Not every game needs to be more like IO Interactive’s Hitman, but some games would benefit from adopting more of that incredible series’ strong points. This is something Rebellion seemed to figure out around the time of Sniper Elite 3 back in 2014, when the series ditched linear levels set in tight, wartorn streets in favor of a much deeper, wider tour of duty, with each map allowing for player choice in how they navigate the world and complete missions. The series has even gone so far as to create some absurd, Agent 47-like situations in which you can assassinate Nazis. Sniper Elite: Resistance reintroduces that tried-and-true formula for the fourth time in 11 years, and though it’s still enjoyable, I can’t help but notice how this campaign through the French countryside elicits such a strong sense of deja vu.
Sniper Elite is a third-person shooter set during World War II, and like other games in the series, it can be played in first-person when you’re aiming. The series has made a name for itself on a deep ballistic physics model that accounts for wind, bullet drop, and positioning, as well as its cherry on top: the X-ray killcam. This feature shows you, in slow-motion, how each bullet shreds Nazis in grotesque detail, inside and out. Like in other Sniper Elite games, a well-placed bullet can shoot their eyes out, explode their hearts, or even obliterate their testicles, among other special displays of sharpshooting.
Like its predecessors, the game is a fun and reliable shooter when it comes to sniping mechanics, though I’ve grown weary of the killcam. These days, I more often skip the killcam, or at least adjust my settings to see fewer headhunting highlight reels. I get it by now; it’s neat tech, but they add up over the course of a mission, which already tend to take me about two hours each, because I’m much more interested in stealthily completing my missions than watching the highlight reels of long-range vivisections.
Sniper Elite: Resistance shifts the focus from the usual series protagonist, Karl Fairburne, to a character formerly designated as Player 2 in the game’s co-op campaign, Harry Hawker. A British soldier, Hawker’s missions task him with performing the same type of feats for which Fairburne has long earned medals: infiltrating crowded Nazi strongholds, blowing up a few subs, trucks, or missile command centers, and displacing the brain matter of every fascist he encounters along the way.
With fascism newly fashionable again in some parts of the world, it would seem cathartic to simulate such vivid Nazi destruction, and yet, Sniper Elite has never cared to paint its villains as more than The Bad Guys, the way some games may with zombies or aliens. They feel comic-booky, and ultimately that’s okay–albeit unmoving–as the story has never been much of the point in these games anyway.
Each mission opens with a main objective, but you’ll find optional objectives as you explore, a high-value target who can often be killed creatively–like planting a rat-shaped bomb in the kitchen for him to shoot and detonate–and other helpful secrets, like weapon workbenches and alternate starting locations for revisited missions. No Sniper Elite protagonist is all that durable, so while you could maybe sprint across each sprawling map and wipe out your to-do list in under 20 minutes if you really wanted to, I can’t imagine it would be much fun or easy–in the open, the heroes die quickly. Instead, a methodical, stealthy approach is clearly how the game hopes you’ll play it, though it tries to give you the tools to go loud when you need to, as well.
That’s a place Resistance struggles, however, and it’s a familiar struggle. Outside of sniping, gunplay isn’t great. Aiming around cover is often janky, with Hawker unreliably sticking to a wall. Aiming in first-person with guns like SMGs and pistols also feels slow and unwieldy, though the reticle in third-person is pretty punishing, too, rarely narrowing in a way that promises your shots will be on target. Even the act of hurdling some waist-high objects, like railings or fences, proves to be consistent only in how inconsistent it is. Some walls I could scale easily, while others that would seem to be of a similar or identical height didn’t prompt me to leap over them. These aspects wind up leaving me untrusting of the world at times. If all hell breaks loose, I’d like to be able to trust a nearby cover object, but in Resistance, like in all of these games, that’s not always the case.
In part, Rebellion has put itself in a tricky spot. Clearly, the team is smaller and dealing with fewer resources than many games in the shooter space, and yet each installment looks pretty good and plays well enough that it can be easy to view the team as competing in the AAA space even though it truly isn’t. Traditionally, I’ve forgiven some of the jank and lack of polish for this reason. Rebellion is a team already overachieving by some measure, but to release so many sequels that feel so similar to each other at this point, it starts to feel more like an issue we see in the sports gaming world. A lack of game-to-game innovation jumps off the screen.
This is most egregiously depicted in Resistance’s skill tree, which is identical to Sniper Elite 5’s (SE5) skill tree. It’s not just galling to run back the same skills as before for players to unlock; it suffers doubly because that skill tree wasn’t so exciting to begin with. Many of its skills I have no use for, like being able to maintain my heart rate better during sprinting, and the tree also lacks some abilities I find obviously needed, such as allowing for a faster crouch-walking speed. Anyone who has played a few of these games and has an introductory grasp on in-game progression systems would likely have a few neat ideas that could’ve populated Resistance’s skill tree. Perhaps they would’ve even tried and failed to one-up SE5’s skill tree, which would’ve been disappointing, but worse is to re-use the one that was already there.
Some similar design decisions show up elsewhere, too, such as Missions 1 and 4 of the campaign being set on the same map, though Mission 4 does at least give you more space to explore that map. Later in the campaign, a mission re-uses many of the same assets and the basic setting as an early mission in SE5, to the extent that I had to look up whether it was set on the same exact map. (It isn’t.) It’s said the story is set in France because Hawker’s saga runs concurrently with Fairburne’s SE5 adventure elsewhere in the nation, but with choices like these on display, it starts to feel like Resistance, right down to how its name drops the use of numerics, is a sizable standalone expansion tied to SE5 rather than a sequel.
To the team’s credit, and partly what’s creating its image of a much more resource-heavy studio, there’s a lot to do outside the solo campaign. Like most of these games, Resistance’s campaign can be played entirely in two-player co-op, including cross-play lobbies. Not everything is better in co-op, but many games are, and this is one of them, provided you find a teammate with the same playstyle as you. The game also offers an Invasion mode akin to Deathloop or Dark Souls, in which you can jump into another player’s live campaign and hunt them down as an adversary.
This is the game’s most thrilling mode of all, as the consequences of each decision by either player become much more magnified. Making noise, alerting enemies, or missing shots will bring a pained grimace to your face when you’re trying to eliminate or outlast your adversary. Frankly, this series has not received enough credit for how cool this mode is. The huge maps, with their many different viable routes and strategies to employ, make this feel like the game’s secret weapon. Even as the campaign feels too familiar at times, Invasion mode invigorates it with greater appeal. Like always, if you hate the idea of being invaded, you can also just turn this feature off, or leave it open only to friends.
Sniper Elite also includes team-based PvP modes and wave-based PvE modes. I’d actually just begun playing these in SE5 last month, so though I’m not a long-time player, I have come to find, including in Resistance, that there’s actually a bit more magic here, too. The best of the modes is No Cross, which splits each map asymmetrically down the middle, inviting players into a snipers-versus-snipers headshot tournament where no one can traverse the gap to the other side.
Like Invasion, this mode is tense and exciting. Each sightline has counters, and the glint of your scope is a betrayer that promises no one camps for long before losing their helmet and all of its squishy contents. It reminds me of an era a few generations ago when shooters were trying to find their niche beyond simply doing what Call of Duty was doing. Not all of those attempts were successes, and Resistance’s PvP/PvE modes don’t seem likely to topple the genre’s titans anytime soon, but for players who appreciate the game’s physics and combat, you can spend many hours in Resistance’s peripheral modes and get more enjoyment out of it than you might in the solo story mode, where returns are noticeably diminishing if you’ve frequented this series to date.
All of these side attractions to the single-player campaign end up being stronger reasons to experience Sniper Elite: Resistance. Oddly, the one thing the game adds to its suite of modes is Propaganda missions, which I found to be quite forgettable. Unlocked by finding propaganda posters in the campaign, these seven bonus missions return you to maps from the story with new stealth, sniping, or open-combat challenges to perform in a timed environment. These feel totally skippable unless you and some buddies are into bragging rights and want to compete for the top scores. Whereas Invasion mode is an under-heralded destination mode for this series, I would be unsurprised and even content if Propaganda missions are one-and-done.
I experienced some bugs in my time with the game, such as invisible walls that shouldn’t have been there and some jank at the top of staircases that would catch me or NPCs if we were crouch-walking. A patch deployed before the game’s launch seems to have cleared up most of these issues, so though they got in my way at times, they shouldn’t get in yours much or at all. This patch didn’t address my issues with inconsistent wall grabs and hurdles, but then neither did the last three games, so that speaks more to my hope for the series’ future, not just my feelings on Resistance itself.
In the end, Sniper Elite: Resistance is a fun game that you’ll probably enjoy if you liked the last few, but you’ll likely enjoy it even more if you’re new to the series. Some of its signature moves, like the gruesome killcam and the solid sniping mechanics, are getting a bit stale here as the series has mostly stopped innovating across consecutive sequels.
While the campaign is fun but often too familiar, Resistance shines most of all in some of the game’s secondary modes, particularly Invasion and No Cross PvP. Of course, bringing a buddy along to play the story in co-op smooths over some of its roughness, too. I do want to play more of this series, but I’m hopeful the next one takes a bigger leap forward and cleans up some of the long-present jank. Like the difference between the second and third games in the series, it’s only going to be the next big step for Sniper Elite if the team finally innovates on what existed before. Otherwise, it’s just sparkling familiarity.
