Despite cranking out solid arcade experiences, after several similar sequels, it's time for Sniper Elite to go in a bold new direction.
I’ve enjoyed Sniper Elite’s steadfast devotion to shooting Nazis between the eyeballs or in the groin for years, but I’ve also found the series frustrating for nearly as long. From the original game in 2005 to the release of V2 in 2012, which put in place the formula for the four sequels and two VR games we have had since then, the experience hasn’t really changed much.
Sniper Elite: Resistance is no different, and my frustration has only grown after playing it. Dare we ask for more than shooting Nazis again, in the same ways, after 10 years? Each game has added new side modes or expanded progression, but tinkering around the edges has only diluted the series’ core focus with each new release. After Resistance, it’s time developer Rebellion looked to its older assassination brother Hitman to radically reform its flagship series.
Sniper Elite is rooted in its depiction of the many fronts of World War 2 conflicts, from the barren deserts of Northern Africa to the rural villages of France. Despite offering up new theatres of war with almost every game, the mission designs and setups are almost universally dull. Each game almost always tasks players with moving through a location to find some intel or kill a specific target. You might have an extra objective along the way, like destroying a train in a station, but few campaign missions take advantage of the unique opportunities sniping offers or put you in inventive scenarios or situations.
This leads to every game feeling virtually identical, and if you asked me to name a mission from Sniper Elite that was memorable, I couldn’t give you an answer. Sure, the sniping’s still great. But that’s not enough in 2025! This is a problem virtually every other singleplayer, level-based shooter has figured out by now, from Call of Duty to Hitman.
The former has at least one or two missions in every game that take place in a location I haven’t seen before in a shooter. Hitman, especially with the recent World of Assassination Trilogy, gives players the flexibility to approach assassinations or objectives in a multitude of ways. Each mission is a complex moving simulation to analyze, unravel, and exploit. Sniper Elite mostly consists of meandering through buildings and streets, picking off enemies one by one until you reach your goal.
While I’m not looking for Sniper Elite to directly copy the action-packed setpieces of Call of Duty or the exotic locations on offer in Hitman, I do believe there is room to inject Sniper Elite’s core experience with more unique mission design, inspired by Hitman’s move towards a more reactive, player-driven philosophy.
Small tweaks, like having to discover who your target is through obtaining clues from dialogue and interrogations organically, rather than following objective markers, would be a strong start. But more importantly, Hitman’s purpose built levels are full of situations far more interesting than “another warzone.” Having to assassinate someone from the top of a hill in the midst of a wedding or a family birthday party, where the stakes are higher and you have to avoid killing civilians, forms the foundation for creating a more memorable shooter. IO Interactive’s focus on making its levels reactive means your decisions affect how NPCs and other characters behave, forcing you to adjust your strategy on the spot. In Sniper Elite right now, its a cat-and-mouse game of waiting until the enemies stop looking for you in a bush or building.
Imagine Sniper Elite missions where hurricanes or sandstorms sweep in during the middle of it, affecting your visibility and shot accuracy, forcing you to change your approach on the fly. The basic mission structure is just begging for more Hitman-style reactivity: For example, the more intel or information you find on Nazi plans in a level, the more it could amplify the enemy reinforcements in the next mission as they realise their information has been stolen over the course of the campaign.
This could make the game harder to stealth your way through in return for knowing the location of key loot, weapons, or gear that could give you the upper hand. Going a step further, you can add civilians into the mix who may provide you with information or details of Nazi movements.
I may be spitballing untenable design ideas here, but Sniper Elite’s premise is just such a good fit for intricate, complex gameplay mechanics. The series is feeling closer to extinction the longer it refuses to evolve. Hitman felt like it was going the way of the dodo before becoming a stealth trilogy masterpiece. Necessity breeds innovation, and Resistance really feels like that point for Sniper Elite.
I’d gladly trade away some of Sniper Elite’s side modes for missions that are complex and interesting enough to compel me to replay them like Hitman levels. Right now, the only incentives you have to actually replay missions, use the new weapons you get and start at different entrances in the level are to complete some meaningless challenges or obtain some collectibles.
On top of its campaign, Resistance has a returning PvP multiplayer mode, a wave-based Survival mode, Elden Ring-like player invasions, and a new Propaganda mode that is effectively Call of Duty-like Spec Ops missions with a time limit.
Propaganda mode is especially bewildering because it takes a chunk of a campaign mission map, sticks a bunch of enemies in it, and asks you to kill all of them before a timer hits zero. It is completely antithetical to the core methodical sniping the series is built off of. None of these modes stand out – they feel like bolted-on multiplayer modes from the 2000s that were forgotten about after a week or two.
Sniper Elite isn’t going to attract new audiences with thin side activities or yet another set of missions that look the same as the last set.. While it doesn’t have to have the flexibility and player creativity Hitman offers, Sniper Elite needs some kind of unique selling point in 2025. Right now it doesn’t have one.
If channeling Hitman isn’t the way, maybe it’s heightening the intense survival experience of sniping instead. Give players a limited number of bullets, so they can only kill a handful of people each mission. Weather, like rain, could dramatically affect visibility, forcing you to clean your scope in exchange for masking shots more, allowing you to get closer to your target.
Sniper Elite’s only real competition, Sniper Ghost Warrior, seems to have been slowly abandoned as CI Games saw success with Lords of the Fallen. This means Sniper Elite is the big player left in this space, and if the series wants to thrive, it needs to adapt beyond its base form that it has recycled for so many years now. If it doesn’t, someone else will come along and snipe the trophy right out of its hands.
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