SPOILER-FREE REVIEW
The only fun to be had in Sniper Elite 4 is online, thanks to flawed design and an extraordinarily bland campaign.
Sometimes, it’s not just one big flaw that sinks a game. Sometimes it’s a lot of small things that build up to create a mess. Like any enemy of series protagonist Karl Fairburne, Sniper Elite 4 is riddled with holes: tiny flaws inconsequential on their own, coming together to drag down an otherwise competent shooter. Budding snipers are left with half a game: a decent online experience that can’t fully stand up on its own.
The single-player campaign, which sees Fairburne infiltrating Italy to wreak havoc, is bland. Nothing particularly interesting happens and none of our characters seem invested in their own stories. You’re told that Fairburne, a one-note military stereotype, is on a high-stakes mission to destroy vital military targets, but since you’ll spend hours just crawling through the undergrowth, it never feels urgent.
This game’s flaws are obvious in single-player. Every mission has objectives: high-ranking Nazis to assassinate or things to blow up. You’re then let loose into massive sandboxes, with plenty of verticality and terrain variety, to complete them. You’ll journey to coastal cliffside bases, viaducts and overrun occupied towns, only to repeat what you’ve already been doing for hours: lying prone in the grass while picking off Nazis in between you and your objectives. It’s tiresome. On top of that, no matter how much time you spend peering through binoculars, tagging enemies and crafting a perfect plan, something always goes awry. It’s impossible to complete some objectives without breaking stealth and that’s frustrating, especially since SE4 clearly wants you to be stealthy. None of this is helped by muddy low-resolution environments. Character models suffer, and not being able to clearly see distant enemies unintentionally adds to the difficulty. The X-Ray Killcam is a notable exception; seeing a bullet puncture someone’s lungs is wonderfully excessive, but repetition quickly strips away the excitement after an hour or two.
The AI is unpredictable. To a certain extent you want that, because part of the fun comes from improvising in the moment to compensate. But it’s also inconsistent. Sometimes, enemies are moronic, other times they have superhuman sight and hearing. It’s hard to plan when you can’t be sure whether an enemy is eagle-eyed or short-sighted at any particular moment. The mechanics that make sniping so realistic: factoring in bullet drop, wind and ambient noise, create an experience that’s both realistic and dull. Enemies cluster together, so you have to wait for the exact moment where everything from ambient noise levels to enemy sightlines are perfectly aligned. The problem is, you might end up waiting a long time, far longer than is reasonable, for those moments.
Your options for creating your own moments are also limited. The game’s arsenal of explosives tend to be suited to particular playstyles and useful only in very specific circumstances. You can whistle to attract enemies over for stealth kills, plant booby-traps and use the environment. Still, these don’t feel like viable solutions most of the time. Achieving a stealth kill for example requires getting so close to enemies that they can easily set everyone on alert before you can terminate them. Fairburne moves painfully slowly, and even something as simple as climbing a wall is made tedious. Unless you’re particularly patient, it’s hard to resist the temptation to just run and gun.
The campaign is best played cooperatively online with a friend. Having double the firepower makes all the difference and the game takes that into account. You can see targets tagged by your teammate’s binoculars and wipe out clusters of enemies in a far cleaner fashion than you could by yourself. It’s a shame that the game didn’t lean on it more in the same way as Dead Space 3 for example by crafting a narrative that’s co-op friendly.
Multiplayer is where this game really shines. SE4 has traditional modes such as team deathmatch and free-for-all, giving them a gripping long-distance warfare twist. Pulling off a headshot in this game is easily one of the best experiences you can get from a modern shooter. On top of that, rather than just replicating traditional game modes, the game has Distance King. You’re encouraged to pull off long-distance kills in order to add to your score, with the team achieving the greatest combined distance winning the match. It’s a simple but effective way to add personality to a staple game mode. The inconsistent AI is replaced with slightly more consistent, impatient human beings, making multiplayer fast-paced and engaging. You’ll find that this is where most of this game’s fun is found. Unfortunately, while lag might not ruin the game, it still has an unwelcome effect on a game that demands quick reactions and pinpoint accuracy. Customisation is also limited to a very basic progression system, and an option to buy different guns. It’s incapable of sustaining a truly deep or long-lasting online experience.
A lot of small imperfections come together to kill the fun in single-player, but in the end, the generic story means it’s not worth suffering through except in co-op. Any fans of the genre will find that, and multiplayer, to be a refreshing, though not long-lasting, change of pace from more traditional shooters like Call of Duty or Battlefield. The game’s uniquely realistic sniping mechanics mean it’s certainly still competent, even if it’s certainly not elite.
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