Sniper Elite 5 can't help missing the point

Every Friday, A.V. Club staffers kick off our weekly open thread for the discussion of gaming plans and recent gaming glories, but of course, the real action is down in the comments, where we invite you to answer our eternal question: What Are You Playing This Weekend?

As I have discussed here in the past, I like to think that a B-game that reaches beyond its means (regardless of whether it does it successfully) is often better than a triple-A game that squanders its budget. I also think that a game that comes out with some rough edges is often better than one that is immaculately polished. I’m also a big fan of stealth games, where quietly tiptoeing behind an enemy’s back is often the best solution to any problem.

So, naturally, the World War II shooter series Sniper Elite has a special place in my heart. It’s a series that has always been a little bit janky, but in a way that makes it seem more personal and handcrafted, and every single game is built around one very nice gimmick: You sneak around a big map, you see a Nazi in the distance, and then you take out your sniper rifle and watch in slow-motion as a bullet pops the Nazi’s head like a fascist pimple.

Sniper Elite 5, the latest game in developer Rebellion’s Nazi-popping series, has all of the stuff that was good about previous games (including dropping you into one big-ish map with a number of objectives and leaving you to figure out how best to accomplish them), but it also tries to do … other stuff. In a slight departure from previous games, more of Sniper Elite 5’s levels are based around infiltrating Nazi-infested castles or bunkers and quietly blowing stuff up, or maybe slaughtering your way through a Nazi horde and loudly blowing stuff up, if you’re unlucky enough to get spotted by an enemy.

You’ll notice that I didn’t say “sniping” as part of that rundown for how this video game with “sniper” in the title works. Oh sure, there’s plenty of sniping, where you spot a watchtower or whatever from a distance, kill all the Nazis so you can take it for yourself, and then use that vantage point to clear out enemies from your next target, but it seems less like The Point than ever before. It would take an inordinate amount of patience and awareness of enemy locations to make exclusively using your sniper rifle a viable strategy on many of the new levels, which wouldn’t necessarily be a mortal sin if not for the fact that every other strategy is more trouble than its worth.

The game gives you familiar tools to making sniping fun, like a mechanic where you let the air out of your lungs to steady your aim, slightly slow things down, and use a focused reticle that turns red on an enemy, but combat with any other weapon is just your thumbs and the controller. There’s nothing new or interesting about it whatsoever, and the frequency at which things go wrong with sniping and force you to rely on louder and more face-to-face means is completely out of balance.

It’s like if you were playing Super Mario Bros. and every time you misjudged a jump onto a Koopa’s head you had to go back and solve one of those infuriating slide puzzles you got from the dentist as a kid. It’s not why you’re there, it’s not what you want to be doing, and it just makes you wish you could go back to the stuff that the game is good at—which is still very good! It’s not that a video game shouldn’t evolve five entries deep, but it’s a shame when evolution comes at the expense of existing strengths like it does here.