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Sniper Elite: Resistance

Sniper Elite: Resistance

The Nazis must be dealt with again, this time in Sniper Elite: Resistance. The grotesque kill-cams are back and they never disappoint - but what about the rest of the game?

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The Sniper Elite series from Rebellion has gained a large and loyal following over the years and it seems that the series has hit on something that fans want. It's quite likely that Sniper Elite: Resistance will be as successful as its predecessors, as it is very similar to the previous games and in no way revolutionises the series. However, I'm not sure I need Sniper Elite to go through a big "let's shake things up" exercise either, because it works just fine as it is. That said, it's all starting to feel a bit thin.

Sniper Elite: Resistance

Sniper Elite: Resistance is the latest game in the series and this time it features British sniper Harry Hawker in the lead. Fans of the series will recognise him from his time as a secondary protagonist in previous titles and here he is thrown deep behind enemy lines in occupied France in spring 1944. Alongside the proud French Resistance, he must take on the Germans and uncover a new and dangerous "Wunderwaffe" that is supposedly so revolutionary that D-Day itself is in danger.

Sniper Elite: Resistance contains just under two handfuls of very large and open-ended missions. They're all really well designed and you'll go through everything from a bombed-out French village, a large hotel turned into a Nazi headquarters, to huge Nazi castles, laboratories deep down in underground bunkers, and a French winery that makes much more than wine.

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The game follows the same open design as Sniper Elite 5 and, much like Hitman, you can choose to complete missions in many different ways. You can let your sniper rifle do the talking, but you can also choose to be stealthy and let your silenced pistol be your primary weapon. You can even get downright personal and sneak up on the enemy and assassinate them with your knife. Or maybe a combination of all three - it's entirely up to the player and as always, it works pretty well.

Sniper Elite: Resistance
Sniper Elite: Resistance

The missions evolve along the way, with different sub-objectives popping up as you gather intelligence or listen to German soldiers talking to each other. Alongside the overall objective of a given mission, you can choose to go after, for example, a high-ranking member of the SS located somewhere on the map and you can look for various classified documents, files from the resistance, or personal letters from some of the characters that the mission is about. If you want to find it all and are playing on one of the higher difficulty levels, some of the missions can take upwards of three hours to complete.

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The most entertaining part is still sitting at the top of a church tower under the cover of the loud ringing of church bells, picking off one enemy after another. Your sniper rifle is just as effective as it ever was and depending on the difficulty level you play on, you have to take into account the wind and weather and how your target moves (you have to shoot slightly ahead of the target to hit it), and you also have to consider that your bullet will lose altitude on its way to the target.

Sniper Elite: Resistance

A successful kill over several hundred metres is, as always, rewarded with the familiar and brutal kill cam. Here you follow your projectile in slow motion through the air and when it hits the enemy, you see how it shatters femurs, a spine, or skull and how the internal organs are torn apart, depending on where you hit. And now you're probably wondering if you can still shoot Nazis in the testicles; and yes, you can. So there you have it.

The campaign can be played either alone or side-by-side with a friend in co-op. In addition to the campaign, there are various multiplayer modes such as Team Match (two teams of up to eight players), Squad Match (four teams of up to four players) and the excellent No Cross game mode is back. No Cross is a kind of Team Deathmatch where teams are separated by a piece of no man's land that no one can cross, so the focus is solely on killing each other from a distance without worrying about being overrun by approaching enemies.

Sniper Elite: Resistance
Sniper Elite: ResistanceSniper Elite: Resistance

You can also invade other players' campaigns as the dreaded sniper Jäger and make it harder for the other player to complete the campaign mission. Survival is a kind of horde mode and in the new Propaganda Challenges, which are unlocked by finding propaganda posters during the campaign, you get to play as members of the Resistance in a number of challenges. Overall, the multiplayer portion of Sniper Elite: Resistance is quite nice and entertaining in smaller portions, but there are no major improvements over the previous games - and for me, Sniper Elite is a single player, or co-op, game, but it's good that the relatively many multiplayer modes are there for those who want to spend time on them.

Because Sniper Elite: Resistance is so closely modelled to the previous games, some of those games' weaknesses are still present in Resistance. This is most evident around the artificial intelligence. The enemy's ability to see the player can range from non-existent to almost superhuman, and the latter is especially frustrating. Sometimes it seems like the enemy is able to see through walls and that they have the wildest eagle vision, as they can spot you from the strangest angles and over very long distances. Other times they can step on top of the corpse of one of their mates without realising it, so the AI is very uneven and it affects the gameplay. Especially in stealth games, where a lot of the experience is tied up in how enemies react and how you can manipulate them, the AI is very important and Sniper Elite still hasn't quite got that part right.

Sniper Elite: ResistanceSniper Elite: Resistance

The visuals in Sniper Elite: Resistance are, again, exactly as you would expect if you look back at the previous games. Technically, the graphics are on the simple side, as lights, shadows, and surfaces are not on par with most other games here in 2025, but the simple visuals are offset by a really good design and some very, as mentioned at the beginning, well-designed and large levels. However, there are some issues with surfaces not always loading fast enough, you can sometimes walk through walls, NPCs walk through each other, you can get stuck in your surroundings, and enemies can fall through the world when killed. However, this should be fixed in a patch shortly before release, Rebellion has promised us.

So, how do you summarise this game? Sniper Elite: Resistance feels a lot like the previous games - and that's not necessarily a problem. I'm sure it will strike a chord with the now large and loyal following that the Sniper Elite series has - and I'm one of them. Resistance has been tweaked here and there, but I hope Rebellion will soon, maybe not shake things up because it probably doesn't need it, but will try to take a few more chances with the series and fix some of the weaker elements, such as the artificial intelligence that has plagued the series for as long as I can remember. That said, it works, but it does feel a little bit thin after this many years of the same formula.

Sniper Elite: Resistance

Sniper Elite: Resistance is not a game for everyone, but very much a game for fans of the series. You need a good amount of patience and the desire to sit for several minutes and scrutinise your surroundings through your binoculars, spotting enemies and planning a battle plan. There are plenty of opportunities to be a real sniper by adjusting the difficulty level, especially on the higher difficulty levels it requires both finesse and creativity to survive, and it's great that you have the opportunity to be so creative in completing the various missions.

However, the artificial intelligence of the enemies is still a problem that can ruin the experience in some places. That said, it's still strangely satisfying to hit your target from hundreds of metres away and the cool and slightly grotesque kill-cam makes it even more enjoyable. Sniper Elite: Resistance is exactly what you expect a Sniper Elite game to be and it's good and familiar comfort food for connoisseurs of the series.

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Sniper Elite: Resistance
07 Gamereactor UK
7 / 10
+
Really good level design. Great feeling when sniping. Many hours of gameplay are hidden in the large levels.
-
Simple visuals. Uneven AI. Some graphical errors and bugs. Formula is wearing a bit thin by now. Fairly predictable story.
overall score
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REVIEW. Written by Palle Havshøi-Jensen

The Nazis must be dealt with again, this time in Sniper Elite: Resistance. The grotesque kill-cams are back and they never disappoint - but what about the rest of the game?



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