WHAT IS SNIPER ELITE 5?
So, Sniper Elite 5 feels like what would happen if you took some games, threw them in a blender together: Splinter Cell series of game (third-person action/shooter/stealth game); Hitman games (third-person action/shooter/stealth game with a very sandbox-y & big open areas with multiple objectives, which include killing certain specific targets); some Wolfenstein & Call of Duty type of objectives sometimes (i.e. blow up a Tiger Tank or a few with a Panzerfaust, in a few missions; destroy U-Boats somehow; destroy research facilities somehow; etc etc.); Dishonored series & Thief series (action/stealth game, where you have a bunch of missions & maps one after another, but each map is its own chapter and is a big open sandbox with both main & side objectives); and then there's also the World War 2 (WW2) setting.
WW2 HITMAN...AND THEN SOME.
Like Hitman & those games of that sort - after every level, you are scored & rewarded (or not) for your actions, what you did, and given a graph on how you played: Lethal or Non-Lethal; and/or Assault or Stealth style - and of course this also in turns ties into the game's RPG-like and RPG-lite system. This game has some elements of its own to bring to the table, also having some RPG-like & RPG-like character upgrade elements where they can upgrade skills & abilities; and even can customize a lot of your weapons and whatnot (adding mods to guns, that can give them each pro's and con's when you take them on).
In this game, you play as elite soldier & expert sniper Karl Fairburne, who takes on the project to find out more about Project Kraken in 1944 over in France. Karl is here to defeat, dismantle, and destroy the Nazi Regime that are trying to takeover France, while working along-side the French Resistance and the Americans that are over in France. The story's solid and nothing spectacular or anything, but the voice-acting is good and it certainly gets the job done here. Everything here is presented really well, including also the cut-scenes and whatnot b/t the missions too.
KILL-ER CAM.
When you make really nice kills and/or sniping kills in this game, you are often seeing them in a Death Cam / Kill Cam sort of thing - the game slows down and follows the bullet from your gun to the enemy and you can see the enemy killed in X-Ray vision style and where it hit them. You can even speed up and slow down the cam, too. Very similar to the bloody & violent kills seen in the modern Fallout games (since Bethesda's Fallout 3) - it's very hard for me to get tired & sick of this Kill Cam, as you're often seeing these kills in detail and in a cinematic way in this glorified Kill Cam. I should note - you can also control the cam and/or skips the kills while in-game "on the fly"; and/or change the settings on how a lot of these settings work in detail in the Options (i.e. you can even or enable/disable the Death Cam entirely and/or even enable/disable the X-Ray part of it too), in case you want to customize the Kill Cam or remove it from executing entirely. Heck, if you want, there are even settings to make it handle more or less frequently, if you'd like. It's all up to you, which is great - as I'm sure there's some who might tire of these cinematic kills.
The combat and everything is smooth as butter and feels great with the keyboard & mouse, feeling very fluid. Everything animates well here too. Gunplay and combat feels really good here; everything plays well technically. Even w/ the controller, this all feels good too - just, I prefer the mouse for aiming and whatnot. You can climb things, mantle over walls and objects, climbs through open windows, and other stuff you'd expect in a Hitman-like and Splinter Cell-like game here. You can hide bodies in boxes, move bodies, sneak in tall grass areas, sneak around, crawl around, and/or whatever. If you want, you can play it like a shooter - but, you get better rewards and scores by aiming for a stealth approach and/or just killing the enemies the game wants you too in the main or side objectives. The game and is entirely just really well designed, well put together, and everything - and I have very little complaints here about any of the stuff. Simply put, this game's very good and awesome - and I'm still wondering why I didn't get into this series sooner, even while having most of this series backlogged. This is a big surprise somehow on how good this Sniper Elite 5 game actually is.
PERFORMANCE.
Maxed-out at 1080p at Ultra settings and cranked-up, this game looks really good, to say the least; all rans within Vulkan here, BTW. Not only that, I had no problem with it sitting at 60fps with it locked at that and it extremely rarely dipped even below 60fps on my desktop PC loaded with i7 10700KF; 16 GB RAM; 8GB VRAM on the RTX 3070; 1 TB SSD; and 2TB HDD. Sure, this game was eating up anywhere from 6-8GB VRAM on the regular - but I didn't have much trouble at all with this game. Load times were barely even there, even sticking it on the regular HDD, not the SSD. The game looked really good and ran great, basically. Seriously, what more could I ask here out of a game that looks & runs like this? It ran great and ran like a top with very little problems. Had one crash the entirely time...and that was going from one mission to the next, when it was loading that. Definitely impressed with all of this.
DIFFICULTY, CUSTOMIZABILITY, AND OTHER STUFF.
So, I played this on Sharpshooter, which is the game's Normal difficulty mode. I should note that there are also lots of options to even make the game's difficulty more customizable, besides the 5 presets here - as you can also customize things such as the damage you take, damage you can give out, whether bullets and shots have wind applied or not; and more options - which is excellent. I'm seeing more & more games w/ this customizability & approach recently, such as say Thief (2014), Sniper Elite 5, Pathfinder: Kingmaker & Guardians of the Galaxy - and I do hope this trend continues.
EXFILTRATE.
When it comes down to, after 14 1/2 hours or so of playing this one on Sharpshooter difficulty (Normal difficulty mode), Sniper Elite 5 is completed and in the books. Another one to add to my piled of completed games and time well-spent here with this game. I've been missing the Splinter Cell series for a while (c'mon Ubisoft, can we get another one?) and always really enjoyed the Hitman games - but to find a game similar to those, have its own twist on them, and sticking it into WW2 for a setting, and also executing everything so good & well - well, what's there to say here? If you like those kind of games like the games from those franchises like Splinter Cell, Dishonored, Hitman, Thief, and/or other action/shooter/stealth games of those sort - you're definitely going to like this one. I don't know why I've been living and crawling under a rock for so long and sleeping on this series here, as Sniper Elite 5 is a big surprise to me and is a really good game - and I'm still wondering why the heck I'm so late to this series.
