Rebellion leans into historical authenticity with Sniper Elite 5, zooming in on what makes the sniper shooter great.
Sniper Elite 5 isn’t a radical reboot: the long-running World War 2 shooter again challenges you to snipe, shoot, and stealth your way to victory over the Nazis in a succession of open-world missions, set on large maps studded with hidden items and secondary objectives. As in Sniper Elite 4, it supports two-player drop-in/drop-out co-op play, along with 16-player adversarial multiplayer, and a three-person co-op multiplayer mode called Survival. Although, developer Rebellion is adding significant new features to its tried-and-tested blueprint. The most prominent new feature in Sniper Elite 5 will be familiar to any Dark Souls fans: if you’re playing the new Invasion mode, you can drop into another player’s campaign as an enemy sniper and indulge in some PvP action. Rebellion is using the same system for co-op play, too, so you can now request aid from another player if you find yourself stuck in the campaign – you can still play through an entire campaign with a co-op companion if you want. Another change that shows the drift of the series in recent years is that you now shift into first-person whenever aiming down a gun’s sights. Before, the only weapon that had that perspective was your trusty sniper rifle, with the rest of your armory sticking to third-person. There are many more ways to customize your weapons in Sniper Elite 5. Whenever you find workbenches in missions, you can spend resources to change most elements of your guns, such as magazines, sights, barrels, stocks, silencers, and ammo types. New traversal methods allow you to travel around missions in new ways, too. You can flank and surprise enemies in new ways thanks to the zip wires dotted around levels and climbable vines. Plus, Rebellion has somehow worked out how to make Sniper Elite’s trademark Killcam even more forensically lurid. You’re returning to the front as Karl Fairburne, the US Ranger uber-sniper from the previous games. Sniper Elite 5’s action takes place in France in 1944 – spanning events both before and after D-Day, Rebellion told us. The story opens with Fairburne on a mission to weaken the Atlantikwall fortifications along the Brittany coast in preparation for D-Day. Fairburne hooks up with the French Resistance, but the plot swiftly mushrooms when he encounters Sniper Elite 5’s main antagonist, Obergruppenfuhrer Abelard Moller, and digs up intel about secret project Operation Kraken. We don’t know a lot at this stage – how many missions comprise the single-player campaign, for example, or how long it might take you to play through them all. But Rebellion has redoubled its efforts to achieve authenticity, employing methods like photogrammetry to reconstruct real-world locations and working with partners like the Imperial War Museum to get things like weaponry, vehicles, and uniforms spot-on.
