Sniper Elite: Resistance Review – Sniping Never Changes

Over the years, the Sniper Elite series emerged as one of the top stealth game series, and for good reason. With each new entry, developer Rebellion further refined the series’ formula, providing players with more tools to sneak past enemies, who, in turn, have become smarter and more resourceful themselves, culminating with Sniper Elite 5, which introduced, besides more gameplay improvements, a new Invasion mode in the vein of the Souls series that allows players to “invade” another player’s world. This mode considerably spiced up the experience, adding an element of unpredictability for those who enabled the optional invasion.

With the latest entry in the series having been released almost three years ago, the time was definitely ripe to see SOE sniper Karl Fairburne back in action, infiltrate enemy’s strongholds, and enjoy some gory kills with the series’ trademark X-Ray Kill Cam. Rebellion, however, had something else in mind with Sniper Elite: Resistance. Instead of featuring a brand new story taking place after the fifth main entry in the series, the new game focuses on the hidden war fought during World War II, detailing British soldier Harry Hawker’s mission to dispose of a new insidious Wunderwaffe that would allow the Nazis to easily turn the tides of the war. Operating in France, Harry Hawker ends up collaborating with the local Resistance to learn more about this new threat and get rid of it for good on the eve of one of the most important events of World War II: the Allies landing in Normandy.

A game like Sniper Elite: Resistance is most definitely not story-driven, nor does it attempt to be, as its story and characters are nothing to write home about. While Harry’s snarky remarks can be fun to hear from time to time, they don’t add much to what is a typical war story with all the usual elements, such as brave Resistance members, ruthless scientists and Gestapo operatives and so on, although the fanaticism of Special Committee C, the group behind the chemical Kleine Blume weapon, is refreshing in some way, as it breaks the Nazi absolute obedience to the Fuhrer seen in this type of story.

Thankfully, Sniper Elite: Resistance delivers fully when it comes to gameplay, although with a few caveats. For starters, anyone who has played Sniper Elite 5 will inevitably feel disappointed at the lack of new features in the latest entry in the series. In pretty much every gameplay aspect, Resistance feels more like an expansion of the previous entry in the series, featuring more of the same. That isn’t a bad thing at all, as the stealth gameplay is extremely tight thanks to the varied design of the new maps, which include a Nazi-occupied dam in the Alps, occupied cities with plenty of facilities, including a hotel, a coastal chemical weapons plant, a hilltop fortress and so on.

Following the series’ tradition, these maps feature main objectives that must be completed to proceed to the next map and plenty of side objectives, which include killing a specific target, collecting documents and other collectibles, and so on, which expand the game’s playtime considerably. All the maps, like in the past installments, are designed as sandbox locations where the player is free to reach the main objectives and deal with the enemies any way they see fit, taking advantage of the environment and the tools that can be scavenged on site as well, such as crowbars, explosives and any sort of weapon. These tools augment Henry’s loadout, which includes a sidearm, an automatic weapon, and a long-range rifle that can be selected before a mission begins. All weapons can also be fully customized using workbenches found during missions with new parts that can greatly alter their performance, giving players the chance to tailor them to their preferred playstyle.

Speaking about playstyles, as already mentioned, Sniper Elite: Resistance allows players to tackle each mission’s main objective any way they want. While sneaking around remains the way to go, those who are keen on a more aggressive approach can definitely just go all out and kill all the Nazis on sight, although this approach becomes less and less viable the higher the difficulty is set. Besides featuring some general difficulty presets, Sniper Elite: Resistance also allows players to fine-tune the difficulty to their liking by including options that change specific aspects of the challenge level, such as enemy aggression, accuracy, skill, sniper skills, perceptiveness, turning Focus on or off, the ability which lets Henry perceive enemies in the vicinities, and more, granting players a surprising amount of control over the entire experience.

Even just using the regular difficulty presets, the game can be quite challenging, especially for newcomers who are not used to its mechanics. Thankfully, it does not take long for players to get to grips with them, so, on the whole, the experience is rather welcoming despite the complexity of some of its mechanics, such as sniping, which requires players to keep quite a few things in mind before pulling the trigger. The aforementioned trademark X-Ray Kill Cam naturally makes a comeback, giving players the chance to see exactly how they have killed their enemy with their well-placed shots. Depending on how an enemy is killed, Henry will also obtain experience points to level up and earn Skill Points that can be used to unlock the skills included in the three available skill trees. The vast majority of these skills are rather basic, but some of them can be a big help, depending on the playstyle, such as those that enhance the aforementioned Focus mode, which makes sneaking easier and possibly more fun.

Besides featuring eight main missions set in some rather varied locations, Sniper Elite: Resistance also features an additional set of missions called Propaganda Challenges, which are unlocked by finding Resistance posters hidden inside the main maps. These special missions are slightly different from the main ones, as they put the player’s stealth, combat, and sniping skills to the test. By completing them within certain time limits, it is possible to unlock medals and new weapons, so completionists have plenty of reasons to clear them. Those who wish to put their skills even more to the test also have the chance to play with or against other players in a variety of multiplayer modes and Survival Mode, the same modes seen in Sniper Elite 5. Rounding up the multiplayer modes offered by the game is the ability to play each main story mission in co-op mode, which opens up some extremely interesting possibilities, making repeated playthroughs even more fun.

Launching on previous generation consoles as well as on PC and current generation systems, it is not surprising to find that Sniper Elite: Resistance is far from the best-looking stealth game available. While locations look decent enough and finely detailed in a previous-gen sort of way, character models leave something to be desired, especially when it comes to facial details, which look rough, and animations, which are a tad stiff at times. Still, the game’s visuals are acceptable, for the most part, and fans of the series will not find anything truly wrong with them, as Sniper Elite has never been known for its amazing graphics. The relatively simple visuals also mean that the game runs reasonably well on different PC system configurations.

On the system used for the review (i7-13700F, RTX 4080, 32 GB), the game ran at native 4K resolution (the game does not support any upscaler), and the settings in the screenshots below, at an average of 181 FPS, 65 FPS 1% lows, in a benchmark session held in the Assault on Fort Rouge mission. Unfortunately, I have experienced some second-long stuttering at times, which were annoying, immersion-breaking, and caused some slip-ups in combat and stealth sequences, but at the very least, they did not happen too often.

To no one’s surprise, Sniper Elite: Resistance strength is also its main weakness, as the game is essentially Sniper Elite 5 with a new main character, a new set of missions, and very little else. While this can be good news for those who wanted more of the previous entry in the series and some of its best features, such as the Axis Invasion Mode, fans of the franchise who wanted to experience its next evolution will inevitably be disappointed by what is essentially more of the same. It’s a solid offering, to be sure, but still Sniper Elite 5 by another name.

PC version tested. Review code provided by the publisher.

8.0

WCCFTECH RATING

Sniper Elite: Resistance