion breaking, but hardly a major fault of any kind.

Sniper Elite 4 is a surprisingly good game, especially being the third entry of a rebooted franchise. In an age where developers will shamelessly milk their products for all it is worth with nary a concern about quality, Rebellion managed to surprise me - and I admit, consistently prove me wrong - by delivering high standard titles with every numbered sequel of the Sniper Elite series. Their approach of keeping and improving what worked while taking away what didn’t - and never losing sight in the process of the games special at its core - is admirable. That worked for Assassin’s Creed 1/2/Brotherhood, for the first two Mass Effects, and for Metal Gear Solid before it, to name a few, and it continues to be a supremely successful strategy with Sniper Elite. I look forward to replaying it, both alone and with friends in coop, and can wholeheartedly recommend it -- Sniper Elite 4 is a fantastic title that won’t let you down.