Sniper Elite: Resistance demonstrates the continued relevance of shooting nazis right between the eyeballs

A naive part of me expected Sniper Elite: Resistance to deviate from the Sniper Elite formula, if only a touch. I thought maybe we’d be shooting something other than nazis, perhaps during a point in history that’s not World War 2. No: Sniper Elite Resistance is still about shooting nazis during WW2. Not only that, but like Sniper Elite 5, Sniper Elite Resistance is set in France.

I guess it has to be nazis every time. No other baddies are as unambiguously villainous in the history of sniper rifles, except for zombies, and Rebellion has a whole other series for that (I’m talking about the Zombie Army series, where the zombies are, I shit you not, nazis too). When the violence is as gratuitous and forensic as it is in the Sniper Elite series, it pretty much has to be nazis.

So Resistance is basically Sniper Elite 5 .5, then. The major distinguishing factor is that this one stars Harry, a British guy, instead of the usual Karl, an American guy. Anyone who played Sniper Elite 3 to 5 in co-op will have met Harry as player two. He’s just as good a marksman as Karl, and harbours a similarly healthy contempt for nazis—don’t we all!—so aside from his thick accent and sometimes amusing asides (“I’m losing a lot of motion lotion here!”) he’s not different to play at all. He’s less amusingly archetypal than Karl, because Karl is basically id Soft era BJ Blazkowicz. Harry will probably take some getting used to, but I did appreciate how, as he dashed along a promenade absorbing countless bullets, he promised he’d “be right as rain as soon as I stop this bleeding”.

I played the third mission, which is set in the moonlit Fourvière district of Lyon. The resistance group to which Harry belongs has noticed a lot of nazi presence around the train station and nearby luxury hotel. Word is going around that the nazis have a superweapon at their disposal, which is alarming indeed. I have to go and figure out what they’re up to and, if the opportunity arises, put a stop to anything that might hinder the resistance’s interests.

I start on a hilltop overlooking the Saône River and a heavily blockaded urban district. The train station and mansion are on the other side of this river, so I need to somehow get across the nearby bridge which is, in Harry’s astute words, “crawling with nazis”. Like previous Sniper Elite entries, I have a sizable open “zone” to explore, sprinkled with lots of stealth options (long grass, chest-high cover) and tactical opportunities (white-noise emitting generators, vehicles to sabotage). There are pokey interiors to explore, which provide access to balconies and rooftops that provide a better view over the nazi-ridden expanse, though each time I cross a road I need to ensure there’s not a nazi truck or nazi motorbike-with-sidecar approaching. So far, so Sniper Elite.

But no matter what I have to cross that bridge. It takes three deaths trying to cross it for me to remember that I’m playing a game about sniping. Those who enjoy this series, like me, know that they’re big stealth sandboxes, more akin to Metal Gear Solid 5 or Hitman than say, Call of Duty or Sniper Ghost Warrior. Still, it pays to remember that sniping is core to the series’ identity, because it wasn’t until I remembered this that I had success, chiefly via the disposal of enemy snipers—nazi snipers—behind spotlights in the distance.

While the stealth in Sniper Elite games is less creative than in Hitman or Metal Gear—you can’t dress up as a nazi, for example, nor send a nazi skybound with a helium balloon—it’s a far sight more high-stakes than in Assassin’s Creed or Far Cry. The AI is really good at flanking me when I make my presence lightly felt, and when I’m out in the open with guns blaring it’s very rare for me to make it out alive. Escaping detection is usually a bit harder than just running around a corner and taking cover for 30 seconds. A lot of thought has gone into making the hide-and-seek fantasy authentic: walking into a group of birds and thus dispersing them may draw the attention of a nearby nazi, for example.

But the sniping, yes. When you shoot the nazis in the skull you still get super-slow motion x-ray footage of the nazis’ brains being penetrated by bullets and then exploding. It’s fun doing this, and not just because the baddie is a nazi (though that’s part of it, I swear). When I get a slow-motion kill shot I get to take a breath and relax. It’s a brief respite from the overwhelming pressure of not getting caught, because like all good stealth games, Sniper Elite punishes me mercilessly for not being careful and thinking things through. These damned nazis are sensitive to overhead footsteps and too-brisk movement through scrub, so when I play I’m always holding my breath to make sure I’m not making any unnecessary noise. X-ray vision of nazis getting their brains splattered across the pavement is a nice break from all that. (It also reveals the nazis for what they are: evil skeleton monsters dressed up in skin.)

I do end up making it to the mansion, after accidentally killing a high-value target—Claude La Ronde—during an unrelated skirmish. It’s a nice change in mood: this is a big lavish tinderbox of chaotic opportunities, albeit one strewn with swastikas. Anyone who played Sniper Elite 5—especially its superb Spy Academy level—knows how good Rebellion is at creating real-feeling spaces that nevertheless teem with clever gameplay opportunities. But because I’ve run out of time—from dying so often, due to forgetting to snipe—I just throw grenades everywhere. It’s a lot of fun to do this, and of course I die, but I don’t regret doing it. I may have died, but nazis did too.

Is Sniper Elite: Resistance “good”? So far, yes. I can’t help but resort to a banality here: if you liked Sniper Elite 5, which was good, you will definitely like Sniper Elite: Resistance. It’s pretty much the same. The protagonist is British, but if you can see past that, this is another great stealth game about shooting nazis.

The thing about the Sniper Elite games is that they’re not cerebral games, but they’re not stupid either. While the series’ tone adopts the over-egged melodrama of ’80s straight-to-tape, that’s not at the expense of mechanical complexity. I can lose hours messing around in the Sniper Elite games, prodding at different ways to pull off goals. I guess in that way, they’re like those pulpy war novels full of bizarrely detailed military detail: their trashiness belies their complexity. They’re immersive sims for people who don’t like the weird bullshit in modern immersive sims, like blink abilities and rat spells. Bugger that fairytale frivolity! Give me boots-on-ground nazi slaying, mysterious superweapons, and futile skirmishes from behind chest-high cover.

And that probably explains why the series’ critical reception hasn’t matched its audience reach. Presentation-wise, the Sniper Elite are macho shooting games about big dudes—whether American or British—mowing down indescribable evil. There’s nothing subtle about them. It’s goodies versus baddies, and it’s undeniable that they lack the stylishness and subtle intelligence of, say, MachineGames’ take on the Wolfenstein series. But you know what? So far Sniper Elite: Resistance is a lot more fun than any Wolfenstein game I’ve ever played.