Sniper Elite 4: As unflinchingly ultra-violent as this World War Two shooter series gets
World War 2 is a well-represented setting in video games, but Sniper Elite 4 is proof that the generic isn’t always boring.
This four-quel transports the series from the deserts of Africa to the towns, vineyards, forests and docklands of sunny northern Italy, where you’ll embark on all sorts of different missions, typically involving shooting bad guys from afar.
All of your missions have the same handful of objectives on rotation: locate valuable intel, destroy key strategic outposts and, chief among them, kill a ton of Nazis.
Rather than suffer from repetition, Sniper Elite 4 thrives on its lack of complexity. With far bigger open world levels with even more verticality within them, the game encourages exploration and experimentation.
You’re able to go wherever you want and approach objectives however you please, scouting out useful vantage points and creeping through the undergrowth using the game’s updated cover and stealth mechanics.
As ever, there’s a guilty appeal in the game’s ultra gruesome X-ray kills, which let you watch your bullets tear through flesh and shatter bones in super slow-motion. It’s incredibly violent (and roughly medically accurate) stuff, like an MRI scan crossed with Tarantino’s daydreams.
Balletically bloody and unflinchingly graphic as Sniper Elite may be, the game makes a cruel sport of long distance target practice, where each shot is celebrated. There are few shooters in which pulling the trigger feels so crucial, grave and satisfying.
Sniper Elite 4 knows its own limits, and while it never strays far beyond the bounds of a generic World War 2 action-shooter, it seems to know that that’s exactly where it performs best.
It’s big, strategic and never presumes to elevate itself much past hyper-gore, but who needs that when you can blow the balls off a Nazi?