3.5/5 Stars

When it comes to video games, sniping is one of my least favorite things to do. Sitting in one spot, waiting forever for an enemy to appear, then shooting right over their heads was a more than common occurrence when I had control. However, with Rebellion’s newest game, “Sniper Elite 4,” there are a lot of choices and accessibility to make sniping more than just a chore, but a viable option.

You play as Karl Fairburne, an OSS sniper who has been sent to the Italian island of San Celini to take out numerous Nazi officials. Each level has you dropping into wide open areas ranging from the sunny countryside to snowy mountains where you will be sneaking into Nazi bases or villages that have been taken over to complete objectives.

The game shines brightest with its stealth and sniping gameplay. Each provides feedback and tools that give you the feeling of being a complete killing machine, but for those who wish to go it their own way, a lot of the assists can be turned off. The run-and-gun gameplay lacks a lot of the tightness that comes from the sniping and I found it easier to reload my save than deal with the clunkiness of trying to machine gun the enemies.

The game is at its best when you are left to use all your stealth and snipe abilities at your discretion. You also have access to different tools and explosives that make setting up encounters like Rube Goldberg machines just waiting to be triggered.

Those coming to the game for a robust story will be pretty disappointed. The story is boilerplate at best and the voicework drew me out of most scenes because of how disjointed it was. I did find myself having more of a personal story with the open-world and all the things you can engage with.

When you first start out, the game presents so many systems it is overwhelming, to the point that a general player might be turned off by it. I would have wished for a more streamlined system or at least not dumping it on the player from the start, maybe just presenting more and more challenges as the game came out.

Graphically the game is superb, running at a smooth frame rate on the standard Playstation 4. The only frame rate drops occur when a lot of explosions happen on screen, then it drops to a pretty choppy level.

Along with a single-player campaign, the game has cooperative and competitive modes. You will see a lot of the modes you find in other shooters, but with the added twists like the “No Cross” mode, which has players fighting it out with a barrier separating the two teams. The only issue is there are not a lot of people playing the more unique modes in the game, and sometimes it can take a while to find a full lobby for any of the modes.

“Sniper Elite 4” is a captivating stealth-sniping game worth checking out if you are a fan of that genre, however it severely lacks in the story and character side. I would recommend it for those who like playing an open-world game as they listen to a podcast or watch television, with the additional bonus of exploding Nazi testicles.

*A review code for this game was provided by Wonacott Communications*