Posted in: Games, Rebellion, Sniper Elite, Video Games | Tagged: Sniper Elite: Resistance

We Got To Play a Sample of Sniper Elite: Resistance

We got to try out a special demo of Sniper Elite: Resistance before Rebellion Developments releases the game on PC this January

Before we head into the Thanksgiving weekend, we were given a cool opportunity to try out a demo of Rebellion Developments' latest game, Sniper Elite: Resistance. If you haven't read about this one yet, the game has you playing as Harry Hawker, an agent of the Special Operations Executive (SOE), as you go deep into Axis-controlled France to seek and destroy a new Wunderwaffe that has been discovered. In essence, helping the French Resistance and putting a few extra bullet holes in enemy soldiers along the way in slow motion. We were given the chance to play about an hour of the game's third mission, and this is what we got to experience.

First off, let's cut to the chase for fans of the franchise. If you've played a Sniper Elite title before, this is going to be familiar territory to a degree. The game brings back a number of hallmarks from the series, giving those who played previous titles frequently a chance to dive back into the warm blanket that is killing enemies in slow-motion. The controls and vibes are the same. However, once that wave of familiarity passes over you, you'll notice the subtle changes that have been made. The way your character carries themself, the way your breathing technique has changed, the alertness of the enemies, and how just ducking into some weeds just won't cut it anymore for long-term tactics. You're basically getting the meal you always get from that one diner, but someone changed up the recipe slightly, and now it's kind of a whole new thing. To me, that feels perfect for Sniper Elite: Resistance because it's a bit of familiar with a bit of something new.

The biggest thing that people come back to the series for is killing people in creative ways, and that has returned in spades. Because it was a demo, and there's nothing on the line here for me to succeed or fail, I just played around a bit with being stealthy and sniping people. The game has several options for you to take different routes with side quests, achievements, and main objectives. You can check as many or few off the list as you see fit, aside from the fact you NEED to complete the main goals. But unless you have mastered the art of being invisible in every FPS title ever, you're going to run into Germans who have a habit of being everywhere on patrol and keeping watch.

Thankfully, you can kill them (or if you're a pacifist, you can knock them out to wake up or be discovered later), with multiple options for sneak attacks and close combat, which come with their own variety of slow-mo kills. Or go for the trusty sniper rifle and take them out at a distance. They have an X-ray planned for every kind of kill shot, including several bones and organs. (We're pretty sure the "shot to the nuts" is still here, but we weren't able to pull it off on anyone, just a shattered hip.) There's nothing more satisfying in this game than getting those kills, but they have also ramped up the difficulty in pulling them off as you have low ammo and the gun makes enough sound to alert people across the map. So the game basically tells you without telling you: pick your targets wisely.

Because of this, you'll rely a lot on stealth, and for that, there are literally hundreds of options. Sniper Elite: Resistance has created, at least in the map we experienced, multiple ways for you to go about completing a mission, with different approaches to sections of the map. If you truly wanted to, you could go individually and pick off every single German enemy one by one without anyone noticing. But we didn't have time for that, so we stuck to the basics of picking our windows of opportunity, taking out who we needed to, and hoping they wouldn't be missed. All while avoiding roaming patrols, guard stations, and random soldiers just hanging out like they're on a break. While some may find this jarring, it adds an extra layer of realism to the game because it was super dangerous being in the resistance and trying to do covert operations to sabotage the Axis Powers in WWII.

Which dovetails nicely into our last subject: difficulty. We were playing in normal settings, with nothing hardcore and no walk in the park. Just the straight-forward normal experience you might have playing Sniper Elite: Resistance. Our mission, without giving too much away about the story, was to make it over to a castle across a river, take out some key targets, and find information. None of the soldiers or the world the game was set in made this easy. There were pigeons practically everywhere we walked in tall grass, cobblestone giving away our footsteps, creeky doors signaling they were being opened or closed. Everything about this demo showed that they wanted to put you on edge almost all the time.

We got caught several times, and even when we went for broke and killed a bunch of people until the patrols died down, there was no escaping the fact that once they knew someone was around, they were on high alert. We completed several objectives and some secret ones, but that also tipped people off that something was afoot. This game, by design, is meant to test even the best of players who have mastered and 100% completed every Sniper Elite game ever made. You're going to have a lot of fun playing it when you succeed, but when you fail and are thrown back to that checkpoint, it's going to sting a bit.

Overall, I thought this was an excellent example of how they've grown the series, but I also acknowledge that we're getting a very small piece of a bigger pie. Sniper Elite: Resistance has a lot of good things going for it. I mean, we didn't touch on the graphical upgrades, the improved audio, or the attention to NPCs being improved, so it's not just generic soldiers everywhere. It's clear they took all the things that worked, improved them a little, and raised the challenge a bit more to make this feel grander than before. But I am reserving full judgment on this because it wouldn't be the first time we encountered an FPS title making these kinds of changes and then flopping on delivery. So we'll have to wait until January 30, 2025, to really see what we get.

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