While making the video preview of Sniper Elite 5, I sent a question to the developers inquiring why they added non-lethal options on top of the already-present stealth takedowns and ranged combat. I don’t know if any response could have satisfied me, or convinced me that it was a good idea – I suppose the best possible version would be ‘We really liked the whole ‘clean kill/silent assassin’ thing in Hitman, and we wanted to do exactly that’. Maybe this was all just a huge misunderstanding, and the developers were so laser-focused on the mechanics of their game that they didn’t stop to consider the context in which those mechanics were being implemented.

Part of the response does have that vibe, but another, more concerning part, absolutely does not.

The first section talks about player choice – those who would clear the map, versus those who want to test themselves by being true ghosts, slipping in and out without ever being detected. So, as I said – Hitman franchise stuff.

They also discuss the extra challenge of leaving someone unconscious, because if another guard wakes them up, they’ll be back on-mission and will likely sound an alarm.

We also get the strange justification that ‘knocking people out is silent‘, making it tactically useful. But of course, stabbing people in the throat or brain is also silent, unless the developers have made the decision to make it unrealistically noisier. Likewise, sub-sonic ammunition exists in the world – that’s what allows Karl’s iconic Welrod pistol to be functionally noiseless – it’s not just that the whole gun is a silencer, it’s that the bullet never breaks the sound barrier.

There are all mechanical considerations, though, and have nothing inherently troubling about them – where we run into trouble is the middle paragraph, which talks about the ‘enemy bio’ items that come up when the player uses their binoculars to tag foes. This has been in the series since Sniper Elite 3, and there I found it to be cute, but worried it was being used to humanize Nazis, which is a terrible idea that can only lead to bad outcomes.

My fears have been realized in Sniper Elite 5, as the developer specifically says that the bios are there to give the player more information when making their decision whether to kill or merely knock out enemies.

That’s right – the developers want the player to judge for themselves whether they’re dealing with ‘good Nazis’ or ‘bad Nazis’ and factoring that into a choice to kill or merely subdue. This is reminiscent of Watchdogs‘ mobile phone scanning, where the player can link up with anyone on the street and learn a fact about them. It was a nice mechanic there, because you would learn fun things about random people on the street, and then occasionally one would be a serial killer, and you’d murder them.

The problem with using this mechanic in a Sniper Elite game is that it creates a framework in which such a thing as a ‘good Nazi’ exists. While I was a little concerned about this before, in the end it wasn’t problematic since all the Nazis had to die, no matter who they were. Players would learn a colorful piece of information – occasionally something that might even humanize them a little – but at the end of the day, they’re still Nazis, and as a consequence, they have to get killed. Sure, plenty of them were conscripts, but these are men wearing the uniform of a genocidal regime bent on total domination of Europe and beyond, so it really doesn’t matter whether they love puppies or not, they have to die just the same.

By adding in non-lethal options, however, the developers are saying that maybe it doesn’t matter what actions a person takes part in if they’re a ‘good person’ inside. From a moral standpoint, this is abominable. At the end of the day, it’s not important whether a Nazi soldier loves their children. It doesn’t matter if if they get aroused while setting prisoners on fire. Their internal lives are irrelevant – this is a war, they’re wearing Nazi uniforms, and that means there can be only two ways out – they can abandon the cause and surrender, or they can die. That’s it.

And, as a commando behind enemy lines, Karl Fairburne isn’t in a position to be taking any prisoners.

That’s not the worst of it, though – I’ve been writing this criticism under the assumption that people were going to let the ‘good Nazis’ live, and just kill the ‘bad Nazis’ – but there are people out there with a very different conception of what constitutes good and bad. In Sniper Elite 4, if you didn’t want to kill a specific Nazi based on his bio, it made the game more difficult, because that was one more Nazi trying to kill you. Sniper Elite 5‘s non-lethal takedown mode makes it easier for people to save their preferred Nazis – whoever those might be.

Has Rebellion not thought this through?

They’ve essentially ensured that someone is going to make a video where they play the game killing any Nazi who’s insufficiently passionate about genocide, and preserving the lives of Nazis who enjoy machine-gunning people and love to taunt American prisoners in English before murdering them. It was theoretically possible, with lots of saving and loading, to make that video in Sniper Elite 4 but the non-lethal options in Sniper Elite 5 remove all the difficulty, ensuring that those videos are going to be made using the game engine.

By stepping outside the ‘kill or die’ paradigm and creating a third option in which a soldier gets to decide for themselves which Nazi is a decent person who gets to live, and which is a bad person that has to die, the developers at Rebellion have opened the door to moral depravity, and if they care at all about their game’s impact on the world, they’ll take out the non-lethal options before the game is released and the Sniper Elite franchise can go back to serving its longstanding purpose – reminding us that Nazis need to die, and it’s better if those deaths are brutal.

VIDEO SCRIPT

There’s a new Sniper Elite game coming soon.

On one level this is super-exciting because as a longtime fan of the series I’ve reviewed all of them for Gamecritics, and have watched as the franchise has gradually improved and been perfected over the years by developers with a passion for delivering the most intense stealth and sniping experience possible.

The setting this time – France – promises castles, rivers, ports, and the kind of verdant forests we don’t get enough of in the franchise, The wooded area in Sniper Elite 4 was a delight, and the little bits of nature that I saw in this hands-on preview were both gorgeous and a perfect place to explore and stalk through.

Gameplay-wise, Sniper Elite 5 mostly offers refinements to the design elements we saw in SE3 and SE4.

For example, instead of swapping out their starting kit, players scavenge weapons from the fallen dead and hold onto them as temporary weapons to be used for a few minutes and discarded. It’s a decent system, and does a good job of showing off the different ways guns can be customized, as enemy weapons come with a wide variety of sights, barrels, and magazines. This leads to some questions about why there’s a silenced colt .45 with a 17-bullet capacity lying around a French farmhouse, but players are ostensibly expected to enjoy sampling the armaments rather than worrying about the realism of the situation.

The game even takes a note from Hitman‘s book by setting up specific ways to kill mission targets for rewards. In the level I played, I was asked to drop a chandelier on an officer’s head while he was surveying stolen art in a ballroom. It’s an interesting addition that should encourage players to go back to levels multiple times and test out a variety of approaches.

If these were all the changes that Rebellion made to Sniper Elite, it would be one of my most-anticipated games of the year.

Tragically, this isn’t the case.

Why? Because they made one additional change that transforms the adventure from a delightful fantasy to be savored and turns it into a nightmare to be deeply concerned about.

That change? Non-lethal options.

I was genuinely aghast when I watched the ‘how to play’ video and saw Karl Fairburne – the main character of the SE series, and a man known only for massacring nazis – flip his knife around and clonk a nazi over the head instead of slitting his throat. I don’t have footage of this because why would I ever do something like that in this game? I do, however, have footage of SE5‘s menus which clearly establish that not only does the game have fantasy non-lethal ammunition for weapons, but there are actual badges for getting through a level without killing any non-key targets.

That’s right – Sniper Elite 5 will award experience points for NOT killing Nazis.

To be absolutely crystal clear, this is the Sniper Elite franchise – a series that leads the industry in depicting the brutal murder of Nazis, and I revel in the joyful depiction of shrapnel perforating the internal organs of Nazi soldiers in gruesome slow-motion. Indeed, the point of this series is to remind people that Nazis are monsters, and to allow them to deliver brutal deaths to the Nazis whose actions have earned them… and yet, apparently the developers at Rebellion have decided you should be able to liberate France and dispense justice without hurting Nazis?

To those who might say – ‘Well, this is for people who don’t like games to be disgusting‘ I say turn off the x-ray death cam.

To those who might say ‘Maybe there should be less-violent options for people who are interested in the story‘, I say play something else – Sniper Elite is, and has always been, a game about murdering Nazis. If you want to avoid killing things, play a Thief game, or play Metal Gear – they require or at least heavily encourage stealth without murder.

For disturbed individuals who want to play as a Nazi, I’m sure EA and Activision will be happy to take your money, but this is Sniper Elite. This is a game about killing Nazis.

What makes this design decision even worse is the reality that in our current political climate, American politicians go in front of cameras and use Hitler as a role model and an actual fascist is in a head-to-head runoff to be the president of France. At this moment in time as literal, real-world fascism is on the rise, Rebellion has decided to make killing Nazis optional. The game is literally about stopping a Nazi invasion of America and the developers think it’s a good idea to say that hey, maybe we don’t have to kill Nazis?

Who was asking for this? What were the developers thinking??

And no, that question is not rhetorical. I actually need to know because this game has been in development for years.

Hundreds of people have worked on it.

At some point, at least one of them had to say ‘Maybe Nazis shouldn’t die in this game.’ and then some number of people had to approve that decision.

And then people had to code in an ‘unconscious’ state to enemies.

And then they had to craft animations of people getting knocked out.

And then they had to design the badges that players get for not killing Nazis.

This didn’t happen accidentally. People decided that Sniper Elite, which had, up until this moment, been where people who want to kill Nazis in videogames go to have the best possible experience killing Nazis – should suddenly become be a game where maybe it’s okay for Nazis to get a pass??

This is disgusting.

Luckily, there’s still time to fix this. Sniper Elite 5 doesn’t come out for another six weeks, and this isn’t a difficult thing to patch out. Remove the ‘knock-out’ button and prompt. Delete all references to non-lethal ammunition from the loadout screen and game world, and erase those badges from the awards menu.

Nazis need to die, and it’s Sniper Elite‘s job to make those deaths as entertaining as possible. So fix this, Rebellion, or be remembered as the company that pulled an abrupt about-face in a world with real, actual fascism on the rise and said ‘Hey, maybe the Nazis weren’t so bad, after all…‘

HIGH A sniping post across a lake from a chalet with glass walls.

LOW Why doesn’t this super-mask work?

WTF Why do I have to worry about windspeed in an underground lab?

There’s a story I like about the development of Batman: Arkham Asylum.

Apparently some playtesters enjoyed using detective mode – the x-ray vision that allows Batman to easily spot interactive elements and see traps at a great distance – and they enjoyed it so much that they were leaving it on for the entire game. Worried that no one was going to see the huge amount of work they’d put into the graphics, the developers spent time trying to brainstorm ways to discourage players from overusing the mode.

Nothing seemed actionable, since limitations would only frustrate players in the many sections where detective mode was necessary. Then someone had a eureka moment that would contribute hugely to its success — why not let them play however they want?

I bring this anecdote up because Sniper Ghost Warrior: Contracts manages to deliver a largely satisfying sniping experience, but faceplants in the most spectacular way when it comes to its gadgets. The devs would have done quite well for themselves by taking a page from Rocksteady’s handbook.

As a follow-up to 2017’s FPS Sniper Ghost Warrior 3, SGWC puts players in the role of a mercenary working for the shadowy supervillain organization from that game.

In a near-future setting, Siberia has broken away from Russia to become its own country, but corruption and mismanagement have massively destabilized the region. It’s the player’s job to kill the dozen or so people most responsible for the sorry state of the nation and soften it up for a people’s revolution the aforementioned supervillains will be able to guide towards their own ends. If the player manages to grab any biological weapons and genetic engineering research at the same time, there will be a nice cash bonus for that, too!

Functioning as a sort of middle ground between Sniper Elite and Hitman, SGWC abandons the previous title’s delightfully complex open world and replaces it with five separate mission areas, each one built around three or four facilities where objectives are hidden. Players are dropped in and then told to complete their checklist of tasks in whatever order and manner they please.

The levels are carefully constructed to ensure that all options are on the table. There’s plenty of cover for those who want to run and gun, secret entrances for those who prefer to sneak in and slit throats, and (naturally) many vantage points with clean sightlines for the long-distance killing implied by the title.

The core mechanics are practically perfect. Moving through the world is smooth as silk, whether the player is crawling along riverbeds or climbing to scale cliffsides. Sneaking through enemy lines requires careful use of cover and minimizing sound but there are numerous paths to each objective, some more obvious than others. The ‘tracking’ feature from SGW3 in which players can see glowing footprints on the ground makes a return appearance, although here it’s not about uncovering environmental storytelling, it exists to teach the player how to tiptoe through minefields.

The shooting is simply excellent. Players begin with a silenced sniper rifle with a weak scope, but can quickly upgrade to bigger and better guns by spending contract rewards between levels. Every gun can be extensively customized to fit playstyle, from bipods with extreme-range accuracy to muzzle brakes that let assault rifles to empty a full clip without losing their target. There’s only one fairly major oversight — there are numerous types of special bullets that deal armor piercing or explosive damage, but only certain rifles can equip them and SGW3 doesn’t tell players which bullets go with which rifles until those guns have been unlocked.

It’s not a huge problem, but I did spend too much time trying to figure out how to unlock futuristic computer-guided DARPA projectiles which erase the player’s need to worry about things like bullet drop and windspeed, transforming the most extreme-range engagements into a turkey shoot.

Overall SGWC gets so much right that it almost pains me to bring up its greatest flaw…

In the initial briefing, the player is told that in order to accept contracts, they’ll have to wear a futuristic mask that will hold significance to anyone who played SGW3.

The mask is supposed to overlay an AR filter on the world, auto-tagging enemies, revealing the position of countersnipers, and suggesting alternate routes through levels. It starts out relatively weak, but players can upgrade its range and functionality until it essentially transforms them into a super-soldier.

The entire game is built around employing this mask to make things easier, so why does it have a timer and cooldown restricting its use? Players can turn it on and get outlines of enemies through walls and see the vision cones of surveillance cameras, but a few seconds later it shuts off automatically. It’s a baffling restriction which — like the incredibly small battery life on the drone that players can use to scout areas — makes actually using tech central to the entire premise an annoying chore.

Here’s the thing, though — even without the advantages of the mask and drone, SGWC is still some great sniping, and by the end of the campaign I was barely using the mask at all. At its core Sniper Ghost Warrior: Contracts is a challenging, but fundamentally well-balanced sniping FPS, but the mask was supposed to be the thing that empowered the character and made them more than a match for the armies they’re up against — I just can’t understand why the developers didn’t let me choose how to use it, rather than forcing annoying limits upon me.

Disclosures: This game is developed and published by City Interactive. It is currently available on PC, PS4 and XBO.This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PC. Approximately 10 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed. There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated M and contains Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, and Strong Language. I can talk about the drinking and smoking and slave trading all you want, but you don’t need to know all that to know this game must be kept away from kids. Here’s all you need to know — bullets tear off limbs and explode heads in this game. Graphically and upsettingly. Don’t let kids anywhere near it.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available in the options.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: You’re not going to have much trouble with the game — there are onscreen indicators letting players know when they’re being spotted or attacked by enemies. The only important audio cue missing is the whine of surveillance drones drawing near, but they do offer an onscreen indicator once they’ve spotted the player.

Remappable Controls: Yes, this game offers fully remappable controls.

HIGH Pulling off a 400-meter headshot in high winds.

LOW No longer being able to choose what kind of scope I want to use.

WTF The often-strange bios that appear over enemies when watching them with binoculars.

Well, Rebellion has done it again. Every time a new Sniper Elite game has come out since 2012’s V2, I`ve noticed that each title is a marked improvement over the previous one. There’s something new this time, however — something that elevates Sniper Elite 4 beyond incremental improvement, marking it as the first great game in the series. Rebellion has finally embraced open levels that can be fully explored and traversed, and the difference is tremendous.

Moving the action to Italy, Sniper Elite 4 follows franchise hero Karl Fairburne on his quest to safeguard the Allied invasion of Sicily. The Axis want to deploy radio-operated drone bombs capable of sinking the fleet before it nears land, and they must be stopped. To accomplish this he’ll have to work with Italian partisans, collect secret documents, and, naturally, shoot people from hundreds of meters away.

At long last, Rebellion has both the will to design an incredible sniping game and the technology to realize their dreams. Gone are the tight canyons and claustrophobic cities of the previous entries. While players could (at best) expect three or four great sniping setpieces in the earlier games, SE4 offers choice sightlines and perfectly-placed roosts in every single level. Each area also offers a wide variety of sound-masking options to give players the chance to shatter skulls all over the map without the enemy having the slightest idea where the shots are coming from.

The first level acts as a kind of statement of purpose — Karl is set loose on an island where the drone is being tested, and tasked with killing a general and his four officers. Players can approach this task any way they want, including blasting their way from cover to cover, riddling Nazis with SMG fire, sneaking around patrols, setting traps and slitting throats, or — and this is where the game really stands out — climbing to the top of a tower and shooting the general from 400 meters away. Sniper Elite 4 is now both the most versatile entry in the franchise, and the most sniping-focused.

Sniper aficionados will find that playing on Authentic difficulty is once again a sadistically satisfying experience. Where the normal mode simplifies matters by letting players zoom in and out with both the sniper scope and the binoculars they use to mark targets, Authentic locks them into using a standard magnification – 20x for the binocs, or considerably lower for the rifles. Not being able to mark targets and watch silhouettes move behind cover changes the game completely. Accurate shooting requires binoculars to find out an enemy’s exact distance, adjusting the scope for bullet drop, and some quick calculations to determine how wind strength will affect their aim. It’s harsh training, and at the start of the game, every successful shot feels like a miracle. By the end of the campaign, players will be able to hit their marks entirely on instinct.

The multiplayer is excellent once again. While it features standard deathmatch modes, the real standouts are the sniping challenges. No-Man’s-Land mode forces teams to stay on opposite sides of a barrier, engaging solely with rifles. Distance King, scores players (or teams) based on how far their killshots flew before putting their opponents down. Both work incredibly well and feel like nothing else out there. While there are just a few maps currently available, each is dense and complex enough to allow for intensely strategic gameplay.

While the entire campaign can be played in two-player co-op, the standout co-op mode is Overwatch. This mode offers two huge maps packed with objectives, but the twist is that one player controls Karl, moving along a series of cliffs and bridges looking down on the mission area, while the second player controls a partisan commando who must sneak through the levels, stealing files and sabotaging facilities. The commando also marks targets for the sniper to execute, and the sniper picks off the soldiers that have the commando pinned down under heavy fire. It’s a completely different experience than the campaign, but it’s every bit as polished and fits perfectly alongside it. It’s only two levels, but they’re beautifully constructed and do an incredible job of encouraging and transforming teamwork into satisfying gameplay. 

Sniper Elite 4 is the best sniping game I’ve ever played, and is absolutely the high point of the series. This is a perfect example of what can be achieved if a developer understands what their game’s potential is, and never stops working towards it. Rebellion has made huge leaps forward with every new entry in this series, and they’ve finally reached a point where the results are flat-out incredible. I can only imagine the great things they’ll accomplish in the future. Rating: 9 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed and published by Rebellion. It is currently available on Xbox One, PS4, and PC. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PS4. Approximately 30 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed. 4 hours of play were spent in multiplayer modes.

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated M and contains violence, blood and gore, strong language. As always, I’m going to suggest that you keep the kids as far as possible from this title. Exploding eyeballs, crushed testicles, punctured livers spewing bile everywhere — this is as disgustingly violent as games get. I know it’s tempting, especially today, to teach children the value of shooting Nazis and Fascistas, but try to find a game that’s a little less gruesome unless they’re in their mid-to-late teens.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: On the higher difficulty levels sound is an important element of the game’s design, but so long as you turn the mini-map on you should have no trouble playing the game. There’s still a sound-masking symbol onscreen to let you know when it’s safe to snipe.

Remappable Controls: No, this game’s controls are not remappable.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available in the options.