Sniper Elite 3 Reviews

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    Review of Sniper Elite: http://steamcommunity.com/id/BelphegoreHHR/recommended/3700/
    Review of Sniper Elite V2: http://steamcommunity.com/id/BelphegoreHHR/recommended/63380...

    Sniper Elite is a third-person shooter franchise that has found success so far with two main titles, and two spin-off Nazi Zombie Army games; at least, at the time of Sniper Elite III's release. Up until now, the games have been set in Germany during the tail end of World War II, although Sniper Elite III has set out to change that direction slightly by taking the player to Africa during the early 1940's. Certainly, the same location and era can only be done for so long, and publisher/developer Rebellion know that and have attempted to revitalize the series before it wears out its welcome in Nazi Germany.

    First off, if you are running any variation of Windows 8 or 10, you are not going to have a good time. I myself am running Windows 10 x64, and needless to say I did not have a good time. When I say that Sniper Elite III crashes a lot, that's an understatement; everything from the .exe crashing, to Runtime errors, to the game freezing up, to weird FPS drops before the game just gives up. There is no rhyme or reason for occurrence of these crashes, they're seemingly random, and Rebellion have done nothing but shrug and offer multiple band-aid "solutions" that do not work. Great "solutions" such as verify the integrity of the game cache, disable your firewall and anti-virus, and run the .exe in compatibility mode for Windows 7, none of which worked for me.

    Needless to say, my entire experience with this game has been marred with considerable frustration. Of the 5 hours I've spent with the title, I've managed to not even get halfway through the game due to the aforementioned issues. It's not even that the whopping 8 missions (the least amount in any Sniper Elite game, by the way) are long, in fact I finished the first one in under 20 minutes, it's that every time the game crashes, you have to start back from whatever checkpoint you might have been lucky enough to grab; either that or remember to save every 2-5 minutes.

    Plethora of bugs and crashes aside, you once again control our good friend and American OSS Lieutenant Karl Fairburne, this time on his journey through the Battle of Gazala during 1942. The skilled sniper has been sent to assassinate General Franz Vahlen and recover intel on his secret project. Overall, the story is very skeletal and lacks any real substance, with a large chunk of the meat having been shamelessly saved for a three part DLC add-on. The same lacklusterness can be said for the soundtrack, which feels like nothing more than a rehash of what was included in V2.

    The levels this time around are much larger than those presented in V2, and are on par with how big they were in the original Sniper Elite if the game was translated into modern gaming. With plenty of main and optional objectives, along with a multitude of collectibles and locations to discover, there are enough reasons that any player would want to explore each map to its full potential. Despite the adequate size of each map, there's very little that will make one feel as though they're in Africa, as opposed to any random desert location. The graphics haven't really been upgraded or changed much since Sniper Elite III's predecessor, although the character models don't look quite as clay-like.

    Rebellion have brought back the visibility meter in Sniper Elite III, something that was missing from V2, and as well they have added close-encounter knife stealth kills. Along with these implementations is also a leveling system, one that any gained experience points from either online or offline events contribute to. The higher your level, the more items that you unlock for your loadouts; of which, you can have four at any given time, and they can be selected from at the beginning of any single player mission. As well, this time around you have the option of playing through the campaign in co-op mode with a friend.

    Before wrapping things up, let's talk about the difficulty of the game and the inconsistent AI. Thankfully, Rebellion have brought back the harder difficulty that the debut Sniper Elite was so well known for; they've even added a fourth difficulty option known as Realistic. Of course, the ballistics are still in play for any mode above Cadet (easy), which is another staple feature of the series. Realistic mode is incredibly unforgiving, and truly only for the most hardened of sniper simulation enthusiasts as there is zero help for showing where to aim, or how to calculate wind resistance and gravity. However, the enemy AI is notoriously inconsistent; even though you can now finally sneak up behind a foe to stealth kill them while crouching, if you're underground and walking upright an enemy on the very top floor can and will hear you.

    Even though the idea of sticking with a 1940's era and moving the location of the story from Germany to Africa is a brave one, it just hasn't worked in favor of Sniper Elite III. Overall, the game is excruciatingly dull, we still haven't been given any sort of backstory on Karl, there's nothing but a few exotic trees to indicate that we are in Africa, the AI is overly sensitive, online is completely dead, and the title crashes so much that it's not worth putting up with the frustration to continue playing. Sadly, Rebellion have really dropped the ball on this one, and the fact that they've only offered band-aids to atone for Sniper Elite III not working properly on any OS newer than Windows 7 is simply atrocious. Either get this one on console, or don't bother at all. Hopefully the next installment brings us something more flavorful that will actually work on newer operating systems.

    Rating: 2.0/5.0 - It's not awful, but it's not great.

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