Sniper Elite 3 Xbox Series X
Gundenia Ransbottom
Sniper Elite is a tactical shooter video game series developed by Rebellion Developments. It is a third-person tactical shooter that emphasises a less direct approach to combat, encouraging the player as a sniper to use stealth and keep distance from enemy soldiers.
The games follow Karl Fairburne, a German-American Office of Strategic Services operative battling Axis forces during World War II. The series has been met with relatively positive reviews. More than 30 million Sniper Elite games have been sold.[1][2]
Sniper Elite is a third-person shooter that involves stealth and first-person shooter game elements. Many of the single player levels allow multiple routes for the players to take in order to avoid direct firefights. Set in World War II, the player character, a German-American OSS operative named Karl Fairburne, utilises appropriate weapons for the era. The sniper rifle is the primary weapon throughout the game, though additional side arms (submachine guns and pistols) can be used depending on the situation. In addition to hand grenades, the player can also deploy tripwire booby traps, land mines and dynamite. The player can also shoot the enemies' own grenades to trigger an explosion. Binoculars are used to tag enemies in view, displaying their position and movements to the player. Different postures such as crouching or lying prone can steady a shot, and the player can take a deep breath to "focus" for increased accuracy. Realistic ballistics are optional, taking into consideration factors such as wind direction and strength and bullet drop, potentially altering the outcome of a shot even with the use of the scope. Introduced in Sniper Elite V2 is the "X-Ray Kill Cam", a feature where upon a successful and skilled shot will, in slow motion, follow the bullet from the rifle to the target's point of impact, showing an anatomically correct x-ray of the body part being hit and the damage the bullet causes to the organs and/or bones. In Sniper Elite III, stealth mechanics were reworked. An eye icon squints or opens to denote the player's level of detection by the enemy. Enemy soldiers will also have a circle meter over their heads to indicate alert status. Players are then forced to relocate periodically to prevent detection with a white ghost image to mark their last known position and the enemy will search a wider area.
Rebellion Developments' book imprint Abaddon Books released a novel inspired by the game, Sniper Elite: The Spear of Destiny written by Jasper Bark.[34][35] In this book, Karl Fairburne's mission is to stop Nazi SS general Helmstadt from selling a working atomic bomb to the Soviets.
A 2018 comic based on the series, Sniper Elite: Resistance written by Keith Richardson and Patrick Goddard. The story follows Karl Fairburne as he parachutes into occupied France on a mission to destroy a secret weapon, but instead of a silent mission of sabotage he finds the local resistance compromised and the SS waiting to play a deadly game of cat and mouse in the terrified streets of an ancient town.
The Nazi Zombie Army series has also seen multiple E-books and novels, including E-book prequel Nazi Zombie Army: Gtterdmmerung[38] in 2014, and novel Zombie Army: Fortress of the Dead[39] and comic mini-series Zombie Army 4: Last Rites[40] in 2020.
On 29 March 2021, Variety reports that a film adaptation of Sniper Elite is in development with Marla Studios' Jean-Julien Baronnet producing along with the game's producer and CEO of Rebellion Jason Kingsley, Gary Graham writing and Brad Peyton directing with the film follows Karl Fairburne engage in a cat-and-mouse chase through the streets of London at the height of the Blitz during World War II, as he tries to save British Prime Minister Winston Churchill from a Nazi assassin.[41]
Like a fleet of Allied landing craft storming the beaches of Normandy, Sniper Elite 5 has blown me away. I spent most of my weekend with it in a state of delighted befuddlement, constantly muttering 'isn't this brilliant?' as it delivered yet another incredibly designed level to creep around while turning Nazi skulls into cornflakes. I've enjoyed Rebellion's infamously grisly stealth series since the middling V2, but I never thought I'd be writing about it with the kind of breathless excitement reserved for the likes of Elden Ring.
With the benefit of hindsight, there were signs Sniper Elite might turn into something special. While known mainly for its 'X-Ray' system, which lets you watch your bullets pass through enemy bodies in grotesque anatomical detail, Sniper Elite has been slowly unveiling its potential since 2014's tour of Africa in Sniper Elite 3. The maps have grown larger, more open and more ambitious while the once clunky movement and combat have become steadily more refined. Sniper Elite has been dependably entertaining for a while. It just needed a spark of inspiration to make it excellent.
Sniper Elite 5 finds that spark in an unlikely place: the Allied invasion of France. Of all the second world war theatres, Operation Overlord is the most exhaustively explored by video games, replicated endlessly since 2002's Medal of Honor: Allied Assault. I'm more familiar with the hedgerows of Normandy than I am with my own back garden, and find the idea of playing a game set there similarly unexciting. By all logic Sniper Elite 5 should feel more derivative than the previous games. Instead, the fallow fields of France force Rebellion to be more resourceful in their level design, and the studio reinvigorates the setting with inventive locations and an intricate eye for detail.
Sniper Elite 5 kicks off before the events of D-Day, with veteran brain-popper Karl Fairburne slipping behind the Atlantic Wall to rendezvous with the French Resistance and lay the groundwork for the invasion. The opening mission sets the standard for all that follows, taking place in a sprawling chunk of the Normandy coastline that compiles all the greatest hits of the French liberation. There's a giant radar dish to sabotage, a bunch of 'eighty-eight' artillery guns to scupper, and a picturesque village where a Nazi general wanders around waiting to have his skull ventilated.
Even at this stage, Sniper Elite 5 feels like a marked improvement over previous games. Not only do the maps flow more organically, but Fairburne is more elegant in his traversal of them, able to weave gracefully between Nazi patrols and dispatch enemies at close quarters with quick, brutal melee kills. It's worth noting that Sniper Elite 5 is more unashamedly gruesome than ever before. Arterial spray hisses out of bodies like air from a tyre inflation hose, while the X-Ray system is extended to both melee and sidearm attacks.
But it wasn't until the third mission, Spy Academy, where I fully grasped what raises this above its predecessors. Sniper Elite 5's signature level, Spy Academy opens with a glorious panoramic reveal of Beaumont Saint-Denis, a stunning fictional recreation of the tidal island of Mont Saint-Michel. From across the water, it seems like a sniper's paradise. Wehrmacht soldiers patrol openly on the narrow stone bridge connecting the island to the mainland, while circling Luftwaffe planes provide reliable audio cover for your shots.
As you infiltrate the island proper, however, it becomes clear that this is no simple shooting gallery. The narrow medieval streets, combined with the level's continuously upward progression, make effective sniping opportunities rare. Instead, you must rely on Fairburne's other skills and equipment, taking out enemies at close range with silenced pistols and melee kills, and carefully deploying teller mines to eliminate the patrolling German motorcycles.
In this way, Sniper Elite 5 perfects the balance between sniping and more general stealth. No one tactic works universally. Sniper Elite 5 is more liberal with suppressed weapons, for example, letting you attach a suppressor to pretty much anything. But suppressed is not the same as silent, and you still need guards to be fairly isolated (or a low level of ambient noise) for suppressed shots to go unnoticed. Alternatively, you can also minimise your chances of detection by using 'subsonic' sniper rounds. These are quieter than standard ammunition, but are less powerful and less accurate. Completely silent kills can only be achieved up close, which has its own inherent drawbacks.
Multiplayer invasions are far from a new idea, but Sniper Elite's diverse maps and wide variety of equipment makes it the perfect stage for some wickedly tense cat and mouse action. With a Jager in play, rounding every corner could see you tread on a teller mine, or be gifted a brand new orifice from half a mile away. During one invasion, I spent 15 minutes circling my invader around a lavish chteau, before finally taking them down from the balcony of the building's private concert hall. In another encounter, my invader and I mutually incapacitated each other, and the round turned into a frantic race to see who could patch themselves up the quickest.
Invasions fit into Sniper Elite like ten grams of lead into an SS officer's eye-socket. But Rebellion also makes some smart iterations on the formula. The game pings you the approximate location of your foe to minimise fruitless wandering, and will highlight your respective positions if you spend too long camping in one place. It also lets both sides request a rematch once the fight is over, letting you temporarily shelve your mission for a few rounds of ad-hoc deathmatch. When you're finished, the game either continues on, or it pops you back to your most recent save. This makes it less neatly integrated than, say, Deathloop's invasions, but it also makes it more flexible and less frustrating, leaving you more inclined to keep the system switched on.
Through its invasion mechanic, Sniper Elite 5 achieves the ultimate goal of any sniping game, to capture the tension and drama of Jude Law and Ed Harris squaring off in Enemy at the Gates. If, like me, you watched that film when you were too young to do so, and thought "I wish there was a game that let me do that", rather than the more balanced "wow, war is terrible," then Sniper Elite 5 is that game, just without the Russian setting or Rachel Weisz. Couple that with eight superbly flexible sandboxes and the most imaginative interactive representation of the second world war in at least a decade, and you've got yourself one of the most entertaining games of the year.
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