Sniper Elite 5 For PS5

Sniper Elite 5 For PS5

In news that will make any Nazi with a nutsack feel nervous, the serial scrotum-sniping soldier, Karl Fairburne, is back on the hunt. Sniper Elite 5 shifts the series’ established blend of espionage and X-rayed executions to 1944 France, taking Fairburne deep behind enemy lines into another collection of surprisingly large-scale stealth sandboxes. Yet while welcome enhancements to controls, weapon customisation, and multiplayer features make Sniper Elite 5 by far and away the most flexible entry in the series to date, another forgettable story and some heavily recycled mission objectives made it seem more like sniper repeat than sniper elite by the time I reached the end of its 12-hour campaign.

The Sniper Elite series has always been more concerned with tracing the trajectory of its bullets than creating complex story arcs for its characters, and indeed this fifth mainline instalment is no different. This time around Fairburne is on a quest to uncover and thwart the Nazis’ top-secret Operation Kraken, assisted by yet another ragtag group of resistance fighters who exist simply to act woodenly and populate your list of objectives at the start of each mission. Drop in a cartoonish high-ranking Nazi antagonist and a series of predictable late-game dramatic turns, and you have a WWII story more straightforward than the scope on Fairburne’s carbine.

Thankfully, while Sniper Elite 5’s storyline might be staid, Fairburne himself has never been more nimble or as adventurous, making him more fun to control. While each stalk through a heavily guarded area inevitably starts out as a silent crouch-walk, the moment things go loud you are now capable of quickly mantling over low walls and through windows, gaining some distance with a zipline, clambering up vines and rope netting, or sliding down inclines to break the line of sight and regroup for a counterattack. While occasionally I found myself with my back to the wall and no other option than to shoot my way out, for the most part the open level design allowed me to be less of a sitting duck and something more closely resembling a sniping Spider-Man.

Sniper Elite 5’s eight different environments take good advantage of Fairburne’s expanded movement set, offering multiple entry points to each facility be they through the front door, around the side, or through some hard-to-reach open window on an upper floor, and I enjoyed the added freedom to execute each infiltration from almost any angle of my choosing. You also have a new focus ability that allows you to spot enemies through walls in order to avoid a potential ambush, and tools like bolt cutters can cut through weakened sections of fences to create even more optional paths to an objective.

I like the fact that enemy soldiers will often sprint desperately for the nearest alarm tower to radio for help once you’ve engaged them in combat, resulting in a gripping burst of tension as you scramble to take them out before they can call in reinforcements. It’s also a neat touch that if you wing them they’ll sometimes run away clutching at their wound. But while they can certainly be deadly in numbers, they will also often march mindlessly into your crosshairs, struggle with basic pathfinding, or veer unpredictably between different states of alertness. In one late-game mission set in an expanse of French countryside, I was spotted killing a couple of German soldiers and an alarm was raised forcing me to flee. Yet when I returned to the area some 20 minutes later, the enemy patrol remained locked in a cycle in which they’d be in a heightened investigative state, then the investigation would end, then the same dead body would be noticed and the investigation would begin again as though they were a group of goose-stepping goldfish.

On the plus side, while the AI may presently have quirks in need of some post-release patching, I did at least find the auto-save system to be far more intelligent than that of Sniper Elite 4, and anytime I died I was grateful that it always returned me to a checkpoint that didn’t place me directly back in mortal danger, as was regularly the case with the previous game.