Sniper Elite 5 Review
In news that will make any Nazi with a nutsack feel nervous, the serial scrotum-sniping soldier, Karl Fairburne, is back on the hunt. Sniper Elite 5 shifts the series’ established blend of espionage and X-rayed executions to 1944 France, taking Fairburne deep behind enemy lines into another collection of surprisingly large-scale stealth sandboxes. Yet while welcome enhancements to controls, weapon customisation, and multiplayer features make Sniper Elite 5 by far and away the most flexible entry in the series to date, another forgettable story and some heavily recycled mission objectives made it seem more like sniper repeat than sniper elite by the time I reached the end of its 12-hour campaign.
The Sniper Elite series has always been more concerned with tracing the trajectory of its bullets than creating complex story arcs for its characters, and indeed this fifth mainline instalment is no different. This time around Fairburne is on a quest to uncover and thwart the Nazis’ top-secret Operation Kraken, assisted by yet another ragtag group of resistance fighters who exist simply to act woodenly and populate your list of objectives at the start of each mission. Drop in a cartoonish high-ranking Nazi antagonist and a series of predictable late-game dramatic turns, and you have a WWII story more straightforward than the scope on Fairburne's carbine.
Thankfully, while Sniper Elite 5's storyline might be staid, Fairburne himself has never been more nimble or as adventurous, making him more fun to control. While each stalk through a heavily guarded area inevitably starts out as a silent crouch-walk, the moment things go loud you are now capable of quickly mantling over low walls and through windows, gaining some distance with a
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