Sniper Elite

Written by Troy Matsumiya  on August 02, 2005

First Impressions: Reach out and kill someone.

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As anyone who plays first-person shooters knows, having a good sniper on your team can be the difference between the thrill of victory and the agony of listening to the other team harp on your noobishness. For those of you who can't get enough of sneaking around and picking people off from afar, then UK developer Rebellion is making a special treat for you.

Sniper Elite is a third-person stealth sniper simulator (try saying that three times really fast) where the focus is on delivering long distance death. The game is set in Berlin at the end of World War II; the Nazis have been defeated but tensions between the Soviets and Allies are increasing. You will play an American OSS agent and sniper who must prevent the Soviets from capturing Nazi atomic and V2 weapons research. Although the story is fictional, it is based on actual historical fact during a time when the mistrust between the Western Allies and Soviets really began to fester and grow. Basically, the end of World War II marked the beginning of the Cold War.

Rebellion is attempting to make the game as realistic as possible, so this will not be your typical run and gun shooter. There will be four difficulty levels, with the easiest level playing like the average shooter Ц in other words, where you place your crosshairs is where the bullet will strike. Move up the difficulty scale and you increase the realism, which means gravity and wind will affect the trajectory of your bullet; so centering the crosshairs on your target won't necessarily result in a kill since your shot would most likely hit well short and off to the side. Your heart rate and breathing will also affect your accuracy, so don't expect to be racking up the kills after a hard run where your heart is pumping and you're out of breath. But if you're calm, lying prone, empty your lungs and aim high, you will be a deadly force to be reckoned with.

To help you aim, your scope has notches in the crosshairs; so for example, at certain distances you may learn to aim two notches high. You will also have a meter indicating wind direction and speed but like in real life, the wind will change dynamically which means you won't have the luxury to take your slow sweet time lining up your shots. To add a little variety, you will be able to use an array of historically accurate sniper rifles, each with their own different accuracy and range attributes. This means the aiming techniques for one rifle won't necessarily carry over to another, so you will have to train yourself on the nuances of each one.

You shouldn't expect a shooting gallery type of gameplay either because the enemy AI will react realistically to your attacks. They will hear your shots and duck for cover unless you mask them by firing under ambient noises like artillery strikes. If you wound someone, enemies will try to distract you by taking pot shots at you while a teammate pulls his wounded comrade to safety. While wounding enemies will be a good way to draw out others, it can also backfire since enemies with non-fatal wounds will pump themselves full of morphine and start fighting back. And once enemies figure out where you are, they will attempt to flank and root you out, so staying in one spot won't be a good idea. Worst of all, they will have sneaky snipers of their own eager to take you out. Yikes.

Like real snipers, patience, stealth and strategy will be the keys to success. So while you may have found a good sniping spot, how many exit routes does it have? When you are discovered, will you be able to get away safely and quickly? Using cover, camouflage and thinking strategically will keep you alive rather than running around guns a'blazing Ц hmm, sounds a lot like Splinter Cell and Thief doesn't it?

If you feel a particular situation calls for something other than sniping, you can use other weapons like a knife, silenced pistol, SMG, or even grenades, proximity mines and TNT, though you will be limited to how much armaments you can carry at a time. You will also be able use binoculars, first aid kits and can throw rocks to distract enemies. You will even be able to blow up vehicle gas tanks and fuel barrels by shooting at them but it won't be as easy as it sounds, since the only way to do so is to hit the tiny inches-wide gas cap. You will also be able to blow up TNT and grenades by shooting them, even when they are still hanging off the belts of enemies. Cool!

As you play, you will accumulate statistics and earn special credit for things like long range head shots, multiple kills with one bullet, covert kills, killing a moving target, longest kill, accuracy percentage and so on. The big reward, however, is when you line up that perfect headshot. When that happens, the game will slow down and follow your bullet as it smoothly arcs through the air and strikes the enemy in a satisfying gush of blood. You don't need headshots to kill, however; enemies will suffer location-specific damage, so a shot to the heart will also be fatal, but hitting a foot will not.

The single-player campaign will consist of 28 missions that are somewhat open ended in that it is left up to you how the various objectives are completed; you can snipe, plant TNT or introduce enemies to your buddy Mr. Knife. Multiplayer consists of cooperative and adversarial modes over Xbox Live and System Link. Cooperative is limited to two players only and purportedly has one player as the sniper and the other as the spotter. Adversarial modes support up to eight players and include the standard deathmatch and team deathmatch, along with a new team mode called Assassination, where one team tries to kill a target while the other team tries to protect him.

Graphically, the game looks like your average WWII shooter; in other words, nice but not spectacular. One thing that stands out, however, is that Rebellion meticulously recreated war-torn Berlin from old photographs, including reconstructing old buildings that have since been destroyed or demolished. The devastated city looks great and little effects like how rain splatters on the screen or how blurry images come into focus as you adjust your scope add to the graphical coolness factor.