As mentioned in my recent revisit of Sniper Elite V2 (this time Remastered), I’ve quite enjoyed Sniper Elite 4. It was hardly as detailed or inventive as the titles it directly pulled from, like Hitman or Metal Gear Solid V, but what it had was extremely fun and satisfying. So I was looking forward to playing a sequel, yet when Sniper Elite 5 came out I was too stressed due to living through early months of the full scale russian invasion, I was rather picky about which games I was comfortable playing. Plus, a lot of the initial user reviews on the game were surprisingly negative, commenting on its inferiority to the fourth game. Two years since its release and one year since the release of its final DLC mission, I’ve decided to give it a shot and was not disappointed.
A lot of Sniper Elite 5 can be described as “Sniper Elite 4, but improved”. If in the previous title the franchise have finally found itself, here the developers were trying to polish and perfect its ideas, without reinventing the game again. It’s still a stealth third person shooter with emphasis on using the sniper rifle. You still get huge open maps with several main and optional objectives. You have Hitman-like traversal abilities and an automated sticky cover system. There are systems in place to simulate different aspects of shooting and a lot of the stealth is based around using traps and making it hard for enemies to triangulate and figure out your exact position. And, of course, the slow motion x-ray kill cameras are back again, but are made even more customizable and tied to more systems. All of this is as good, and often better, than it used to be in the previous game with lots of very smart and helpful UI improvements and changes to make things easier to understand.
But on top of just improving things, there are expansions of systems and new ideas added. Enemies, for example, are no longer clearly shown on the map before you tag them, and are instead shown as a big vague circle, making it all the more important to recon before engaging unless you want to be caught completely off guard. The “see through walls” vision is here to help with it, without it being too overpowered and helpful at the same time. More things can be found on the maps, like hidden modification tables and starting points, in addition to just intel and collectibles, making it even harder to “do everything” on your first go, unless you are very thorough.
Amount of trap items is decreased to an essential minimum, but more elements can be trapped and more things in the environment can be turned into a sound producing thing that hides the sounds of your shots. A simple but fun “active reload” concept is copied from Gears of War. All maps have two types of tools hidden in them, lack of which makes some interactions slower or completely unavailable. The skill concept is changed, but it still feels like an afterthought as none of its improvements are that gameplay changing. Also, non-lethal approach is made possible, though I fail to see how it fits this setting and this story… Oh and more additional modes, that I personally never cared much about, are added – including an invasion mechanic, where other players can join your game as enemy snipers if you enable it. I didn’t want to bother with installing anti-cheat, so I didn’t, but it sounds like a cool idea.
Some elements of the game remain quite rough. It’s still possible to find spots of geometry on the map working against you in a “level designers missed this spot” kind of way. Climbing stuff and sticky cover never feel reliable and can misfire or not activate when they should. Enemies can and will glitch out in silly ways. Spawning enemies is still proximity based and while most levels hide it well, using level geometry to make it hard or impossible to engage with enemies across the entire map, or by having new enemies arrive or be inside a building thus explaining their absence from afar. But you will notice this issue from time to time, even though most of the time when you have a good vantage point, you can see at least some of the enemies from very very far away (and kill them).
DLCs are still a mixed bag. Missions are quite alright, but are basically “more of the same”. And some of them, most notably Kraken Awakens, have an especially egregious examples of enemy spawning very noticeably. You get your obligatory “kill Hitler” mission once again, and you get a selection of maps that will give you more of the fun and satisfying Sniper Elite 5 gameplay, if you want it. But I’d not recommend getting them until after you’re done with the main game as you might feel that you don’t want more. And the weapons and skins DLCs… I haven’t used them, as with the previous game. All of these titles are very good with providing you with a fun loadout from the beginning and since you can customize elements of weapons, it’s far easier to get what you want with just that and not by having more different guns.
Overall, I could easily recommend Sniper Elite 5. Just like its predecessor, it’s not the best stealth game out there, but landing sniper shots and utilizing traps to kill nazis is very satisfying and doesn’t get boring across a rather long campaign, if you try to do all objectives and find as much optional stuff as you can. The improvements of the game also make it an easy recommendation over Sniper Elite 4, but at the same time, I feel like it’s still worth playing the fourth game as well. I’m very curious to see where the series can go next from here, but if it’s going to be more of this, I probably won’t mind.