#260: Sniper Elite III
It wants so bad to be good, but it misses the mark
This review was originally posted to Twitter on June 1, 2020.
Initial release: June 27, 2014
Platform: PC, XBox 360, XBox One, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4
Developer: Rebellion
Imagine if Metal Gear Solid was developed by a British company with a wildly uneven record, was set in North Africa during World War II, focused on sniping, and was boring as shit. Welcome to Sniper Elite III.
The original Sniper Elite was a cult classic (somehow) back in the PS2 era; it was since remade as Sniper Elite V2, which proved popular enough to spawn a number of successors as well as the Zombie Army spinoff. (Don’t worry, we’ll get to that one.)
Oddly enough, despite V2 supposedly being a remake, it’s still considered the second game in the series, thus this game getting a Roman numeral III slapped on it. Even odder, it’s a prequel (given that the original and V2 were set during the fall of Berlin, that’s probably just as well.) Set in late 1942 after the fall of Tobruk, Karl Fairburne, the generically gruff, gravelly-voiced protagonist of the series, has been assigned by Special Operations Executive to track down a certain Nazi general, find out what his secret project out in the desert is, and assassinate him. Easy.
The gameplay is simple: across eight lengthy missions (each opening with a Thief-style narrated intro where Fairburne explains the mission over grainy still artwork and maps of the upcoming mission) you shoot, sneak and sabotage your way to victory. The focus of the game, of course, is on sniping. Sniper rifles are obviously noisy, so you must find ways to stay concealed. One way is to use louder noises to mask your shots; more often, you have to relocate after every couple of shots so they can’t get a bead on you. On higher difficulties you have to take into account distance and wind speed when making your shot. So the game gives us the focus system — get an enemy in your sights and press a button and time slows down for a bit, and a little red indicator shows where your bullet will land. You also have to keep your heartbeat in mind; the lower your heart rate, the more easily you’ll be able to aim. You’re not likely to make an award-winning long shot two seconds after running your ass off half across the map. It’s a nice little touch of realism.
The main selling point of the game is the Mortal Kombat-style x-ray mode as bullets tear through the bodies of fascists in slow motion. It’s gratuitious, it’s pointless, it’s unnecessary, and it never stops being funny. It is probably the only reason to play this game.
Sniper Elite III definitely feels like it was intended to be a sort of budget Metal Gear, including a giant, thoroughly useless super weapon (the P-1000 Ratte, a giant tank that was never actually made.) But the game lacks any of the charm of the Metal Gear series. Fairburne himself has no real personality beyond generic male video game protagonist; Solid Snake he is not. His interactions with other characters are minimal — in fact, there barely are any other characters, beyond an informant you rescue and the villain you have to kill. The story — what little there is of it — is relegated to the briefing vids, a little bit of enemy chatter and the collectibles — and as I’ve said before with Call of Duty, if you put all your story in collectibles, you have no story. I’m here to shoot motherfuckers, not read.
I did not finish this game. True to the Rebellion formula, Sniper Elite III is a glorified budget game with glossy graphics to distract you from a clunky engine with several bugs that remain unfixed six years later. Some of these bugs are just appalling. A big one is that sometimes your shot is blocked by absolutely nothing. This happens most often if you’re sitting behind cover; for whatever reason, the game thinks you’re going to hit something that isn’t there. For a game built around sniping, this is just ludicrous.
Another bug that I encountered multiple times is that reloading a save or a checkpoint sometimes will instantly alert nearby enemies, even if they weren’t alert when you created the save. This resulted in a game — breaking situation towards the very end of the fifth mission. I had to watch a group of officers and track the one who was heading back to Berlin with some important intel I needed. Unfortunately, after screwing up and reloading my save, I found that they were instantly alerted, resulting in a game over. Several hours down the drain.
So I watched the final three missions on YouTube and to be quite honest, it’s obvious I didn’t miss much. Rebellion have some decent games under their belt: their Alien vs Predator games, Rogue Trooper, even Shellshock 2: Blood Trails wasn’t completely awful. But there’s a real lack of spirit to this game; it feels generic, like it took a bunch of random ideas and jammed them together in the hopes that 10–20 hours of samey-ass gameplay will make up for the lack of polish, story, or reason to care. For me it didn’t.
