Sniper Elite V2 Review

     Hello everyone and happy Wednesday, hope your all doing great.  Today I am dipping into the World War II era of shooters that started the genre and picking one of the more original titles among the vast desert, still more lush than the racist shooters set in the modern age.  The Sniper Elite series made its debut way back in 2005 as a sniper game set in the World War II era, which was a common spectacle back then.  It's uniqueness shined above the rest with it's realistic bullet ballistics effected by wind, distance, heart rate and position.  The first Sniper Elite received critical acclaim with its third person sniper action and a whopping seven years later V2 came out with improved graphics and gameplay elements in 2012. The sequel is a remake to the original with some modifications, Sniper Elite V2 takes place in Berlin 1945 during the last days of Nazi rule.  As anyone who took 6th grade history knows, America and other nations were sweeping in to recruit Nazi scientists because of their knowledge in science.  One of the many vast inventions of the Nazi arsenal were the V2 rockets; deadly missiles for their time that were undetectable until it was too late.  The Soviets led the charge against Berlin before the Allies could arrive and while everyone agreed the Nazis were bad, the Soviets were almost as bad then they defiantly became genocidal maniacs later.  Then America was freaking out that the Soviets might get their hands on the V2 scientists so the Allies send American OSS agent Karl Fairburne is sent in to Berlin to assassinate the scientists and their Russian contacts.  While this didn't really happen, the Soviets never got their hands on the scientists because they were dead.  So who knows what happened. The game centers around traversing a certain environment, assassinating the target and then making tracks before they even know you were there or just go in guns blazing.  The player is equipped with three weapons, their Springfield sniper rifle which will be used for some pretty awesome long range kills, your Tommy Gun, for when things get out in the open and your one-shot silenced pistol for getting close and staying quiet.

 Karl can also preform stealth kills with his knife as well as laying trip mines and other traps to create a daring escape or a brutal offensive.  The most enjoyable feature about V2 is the x-ray feature that allows the player to see an accurate depiction of following a bullet to its target and the damage it deals (see image and trailer). The overall challenge is trying to do it all quietly and remain undetected, Karl can use surrounding noises like speaker noise, rocket emissions, anti-air guns to shoot insync with the noise, thus masking the sound of gun fire.  Karl can then proceed to move bodies out of sight to remain unnoticed or could go a whole mission without killing anyone at all besides the target.  While the game encourages the stealthy sniper approach, there are many paths that can be taken, as I said earlier brute force is an option but makes it easier to be overwhelmed unless your carrying many grenades and even then one must beware. Theres also a DLC where you can kill Hitler, packs a satisfying punch. Overall Sniper Elite V2 is a fun game that is one of the few unique concepts left on the shooter and the open world sequel came out a few months ago, so that should be fun. I had fun with this game and would recommend it to those who enjoy fast paced rewarding action.  I hope you all enjoyed this review and I will be back next week with more games. This has been Jacob Arnold, signing off.

trailer