“Sniper Elite 4” is Gruesome and a Load of Fun with Friends

Rebellion‘s 2017 tactical stealth shooter will have you sneaking around, sniping soldiers, blowing stuff up, and generally being a massive pain in the enemies’ behinds. If you like strategically shooting baddies, you’ve come to the right place.

Sniper Elite 4‘s gameplay is great. Planning your shots is enjoyable and pulling the trigger is even more rewarding thanks to the gruesomely-visceral X-Ray Kill Cam which glorifies your shot by following your bullet’s journey from the barrel and through whichever of your foe’s vital organs you managed to hit. While you’d think being a sniper might be a lonely job, the multiplayer allows you and a friend to team up and play through the campaign together.

The visuals are really good and they impressed right from the start (especially through the aforementioned “kill cam”). Since you’ll probably spend a lot of time hiding in bushes, behind walls, or on top of roofs, it’s nice that there’s a lot of nice stuff to look at.

The level design within these beautiful locations allows you to get the most out of the gameplay. Each level is essentially a sniper’s dream, allowing you to play several times over in different ways without getting bored. There are always multiple ways to get to a given objective and plenty of places for you ready your shot. Additionally, most of the levels ondulate, granting the player a lot of verticality to mess around in.

The game does have a story but I couldn’t really tell you what it’s about and nor would I want to. I’m not saying the story is bad, but rather that I don’t really think trying to tie the campaign through as much narrative was necessary. In fact, I don’t think any game where you go around killing nazis needs much of a story. Similarly, there’s a pre-mission area where you can get further narrative and backstory from NPCs and all that does it get in the way of me putting a bullet in a nazi’s testicle from 300 yards away!

As fun as the main campaign is, it’s quite short. The missions themselves last a decent amount of time but there are only 8 of them (not including DLC), which means you can finish the whole campaign in around 10 hours. That said, there’s a lot of replayability in each level and with challenges, collectables, and the different difficulty levels, you’ll probably want to do the whole campaign again.

The Verdict

Sniper Elite 4 feels great to play and is even better if you have a friend that can do the whole campaign with you. It’ll be over quickly, but it’ll be a long time before you tire of watching nazi’s skulls explode. You can easily switch up play styles if you want and go from tactical mastermind to Schwarzenegger levels of lunacy in the blink of an eye. Enjoy the killing, they’re only nazis, after all!

Sniper Elite 4 is available on PC, PS4, and Xbox One.