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Lets start this off by recognizing what this game is, and that is a niche shooter. This is not a game that is going to appeal to as broad of an audience as what Call of Duty, or the Battlefield franchises enjoy.
The main attraction of this game is in its shooting mechanics. Bullet Drop, Heart rate, Breathing, Range, and Wind all factor into making an accurate shot. If you calculate correctly, your well placed shot gets you rewarded with some very impressive bullet/kill camera sequences. Many of these sequences will follow the bullet into the target, but the exceptional shots will cut to an X-Ray view of your target, showing your bullet ripping through their body and reflecting the damage youve done.
It also incorporates a scoring mechanic, which is modified by several factors.
Enemy Difficulty (Rookie, Veteran, or Elite)
Ballistics (None, Gravity only, or Gravity and Wind)
Tactical Assistance (Full, Moderate, or None)
Distance of Shot
Placement of Shot
Status of Target (Moving, or Still)
Depending on difficulty and what settings you have on, your shots will be scored accordingly, which will push players to up the ante to Sniper Elite difficulty, which will disable the tactical assistances of Tagging enemies, showing Range and Rank, and showing a target area during focus time where your bullet will end up.)
Now, the unskilled can still have fun with this game, simply turn the ballistics off, but leave the enemy AI at Elite and turn off tactical assistance. You wont get maximum points, but you'll get pretty good scores without having to mess with bullet drop or anything like that, and you will generally see a lot more of the X-Ray kills.
This, at its core is the main draw of the game. Taking ever more difficult shots to crank that score up and see those nasty killcams. Its an extremely fun and rewarding experience.
The game however is not without its flaws. The levels compared to the original game are far more claustrophobic and linear in nature. This leads to several "Setpiece" segments where youre encountering a lot of scripted firefights. Scripted firefights in a Sniper game seem out of place.
For example, I spent the entire second mission as a ghost. I masked every shot, hid every body, took out every enemy soldier without being detected. Yet, all my efforts to get in and out undetected are squandered by my character in a cutscene, where he foolishly just decides to chill out in front of an open window so he can be spotted by an enemy soldier. Instead of the enemy soldier just killing me outright, the game elects to have the soldier put the facility on alert, and after the sequence Im stuck in a massive firefight with about twenty soldiers.
I wouldnt mind this so much if the odds were evened up a bit in terms of my character's skill. Its as if Karl Fairburne received training on how to fire a rifle, but nothing else. Weapons like the Thompson and MP40, which should be fairly accurate weapons, are turned into little more than spray and pray devices. I understand that Rebellion wanted us to rely on the rifle, but come on. They already punish players for using secondary weapons in the form of drasticly reduced scores for kills with those weapons. On Elite difficulty, there can be a few frustrating sequences where an enemy five feet in front of you has your Thompson throwing lead everywhere but where he's standing, while his weapon is accurate at three hundred meters. Its pretty imbalanced.
The next issue I have is with the enemy AI sight and hearing. If you so much as step down six inches off of a curb within thirty yards of an enemy, he's going to hear it and come investigating.
Taking shots and killing enemies with one shot and moving to a new location, and yet nanoseconds after taking a look through the scope, the enemies downrange somehow immediately see me and put fire on me? I dont think so.
If you can look past these flaws, there is a TON of fun to be had with this shooter. Dont approach it as a sniper simulation. It isnt. The shooting mechanic is close to simulation, but when a game has an achievement for completing a level without being shot, you know that taking fire and getting hit is going to be considered a relatively common occurence.
Online, while lacking in PVP, still offers a lot of fun. Whether it be this game's version of Horde mode titled Kill Tally, teaming up in Overwatch as a spotter and sniper, racing against the clock to gather vehicle parts in Bombing Run, or just teaming up to play through the campaign with a friend, the online modes offer a lot of enjoyable gameplay.
I was a little disappointed to see things like the ability to just set a regular grenade down on the ground to use as a trap later by shooting it when a patrol came by, or the ability to throw a bundle of TNT instead of placing it left out of this game when they were so useful in the original game. Those were gameplay elements that offered more options when completing missions. The addition of the landmines does help to offset the sting of that though.
Bottom line, dont take the game too seriously, and you will have a blast with this. There is little more in the gaming world that offers more satisfation than blowing off a Nazi's ballsac, or putting a bullet through the eye of an enemy sniper.
If I had to score it, Id say its a solid 7.5-8 out of 10.
The AI has some glaring flaws and those can be tough to look past sometimes, and the relatively short campaign hold this game back from being something really great. As it stands, its a very solid and very playable game that should at the very least get a rental.
