Sniper Elite 5 is rooted in the past

polygon.com:

I am exactly halfway up the wall of an exorbitant chateau in rural France when my cover is blown.

As I hang suspended from vines that have outgrown their trellis, bullets pelt the area around me, punching concentrated holes in musty stone. Bizarrely, not a single slug connects with me until I have scaled the wall and entered the building, at which point I take a huge amount of damage from … somewhere? I take cover, stitch my wounds, and wait for things to calm down. Someone off screen with no line of sight on me sounds an alarm. I have no idea what is happening.

The above vignette is a perfect diorama of Sniper Elite 5, a third-person tactical shooter that is both helped and hindered by that chaos. It is, put plainly, a game that is equal parts tactile and coarse, tight and janky, clever and zany. This review would probably have constituted a shopping list of minor complaints had I not been lucid enough to constantly remind myself how much fun I was having.

For what it’s worth, I don’t rate that word: “fun.” It’s a near-useless descriptor that is usually lazy and imprecise, but in this specific instance, it’s the most accurate term I can possibly use.

Sniper Elite 5 is set in Nazi-occupied France toward the tail end of World War II. For all the gravitas this context should demand, Sniper instead insists on force-feeding you bombast. The contrast between being a ghillie in the mist and seeing an X-ray of your mark’s skull at the time of impact (think of Sam Raimi’s worst early-aughts impulses) is both immediate and unapologetic. Should a firefight break out, it will ironically be more akin to the messy, disorganized warfare of actual history than the hyper-refined tactics we have come to expect from contemporary war