"Aim Small, Miss Small": Sniper Elite 4 Review (PlayStation 4, Single Player)

Overall Score: 4/5

B

Gameplay: 4
I'll start off with this, this isn't a game for everyone. On the outset it looks like a 3rd Person action game, which it is, but it isn't the sort of run-and-gun Uncharted sort. If anything it's more akin to the Metal Gear Solid series. The game requires a level of patience and player must be more tactical in approaching situations as opposed to trying to Rambo their way though.

The centerpiece of the game, is it's ballistic mechanic. With gravity and wind enabled, the player must adjust for windage and bullet drop, the longer the shot, the greater the compensation that needs to be made. So what does that all mean? In most First and Third Person Shooters, where you place a scope's crosshair is where your bullet will land, regardless of how far away the target is. Of course in real life it doesn't work out that way. In real life you need to take into account, wind and distance, and even ambient temperature, barrel temperature, bullet weight and in some cases even the kind of powder in the bullet if you're doing really long range sniping or competition shooting. Here the game tries to make a more realistic shooter while pairing down all the variables to consider. In the game is mainly windage, bullet drop, and hear rate/breathing that the player has to worry about.

A more extreme example of having to compensate for windage with a rifle with low muzzle velocity. 

As expected, windage will affect the horizontal drift of your shot, while bullet drop will affect the vertical downward drift of your shot. Your heart rate and breathing will affect how steady your character holds his rifle. There is an option to hold your breath to hold the rifle perfectly still, as well as add an additional zoom as your character concentrates on the shot, but this only lasts a few seconds. This has been a staple of the series, but they have slightly evolved it further, now the player is able to adjust the zero (distance where the scope is calibrated for) in 100m increments. What this ultimately does is affect how much the player has to adjust and compensate their shots.

Unlike Sniper Elite 3, the rifles are no longer fully customizable. Instead, the rifles have three different attributes (different for each rifle) upgradable by meeting certain conditions (such as 50 head shots, or 10000m total meters in kills). Personally I prefer this method since it incentivises using each rifle instead of just using one main and finding the upgrade parts to all the others as in SE3. Additionally there is a wider variety of rifles to choose from each with their own strengths and weaknesses. For instance the M1 Garand is semi-automatic and has a high rate of fire, but on the same token, it's base model is relatively weak and has low muzzle velocity (the higher velocity, the less they player needs to compensate their shots), where as the Mosin-Nagant is slow but has very high power and muzzle velocity. Or going in a completely different direction is the De Lisle Carbine (DLC only) which has a relatively fast rate of fire, low recoil, low muzzle velocity, and low power, but is permanently suppressed. The game features multiple semi-automatic and bolt action rifles ranging from classics like the Mauser Karabiner 98 and the Lee Enfield No.4 Mk.I to lesser known rifles like the Mannlicher M1895. A new feature are suppressed bullets, equipping them causes the character to reload the gun as well as fit a suppressor to the end of barrel.

Here we can see the scope being re-zeroed from 100m to 200m to make a headshot.

Unlike in previous games, the secondary and side arms get more attention this time around. Secondary weapons range from the Trench Gun, the Beretta Model 38 SMG and the MKb.42 rifle, forerunner to the infamous Sturmgewehr 44.  As with the rifles, different attributes of the secondary weapons can also be upgraded by meeting various conditions. The same also goes for the side arms. The side arms in the game are also as varied ranging from several classics like the M-1911 and the Luger, to the more lesser known Beretta M1934, and the infamous Welrod. As with the rifles, most of the handguns can also be loaded with suppressed ammo. There are also weapons that can only be found on the field, these include the Panzerfaust 60 and the FG-42, progenitor the American M-60 general purpose machine gun.

Each rifle has their own levels in each attribute. Most are self-explanatory, though Muzzle Velocity affects how much the player has to compensate their shots, and stability is how steady the rifle is held without holding breath. 

Things don't just stop at shooting your foes to death, but returning from previous games are "potato masher" stick grenades, anti-personnel S-mines, trip-wire bombs, TNT and anti-tank mines. This time around the grenades can be made into sticky grenades, S-mines can be fitted with timed fuses, trip-wire bombs can be chained, TNT can either be planted and shot or fitted with a timed fuse, and the anti-tank mines now can be used an anti-personnel land mines.

Though guns, bombs and booby-traps aren't your only tools of destruction and mayhem. Strewn across the maps are various objects you can interact with. You have your typical exploding box/barrel/vehicles, but while they made a small appearance in Sniper Elite 3, SE4 also features falling objects you can drop on an unsuspecting fascist.

Cue Loony Toons sound effects. 

The maps and the level design has also evolved from Sniper Elite 3. Not only are the levels much larger and non-linear, but they're also more of a vertical aspect to them with more climbing up buildings, hills, platforms and cliffs. Taking the high road and holding the high ground is ideal. On the same token you're a disadvantage when the enemy has the high ground. Some of the climbing mechanic appears to be borrowed from games like Uncharted.

Climbing out a window, then climbing up a building on the outside? That's classic Uncharted right there. 

Tactical considerations from the prior games are also present, such as deciding when to fire, and have the gunshot raise suspicion. Returning from SE3 are power generators spread through out the level that the player can damage and cause them to start making loud backfiring noises, you can time your shots with these noises to mask the gunfire report. The rocks the player can throw to get a guards attention and lure them away or into an ambush or trap also return, but the steel wool from SE3 used for starting fires has been replaced by a whistle for getting enemies attentions. Another consideration you need to factor in, is your level of skill with a particular rifle. If you're great with the Mosin-Nagant and switch over to something with lower velocity like the M1 Carbine, should you take the shot where you're at? Or is the chance of missing and just alerting the enemy for nothing too high at your distance and maybe you should close the distance more to ensure a clean fatal hit the first shot?

Using the rock to lure an officer into a booby trap. 

Enemies posted on those rooftops will fire on you from those positions, and you can advance up there as well and use those positions to your advantage. 

However, while generally the gameplay of SE4 is an evolution of SE3, there is one area where the game took a step back. As mentioned earlier, Sniper Elite 4 is more akin to Metal Gear Solid than it is to Uncharted. SE3 had a rudimentary (compared to Metal Gear Solid 3 anyway) stealth meter, that indicated to the player how visible they are to the enemy, sticking to the shadows or crawling around in tall grass can hide the player from patrols. Instead the rudimentary camo meter is replaced by a more simple alert gauge that goes from yellow to red indicating the enemy's suspicion level. To evolve the gameplay further what I would have done was take SE3's stealth meter and make it closer to MGS3's camo index and have given the player unlockable ghillie suits they could equip. On that note though, you can fight off and kill everyone in one large gun battle, unlike in Metal Gear Solid. You won't get hit with an endless wave of enemies spawning in until you're able to lose them, you actually can kill everyone.

Health in the game comes in the form of a five section semi-replenishing health bar that can be replenished with medpacks and bandages. The health meter only replenishes by section, this forces the player to slow down and take their time. Analyse the situation and consider the best approach.

When it comes to armored vehicles, when you don't have a Panzerfaust 60 handy, there are a few ways you can still eliminate them. The player can plant mines along their patrol routes, the player can disable their movement by destroying tracks/tires or sniping out the driver and then throw a timed TNT charge on the vehicle from cover or run up to it and plant a satchel charge. To get in close the player can also snipe out the gunner inside the turret.

For their part, on the normal setting the AI also isn't completely stupid. They will take cover when they know they're being fired on, and they actually will try to flank you when they're engaging you. I've actually been in a few situations where enemies were firing on me from cover, while two more guys were coming around to flank me.

One last aspect of gameplay that's worth mentioning is a lot of the gameplay settings. Difficulty and various "realism" aspects can be changed. The player can change:

• AI difficulty
• Turn windage on/off
• Turn gravity effects (bullet drop) on/off
• Turn Aim Assist (a diamond will appear where your shots will land when you hold your breath, may as well just turn windage and gravity effect off, if you ask me) on/off
• Turn realistic suppressor (they don't completely silence your shots, enemies at close range will still hear something) on/off. 
• Turn realistic magazine changes (you lose all the ammo left in a magazine when you switch it out, only the bolt-actions with fixed magazines are "topped off") on/off. 

Stability: 5
Playing though the PS4 version I have not encounted many stability issues or any show stopper bugs. I did however notice several visual glitches like this one, where a box the medpack was sitting on was blown up under it but the pack continued to hover there in mid-air.

Just up and to the left of the center of this screenshot, there's a medpack floating in mid air. 

Then there's the modeling on the Trench Gun, I'm not sure if this is some weird graphical bug ("waived shippable", we know it's there but we won't fix it) or if the magazine tube is just modeled incorrectly.

The magazine tube (the tube underneath the barrel) should extend all the way to the bayonet mount under the barrel. 

Then there's this weird hitbox related glitch.

Overall though there are a few visual glitches like the one above, or seeing foliage swaying in the breeze and clipping into solid objects.


Graphics and Visuals: 4
The Sniper Elite series (since V2 anyway) was never really at the top of the graphical totem pole. While it doesn't have the level of character detail that Uncharted 4 has (you won't see your character's clothing get wet and dry the way you would see Drake's) SE4 is certainly no slouch in the terms of environment and in the modeling of all the weapons. While there was the prior mention shotgun magazine tube visual issue, the other weapons are correctly modeled, However in contrast to the environment, many of the characters have a kind "wax museum" look to them. PS3 character models in games like Metal Gear Solid 5 or even Killzone 2 look much more detailed and superior.

Along with the weapons the vehicles such as the Panzer III also have a good level of detail and look like the vehicles they're supposed to be portraying rather than just generic armored vehicles. Naturally though, given that this is a video game and a game's main point is fun, there are a few liberties taken, such as suppressors being equipped on guns that rarely (if-ever) had suppressors fixed to them.

I'm not an anatomy expert but overall the kill cams look good, and I'm just assuming the targets are anatomically correct in where they're placed. They are detailed enough though to tell what it is you're shooting. Though the bullet modeling is a bit strange, as the bullet exits and tumbles out of the target, it looks like the shell casing and not the bullet itself is exiting. You don't just see the bullet going though, the person, but you also see organs being destroyed like the liver being ripped apart, lungs collapsing

Speaking of kill cams, explosions and melee kills now have their own kill cams as well. 

On one hand, the character models really look dated and last gen, I ought to have dropped the score to 3 instead of 4. But arguably, the characters aren't the main focus of the game, but rather the guns, specifically the rifles are, and in that regard, the main focus of the game certainly got their due in the graphics department.


Plot:4
The plot pretty much follows the precedent set by Sniper Elite V2. You play as a American OSS (Office of Strategic Services) agent Karl Fairburne. Fairburne is a man of little words and as a character he's only one notch above silent protagonist, which in away is a good thing since it effective makes Fairburne the player's avatar in the game world. Like how John Romero said of the "Doomguy" that he has no name or dialogue because the player is the Doomguy.

The Sniper Elite timeline in chronological order goes something like this: Sniper Elite 3, which takes place in North Africa where Fariburne is task with sabotaging a super tank project > Sniper Elite 4 > Sniper Elite V2 (remake of Sniper Elite) which has Fairburne hunting down/helping to defect Nazi rocket scientists, possibly part of Operation Paperclip. The plot here in SE4 largely follows the same formula, Fariburne is deployed to Italy to investigate a new German superweapon. Nothing really much to write home about. The plot is good and coherent enough to cement the levels together into a solid narrative. The Plot by itself is worth a 3.

On a side note, I'm predicting that Sniper Elite 5 will take place in France.

But... SE4 did do something a little different this time around. Different for the franchise and different for action games in general. Though out the maps there are "Letters from Home" that you can pick up and read. They range from mundane things like "they reduced rations, but we're getting by, come home soon", to joyous news like "you're a father now, you can't die," to things more heavy like a father's executor writing his son on the front to inform him that his parents died in a nighttime RAF bombing raid. There are also "Last Letters" that can be picked up from dead bodies. These letters range from defiance like an Italian father telling his young son to carry "the flame of fascism", to just resignation like a letter of forgiveness to an estranged family member, to again something a big more heavy like one soldier's plea to his brother to watch over his wife and two children and walk his daughter down the aisle in his place one day.

All these letters served to humanize these characters even if they're the enemy. Some are dedicated Nazis and fascists that you'll be good about having shot in the head, and others like the father asking his brother to watch over his family... well... I felt kind of like a heel shooting him in the face like I did. It adds an additional layer to the plot and immersion by making your regular victims something more than just a digital cardboard caricature. I actually wonder if any of these letters were real letters from the war. Like kept in some archive.

Though it isn't just the letters, you can gain additional insight on each target by tagging them with your binoculars and analyzing them. You'll find the diehard Nazi who's committed war criminals, like burning down a church full of people, that you'd be all too happy to shoot in the testicles. Then there's the guy who actually secretly likes the British and Americans, and you'll be thinking "sorry, nothing personal" as you pop his head, And then there's this guy...

While the plot alone is pretty dry, these elements to humanize the enemy add a level of depth and immersion to the game. I found myself wanting to get to know my victims before blowing them away. Some targets I opted to go for a heart shot, others... they got it in the face. But it isn't all heavy the Allied Intel in the Target Focus Info does add a level of humor to the game like the guy above who used Mein Kampf to steady a table. Another guy joined the Hitler Youth and the Wehrmacht to impress a girl only for her to marry his best friend, and another guy who's been complaining about hearing voices.

All together the game has a character that honestly I wasn't expecting with a Sniper Elite game. I was expecting something cold and straight forward like how V2 and SE3 were. As much as I liked V2 and SE3, they were a bit "cold and mechanical". Here Fairburne remains as dull as before, but we have the enemy being personified and sometimes in a humorous way to off set Fairburne's lack of character.


Art and Music: 3
The art direction is straight forward, realistic 1940s. You won't really find much in the game that is purely fantasy in the game that isn't related to gameplay mechanics. You won't find fictional weapons in a "1940's style" like you would in a game like Valkyria Chronicles or to a lesser extent Wolfenstein: The New Order. This isn't a bad thing given that the game is going for realism in terms of setting. At the end of the day, there really isn't much to say in terms of the art direction.

The music... what music? In the Sniper Elite series, music has always been rather sparse since V2. It only really plays in the game's menu and in a few selected areas of gameplay. This can be a little dull, as even during heated gun fights, there's no atmospheric music. It would have been nice if the game was quiet like how it is when you're sneaking around, then have one track playing when enemies start getting suspicious and the threat indicator is yellow, then play one of several battle themes when the threat indicator goes red and the enemy is engaging you. Maybe two or three specifically for when you're engaging Germans and another two or three for when it's the Italians coming after you.

Adding even just a few music tracks for certain situations would add to the immersion and the feel of the game.

Final Verdict: Must Buy for fans of shooters
This is certainly a different kind of shooter, a stark contrast to the run-and-run sort. As someone who recreationally fires some of these rifles in real life, this is some of the closest I've seen a video game get to real shooting. Though don't get me wrong, no video game could ever really emulate what it's like to actually fire a real firearm, but this game does give a nice bite of what the experience is like. Given it's rare gameplay mechanics the game is certainly a nice change from pace from other shooters, both 1st and 3rd person, and definitely a nice change from getting called away by duty.

I mentioned that this game might not be for everyone, but on the same token, because the game allows the player to individually tune different gameplay mechanics, new players can "ease" into things by starting off with just one aspect turned on, then ticking more and more on as players get used to the game.



Of course I can't wrap this up without the classic testicle shot.

Originally posted Apr. 02, 2017