Sniper Elite V2
A reboot of the original Sniper Elite for the Xbox 360, PC via Steam, and Play Station 3. The overall plot is similar to the first game. You are once again Karl Fairburne, an OSS officer who is inserted into Berlin in 1945. Only your mission is to kill V2 scientists and seize information related to the V2 Missiles before the Soviets can get their hands on them. The story takes place in Germany during the final days of WWII and the player must navigate and fight their way through a city crawling with both Nazi and Soviet troops. As you progress through the game you uncover a sinister plot and it is up to Karl to stop it.
Just before a mission players can view the mission map, read the intro for the mission, and select various pieces of gear. Gear selection includes which unlocked sniper rifle, sub-machine gun, pistol, and what other extra bits of equipment you go into the mission with.
The overall game play has been tweaked but should be familiar to anyone who played the first game. One of thew new features is the X-Ray Kill Cam. Where on certain shots you get to see the damage and trauma your bullet causes. It can be gory and visceral to see your bullet put out an eye, smash through some organs, and shatter bones.
The sniping mechanic is virtually unchanged depending on difficulty settings. The Difficulty settings determine basic AI behavior, how realistic your bullet physics are, and what tactical aides the player can rely on.
The tactical aides include a threat/awareness indicator, ghost image of where the player was last seen, the ability to mark targets for easier tracking with binoculars, and and aim point assistance for higher difficulty settings.
The difficulty options include a custom difficulty which allows you tweak AI level, ballistics realism, and tactical aides.
The game still has stealth elements but they are focused more on staying out of direct line of site and noise discipline. Also hiding bodies can prevent an enemy from from frantically combing the area searching for a hidden sniper. Some elements like shot masking (firing when there is a loud environmental sound) is still present but only in certain areas.
The multiplayer has been changed up a bit from the previous game to include a Coop Campaign for online play, Kill Tally, Over Watch and Bombing Run coop missions.
- Co-op campaign mode takes two players in the role of snipers to go through the game completing the various missions together.
- Kill Tally is a survival mode with multiple waves of enemies and vehicles in an enclosed battle field and the two players compete for the highest score.
- Bombing Run is fetching various components for a vehicle to escape the area before bombers flatten it while trying to survive assaulting enemy infantry.
- Over Watch has one player in the role of sniper with nothing more then a sniper rifle and one as spotter with all the secondary weapons. The spotter has to complete a set of objectives to complete the mission. The sniper provides covering fire and shooting designated enemy targets indicated by the spotter.
Four DLC mission have been released for the game, the first being a mission to kill Hitler that came with pre-ordered copies of the game along with two bonus sniper rifles in game, the Kar-98k and the Svt-40.
- Accidental Aiming Skills: On the higher difficulty settings if you don't account for wind and bullet drop due to gravity this can result. For example, you may shoot at the guy on the right but hit the guy on the left.
- Arrow Cam: You get a variety of views of the bullet leaving your gun barrel with a visible shock wave and get to watch it strike your target in a usually gruesome fashion. There is an X-Ray Cam that shows the path of the bullet as it passes through your enemy. The bullet will be show destroying eyes, shattering bones, and rupturing organs.
- Benevolent Architecture: There is a variety of debris scattered about the various levels that benefit both the players and the enemy.
- Booby Trap: Tripwire grenades, dynamite, land mines, vehicle gas tanks with a visible fuel cap, and an assortment of destroyable environmental objects.
- Boom! Headshot!:
- The guaranteed kill for head shots with the sniper rifle. Plus you are a sniper. You get more fame points for head shots at range. Plus when the bullet hits home there is a spray of blood and an entry and exit wound. If you get the X-Ray kill cam you will see your bullet as it travels through the enemy’s skull.
- Averted with pistols and sub-machine gun hits to enemy helmets. There will instead be a noticeable ping sound and the enemy will stagger. But if you hit them in the face they will die instantly.
- Blasting It Out of Their Hands: Averted. Hits on enemy weapons give off a ping, send sparks flying, and stagger the enemy but they retain their weapon.
- Bottomless Magazines: Played straight for NPCs, heavily averted with you. Interestingly, whenever you loot the corpse of any enemy you receive a limited amount of ammunition.
- Bullet Time:
- When making a kill shot the game stops time just to show the bullet as it travels into the target.
- There is a focus mode where if the characters heartbeat is low enough it will slow time down making it easier to target fast enemies and take more difficult shots.
- Cold Sniper: The Player Character and enemy snipers.
- Coup De Grace: You can walk up and just shoot wounded enemy soldiers rolling on the ground or snipe wounded enemies in the open.
- Difficulty spike: On Sniper Elite Difficulty, Starting with the mission to retrieve documents from a Soviet outpost the game experiences a sharp spike in difficulty. Enemy sniper teams ambush the player. The enemy has perfect aim, reflexes, and later missions have multiple enemy snipers appearing in various locations to ambush the player. Two sniper shots can kill the player outright and the only way to locate the enemy is to have them shoot at you or get lucky and spot the light glinting off their scope as they take aim at you. Add in that the player has to account for both bullet drop and wind affecting their shot in addition to being wounded by an enemy shot throwing off your aim.
- Elite Mooks: The enemies who wear great coats. The Russian version mostly carry sub-machineguns. The German variant are the same. The more elite troops are more aggressive, more likely to use a grenade, and are better shots.
- Exploding Barrels: Explosive barrels, fuel cans, and scattered explosive muntions for various forms of artillery. The obvious clue is they are red or have a red part.
- Handguns: Some enemies, the player, and a friendly NPC use various handguns.
- Harder Than Hard: Sniper Elite mode. The enemies are more alert and fight more aggressively. Their weapons fire will become more accurate and enemies with rifles will seriously injure or kill the player in short order. The player also has no tactical aides to show where shots are coming from, when an enemy has been alerted to their presence, or to aid the player with calculating bullet impact points. The player has to account for both wind and bullet drop when shooting.
- Immune to Bullets: Cars, tanks, and APC vehicles. Unless the vehicle has an external fuel tank with a gas cap you can't kill it with your gun. However dynamite or Panzerfaust will work every time.
- Groin Attack: When you shoot the enemy in the right spot the player is shown an xray cam view of the bullet obliterating the enemy’s testicles.
- Lead the Target: You need to do this to hit moving enemy targets. This can be complicated by having the difficulty high enough to have to account for wind.
- Moe Greene Special:
- Head shots with the sniper rifle to the eye usually destroy the eye and continue through the head.
- There is an achievement for shooting an enemy in the eye.
- Mooks: The average Russian/German Soldier you encounter.
- More Dakka:
- Enemies typically carry a sub-machine gun, semi-automatic rifles, or will man machine gun turrets.
- The Player also has access to the same gear.
- No Arc in Archery:
- Averted and Played straight. Depending on difficulty you can have a flat trajectory or have to take account bullet drop due to gravity when shooting distances.
- Some sniper rifles bullets have greater drop over distance when you have bullet drop turned on.
- No Scope: You can realistically shoot the rifle while out of scope and kill an enemy but you are not as accurate.
- One-Hit Polykill: If Multiple Enemies are lined up you can kill most of them with one shot.
- One-Man Army: You take on trucks full of enemies, elite sniper teams,enemy filled fortified structures, armoured vehicles, and can even assassinate Hitler [1].
- Only a Flesh Wound:
- Shooting enemies in the legs or arms makes them stagger.
- You can also wound them with a hip or gut shot and they will roll around on the ground in pain. If they are rescued by an ally, they will be bandaged up and back in the fight as if nothing happened.
- Pink Mist: There usually a spray of blood and bits of skull flying around. There are also frequently blood splatter spots on the walls or ground where you shot the enemy.
- Scope Snipe: Played Straight. It is possible to pull this shot off but it is difficult due to the small size of the scope opening and difficulty in lining up your shot at the perfect angle.
- Shoot the Fuel Tank: Every vehicle has at least one fuel tank or can with a shootable red cap on it.
- Shout-Out: The Achievement World Record 506 kills is a reference to the famous World War II sniper Simo Häyhä who had 505 confirmed sniping kills. The player would hold the record by beating Simo’s score by 1.
- Sniper Rifle:
- You get three [2] different rifles with different cross hairs.
- The rifles have varying characteristics including stopping power, bullet drop, magazine size, semi-auto, bolt action, and zoom level.
- Sniper Scope Sway: Player heart rate and position, and whether you are using the focus mode or not can influence scope sway.
- Sniping Mission: Every mission is a sniping mission. See the title of the game.
- Stuff Blowing Up:
- The V2 Factory Mission. The character is fighting off the Nazis after being discovered searching for intel in the control room, when the bombs planted start going off. Que an assortment of explosions and a general flight of both the player and the enemy from the factory.
- After the player stops the launch of the V2 Missile loaded with Tabin, the whole area pretty much explodes
- It's also possible to shoot the grenade attached to someone's belt, causing this to happen.
- Tactical Withdrawal: If the enemy begins flanking you or you are wounded it is wise to back off and hide for a short bit.
- Third-Person Shooter: Whenever sniper mode is off the player views the world in a 3rd person perspective.
- Trigger Happy: Every enemy who sees you. Enemies will gladly hose down the area they saw you last as well.
- Urban Warfare: The Majority of the missions take place in war torn cities.
- Video Game Cruelty Potential:
- Shoot to wound. Then shoot (ideally, shoot to wound) anyone who comes to help the wounded man as he cries out for help. He'll die without treatment after a few minutes, and you can just sit there and watch, or practice your grenade-lobbing skills, or run a good distance away and shoot him with the sniper rifle for long-distance kill points.
- Also, it is possible to shoot an enemy in the testicles, often accompanied by an X-Ray cam of the gonads bursting like eggs. This will kill the target instantly (sudden outbursts of extreme pain can indeed prove lethal in real life due to reflexogenic cardiac arrest).