Format: Xbox Series X, Xbox One, PS5, PS4, PC
Brace yourself - Rebellion’s latest entry in its Sniper Elite series takes players to the never-before-charted setting of World War II, on the run-up to the totally unexplored Normandy landings. Mild sarcasm aside, while Sniper Elite 5 won’t be winning any awards for originality of setting, it is a significant improvement on its predecessors, continuing the series’ evolution from fun-but-forgettable specialised shooter into one of the best tactical stealth games on the market.
The single player campaign finds the series’ preternaturally gifted sniper Karl Fairburne back with a veritable arsenal of long-distance and up-close weaponry, charged with stopping a(nother) secret Nazi project before it can turn the tide of the conflict. Over the course of eight lengthy missions, Fairburne is drawn into a surprisingly engaging tale that sees him crossing paths with scrappy members of the French Resistance and taking out cruelly evil Nazis, all while trying to dismantle the nefarious ‘Project Kraken’.
Despite its broad and continuing similarity to its predecessors, Sniper Elite 5 is a perfect evolution of what came before. It’s bigger, without feeling bloated, with mission maps that aren’t quite open world, but are far more traversable than what’s been seen in the series before. This affords the player freedom in how to reach and solve objectives, or in making their way past — or through — enemy troops. The scale allows more exploration too, either to go off and complete marked side missions, or to discover extra objectives hidden around the maps. These often add significant depth to the game’s story and world, although there could be slightly better placing of these - for instance, in the first mission, you’ll likely have already destroyed a series of anti-air guns before finding the secret plans that hint at their existence.
It also significantly improves upon the stealth gameplay of its predecessors. Fairburne is almost a WW2 era Solid Snake now, albeit without so much hiding in boxes. Bottles can be thrown to distract enemies, decoys used to attract attention, and even a humble whistle can lure infantry away from their patrols, where you can dispatch them with sneaky melee attacks. You’re also incentivised to hide downed enemies, to prevent detection and alarms being raised. Some of these tricks have featured in the Sniper Elite series before, but they’re perfected here, providing more and better tactical options for how to progress in missions.
The pinnacle of the series to date.
Away from physical stealth, there are also more tools at your disposal for silencing weapons - nearly every gun can be fitted with a suppressor to minimise noise, but this in turn loops into the improved tactics, as “suppressed” isn’t the same as “silenced”, and adding one may mean a trade off in power. A pistol fitted with a suppressor may only utter a strangely satisfying and effectively silent “PTT!”, but will require you be closer to a target to make a kill, risking being spotted by other enemies.
Of course, Sniper Elite’s signature move remains its slo-mo x-ray kill shots, showing the horrific damage that a single bullet can do to a human body as it tears through flesh, bone, and organs. These gory moments return, with sharper, grislier anatomical detail than ever, but — at the default frequency setting — don’t feel gratuitous. This is arguably helped by the game rewarding you with more experience points at the end of a level for knocking enemies unconscious, rather than slaughtering everyone you encounter. When an x-ray shot does trigger, it’s almost like a twisted, sadistic treat - after all, they are Nazis you’re killing.
The biggest improvement though is the invasion feature. Play online, and you can invade — or be invaded by — another player, with the invader appearing as a ‘Jager’, a rival sniper hunting down the host’s version of Fairburne. These are thrilling encounters, kill-or-be-killed chases that help show off how masterfully designed Sniper Elite 5’s maps are, inviting you to lay traps to take out your opponent while paying even closer to every potential hiding spot, every flicker of a moving pixel in a window in the distance. Player invasions are nothing new in and of themselves—they were perhaps best used recently in Deathloop - but they’re done particularly well here.
One are that does let Sniper Elite 5 down are some overlapping context controls that make key features fiddlier than they should be. For instance, clicking in the right thumbstick brings up the binoculars, allowing Fairburne to scope out enemy movements in the distance, but long-pressing the same thumbstick activates and cancels his ‘radar’ skill, a Daredevil-esque ability to ‘see’ nearby enemies from the sound of their movements. It’s all too easy to activate one when you want the other, or to bring up binoculars when you want to come out of radar view. Removed from enemies, it’s an annoyance; up close, trying to skulk around a Nazi bunker, it’s an active problem.
Thankfully, it’s not enough to fully mar the experience. Taken as a whole, Sniper Elite 5 is the pinnacle of the series to date, remixing familiar concepts, settings, and mechanics in a way that feels fresh, innovative, and exciting.