SNIPER ELITE RESISTANCE

Sniper rounds and Nazi testicles, together again

- Shaun Prescott

A naive part of me expected Sniper Elite Resistance to deviate from the Sniper Elite formula, if only a touch. I thought maybe we’d be shooting something other than Nazis, perhaps during a point in history that’s not World War II. No: Sniper Elite Resistance is still about shooting Nazis during WWII. Not only that, but like Sniper Elite 5, Sniper Elite Resistance is set in France.

I guess it has to be Nazis every time. No other baddies are as unambiguously villainous in the history of sniper rifles, except for zombies, and Rebellion has a whole other series for that (the Zombie Army series, where the zombies are, I shit you not, Nazis too). When the violence is as gratuitous and forensic as it is in the Sniper Elite series, it pretty much has to be Nazis.

So Resistance is basically Sniper Elite 5.5, then. The major distinguishing factor is that this one stars Harry, a British guy, instead of the usual Karl, an American guy. Anyone who played Sniper Elite 3 to 5 in co-op will have met Harry as player two. He’s just as good a marksman as Karl, and harbors a similarly healthy contempt for Nazis—don’t we all! —so aside from his accent and sometimes amusing asides (“I’m losing a lot of motion lotion here!”) he’s not different to play at all. He’s less amusingly archetypal than Karl, because Karl is basically id Software’s BJ Blazkowicz. Harry will probably take some getting used to, but I did appreciate how, as he dashed along a promenade absorbing countless bullets, he promised he’d “be right as rain as soon as I stop this bleeding”. Stiff upper lip and all that, right? Harry’s British after all.

SONDERZUGE SABOTAGE