Snippy Elite 5: The Definitive Review

In which exploding crania are rendered boring within 30 minutes of starting play

For my sins, and to satiate my endless appetite for multiple content streams, I am an ardent TikTok consumer. While the majority of my AI-served stream consists of random DnB DJs, spooky backrooms vids, mukbangs of that one guy with fake eyebrows who eats vast quantities of red food, sci-fi book reviews, freehand letterers, felines, that sandwich shop in Naples and meals_by_cug, I do suffer the occasional blip of videogame content. This often takes the form of COD Warzone clips of Nadia being accused of cheating or Scottish people recommending game-breaking loadouts, other times it’s endless Cyberpunk 2077 clips set to *that* song (and one creator insisting the game has an anti-left message). But recently, Rebellion’s latest push to promote ‘season 2’ of Sniper Elite content has bubbled into my instance of the great TikTok algo-blast. It repeatedly tries to promote a comedic aspect to the game’s po-faced sniping melange. Even worse, Rebellion’s social media tries to paint protagonist Karl Fairburne as an iconic figure, rather than the cardboard ubersoldier he very much is, always was, and always will be. It’s something of a tragedy that Karl now embodies the game so completely, a desperately disappointing union has finally been achieved.

Sniper Elite 5 was a game I really looked forward to. I had really committed to 4, and had bought all the DLC and enjoyed it thoroughly. As I had done with 3. It felt like the transition from Africa to Italy was a decent one, along with a nice graphical upgrade. However, the move from 4 to 5 feels a lot less substantial. After completing Sniper Elite 5 I was left with an aching sense of ennui. It didn’t feel like a new game as much as it felt like DLC for Sniper Elite 4. I struggled to understand where there was any meaningful progression other than shifting locale and offering more content. In some ways that content felt a bit soulless, a bit empty. Lacking in verve or imagination, much like most of the maps. Full of space, but so little of it filled with entertainment. We have another fucking Nazi superweapon plot, one which is so ridiculous (V2 rockets launched from submarines, is it?) that we have to assume Sniper Elite 6 will see Karl trying to prevent Hitler from cybernetically merging with an atomic bomb, onboard a Nazi space station. It has a skills system that offers no real progression in skills, where the most useful upgrade is simple inventory enlargement. It has open maps with some of the most savage corridoring and corralling seen since PlayStation 2 days, thanks to impassable hedges and knee-high walls that cannot be jumped, and some shamelessly poor copying from Hitman to add additional side content.

Sniper Elite 5 feels very much like a game that’s running out of ideas, but has plenty of locations to offer. Being in France, it’s clearly 1944 and nearing the end of the war. Perhaps, mercifully, Sniper Elite 6 will be set in Berlin and we can finally say goodbye to the wave of militaristic videogames inspired by Saving Private Ryan. Yes, Sniper Elite’s lineage really does go back that far. And guess what - the first one, which wasn’t at all that great, was set in 1945 Berlin! Please, for the love of videogames, can Rebellion just end this WW2 obsession? I mean, are we going to have to go through Karl’s exploits in the Pacific theatre? Or some clandestine jaunt he took to the Eastern Front? I really hope not. It’s all just so very, very tiresome and over-familiar and creatively lazy. I mean, there is an argument to be made that videogames in general are tending towards a devolved middle of sorts, forming a homogenised mainstream ideal where gamefeel is OK, graphics are good enough, gameplay is long enough, having been hashed through successive filters for raw player stickiness and commercial performance. There is no room for the edges here, the goal is iterative introspection, boiling down to a wholly functional core of mundane acceptability. Reliable product. No room for the triumphant failure, just commercial safety. Maybe this is a brutally realist survival tactic for developers aspirant enough to challenge the AAA hegemony, but too independent to want megabrand or platform holder subsumption. This move towards the blandly capable is perhaps a flavour of realpolitik for videogame design. But this doesn’t excuse Rebellion’s lack of imagination. What’s worse is the IP that Rebellion has access to is fucking astonishing and criminally under-exploited.

With the 2000ad IP in its grasp, the potential for Sniper Elite to grow is tantalising. Of all the sniper-supporting strips on offer, the most obvious is Rogue Trooper, but does anyone else fancy a Joe Pineapples sniping game, placed in the rich ABC Warriors universe? And when I say Rogue Trooper, I really don’t mean playing as Mr Bluegenes himself. I mean exploiting Dave Gibbons and Gerry Finley-Day’s magnificently bleak vision of future warfare in a far more clever and less obvious fashion. Let’s have the player choose between a customisable Souther or Nort sniper, with missions that involve their paths crossing, and perhaps a cameo from Rogue, or the traitor general, as they pass through on their own adventures. You can pillage the back catalogue of stories for locales and battles to carve out sniper content or even better, invent new ones in the Nu Earth style. In a bolder sense, let’s ditch the attempted photorealism and pick up Dave Gibbons’ linework in a cel-shaded manner, and construct big old arenas that pay tribute to Nu Earth’s most awful battlefields in the way they richly deserve. In fact, I’d love to see all the Rogue Trooper artists get their tributes, with maps in a Brett Ewins style followed by Cam Kennedy. It upsets me that Rebellion sees no value in this, even though Sniper Elite 5 is clearly on the diminishing side of returns. One map being heralded by people who never played Sniper Elite 4 doesn’t make up for the foetid stench of stagnation that the game is steeped in. Going further afield, could you conceive of a sniping game in Mega City One? An Apocalypse War campaign perhaps? Or how about the V.C.s, or the Volgan occupations of the UK in Invasion and Savage? There’s just so much on offer and their magnificence deserves more attention and reinvigoration. Like so much of mainstream AAA, the tension between risk and homogeneity, guts and timidity, progression or stagnation falls on the side of the developer-publisher to challenge. There’s an entire generation of receptive fans who have never seen the masterful blend of WW2 and the American Civil War that Rogue Trooper sets up. There are millions of potential readers who’ve never seen Nemesis and his Blitzspear, or Torquemada castigate an underling for their impurity. While I doubt you can fashion a decent Sniper Elite from the world of Nemesis the Warlock, I would fucking love to see them try. Rebellion, live up to your name and attack the status quo. You have immeasurably valuable IPs with which you can build a fine arsenal. Don’t just go full circle with Karl Side-Parting and his convenient noisy generators and even more vertiginous architecture. I turned off the kill cam on the first map, btw. Like so much of Sniper Elite 5, it’s boring now.

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