by:	November 05, 2005

I remember a scene back in Saving Private Ryan where the sniper gets up to a high place, and begins praying, and setting his sniper up for the wind, distance, and so on. After all that he snipes the German sniper in the other tower, right through the scope, and into his eye. This is the kind of intense adrenaline-pumping moment I hope you would partake in, with Sniper Elite, but you don’t quite get that rush. Still you will definitely get a rush in playing the game as it is not only a game of patience, but there is a lot of in-depth points with it.

Sniper Elite is definitely a unique concept—take one part of many war games, and other shooters such as the Halo series and spread it out into something much more complicated, but makes you feel like a truly skilled marksman. The game puts you in the role of a American solider who is posing as a German solider so that he may get to the Russians fighting the Germans, so that they may keep top-secret weapons out of the hands of the Russians. I know it sounds a bit convoluted, but believe it or not, it is based off of a true story. So anyways, as a sniper, you must find good areas to snipe your enemy from, or to take cover when they fire back—almost always keeping on the move just in case they find you. Before I go into the more complicated parts of the game just let me say that the artificial intelligence in the game is so convoluted and distressful, that many times it takes the fun out of the whole sniper situation. The first time I noticed this is when I was sniping from a top of a war-ravaged building, and from about 200 feet in front of me, a guy with an automatic gun, blazing away, is able to start pegging me. Sometimes, the AI is hip to your position without you even letting off a round, and other times they will stand or sit in one spot, while you peg them down one by one—the others simply standing or sitting there. When the AI works though, it does really make you feel like a sniper in war-torn Europe.

So when you are sniping you can be standing, crouching, or of course laying on your stomach to avoid as many bullets as possible. When you are firing, you have to take many things into consideration. Things to consider are if the target is moving, the wind, and most importantly the distance. Let us say the target is about 200 yards away. You will see the middle sight and then some other marking sights above it. You try to get him lined up with the second highest sight from the middle. If you are successful, you will in many cases, have the camera follow the bullet out of the gun, and to the brain of the Russian, showing his brains, eye, whatever flying out of his head. In a few extremely humorous incidents I have managed to have the bullet follow the target to their crotch—which had chunks fly out and blood collect around the front of the pants. When the bullet does follow, it does it in a very bullet-timish way, it is of course an old and increasing clichéd effect but whatever, it still works.

Those times you aren’t within sniping range but actually closer, you can quickly pull out your pistol and shoot at the enemy, which will usually quickly kill him. The controls are though, a bit confusing, and the game has a lot of depth to it so you may actually take awhile to figure out how to even do that. As for doing that all the time, you can’t. You will get shot down extremely quick if you try and run and gun. That is of course why this is a sniping game. There are some cool tricks you can do with sniping also. One of them is, you can blow the lid off of a gas-storage on a Russian tank, resulting in the destruction of the tank. Another is you can take out the leg of a solider, and then get the other soliders to come piling out to his aid in some cases, and then picking them off. Still the game can get pretty boring, because a sniper doesn’t always see action, and you will be crawling, hugging walls, and inspecting each situation carefully the entire time, for if you don’t you will easily be ended. Another sort of tedious and boring part about the game is it is mostly just going from point A to point B, while not getting killed and sniping. There are really no extra frills here, and after seeing a guys brains get splattered against the wall for the 100th time it becomes old.

You see, this is another point in time when Sniper Elite's realism becomes a slight problem. If you want to play the game correctly and make it through each mission without having to replay it several times, you'll need to stay hidden as much as possible. This means you'll need to crawl around on the ground and stay behind cover throughout the missions. This also means it will take some time to get through each mission. Since your targets are oftentimes not visible unless you're making noise, this becomes a very tedious task.

There are some things that adds to the experience though, such as playing co-op with someone, which is a co-op experience that reminds me of the depth of Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory but not quite the uniqueness. There is also an online mode where you can team up with some people and go against computer players, or go against teams, or snipe at another sniper. Still all in all, people who are fans of the sniper weapon in any sniping game will probably definitely want to own this title.

The visuals in Sniper Elite are a mixed bag. It is obvious that the developers had PlayStation 2 in mind when they were developing it, because while the structures and variety in the maps can get interesting, the colors sort of blend together with the weird, almost gooey looking decay and destruction left around. The sound in the game is for the most part done extremely well, is nice and loud in the right times, and eerily quiet in others.

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Sniper Elite is definitely not for everybody—perhaps only for those who truly appreciate the sniper in shooting games. It has the depth that a lot of people who love the sniping weapon have been dreaming of for quite a long time. If you can get past some AI problems, find a friend to play with, and excuse the average visuals you should have plenty of fun with Sniper Elite.

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