Theres more than one way to kill a fascist. My favorite method in Sniper Elite 4 is pretty vanillaa bullet through the helmet from very far awaybut I also enjoy using the occasional explosive barrel or net full of cargo (dropped on a head). Once I filled a neighborhood with mines, fired my rifle into the air three times, and ran away. Any fascists who werent turned into mist walked into my scope. This is easily the best game in the Sniper Elite series.

Theres no voice in your ear telling you what to do: Youre on your own against a map full of AI soldiers.

I havent been able to try Sniper Elite 4s multiplayer yet, so Im not committing to a final review right now, but I suspect the co-op and competitive modes will only make me like it more. I have played most of the campaign as of now, and its really good. The WW2 story about Allied subterfuge in fascist Italy is routine war game stuffthough I do like that I get to team up with Italian partisans and the mobbut the yappy cutscenes dont intrude on hours of skulking through complex maps with a Springfield rifle and a pocket full of tripwire.

Each mission drops you into a large mapthink Battlefield size or a bit largerwith tons of enemy soldiers, multiple primary objectives, and several secondary objectives. Your main tools are: A) a set of binoculars to tag enemies with, B) a sniper rifle, C) an SMG and pistol, and D) medkits, mines, and as many satchel bombs as you need.

Theres no voice in your ear telling you what to do: Youre on your own against a map full of AI soldiers, who are thankfully an improvement over Sniper Elite 3s buggy Nazis. I havent encountered a single noticeable bug in SE4 yet, even in the pre-release review build I was provided.

It's a game with gruesome slow-mo x-ray shots of organs exploding, including brains and balls, so I wouldnt expect to find sleep darts.

The enemies are still simple-minded, though. Take a shot and theyll hear it and take cover. Take another shot or two from the same location and its on: they know where you are and theyll open fire. But they dont have great eyesight. Run away without being respotted (a red ghost image of yourself shows you where they think you are) and hide for a minute and theyll feebly search for you and eventually return to their routines. Classic videogame enemies: they witness you shoot the spleens out of a hundred of their friends and then go back to strolling around and mumbling.

If you wait for sound coverplanes overhead, artillery fire, or malfunctioning generatorsyou can ghost snipe. I once plopped down in a bush and spent 20 minutes killing soldiers on a bridge, using the explosions from a railway gun to mask my shots. I enjoy camping, though opportunities to have a nice lie down are rare. Sniper Elite 4 would rather you pack up and relocate often, but it does give you more opportunities to snipe quietly than Sniper Elite 3 did thanks to small supplies of suppressed ammo you can carry.

You can also sneak into objective sites and use melee takedowns and suppressed pistol kills, but stealth in SE4 isnt quite as fun and playful as it is in similar games, namely Metal Gear Solid 5. Sneaking is slow and the gadgets are straightforward: rocks to toss, a whistle, and explosives. The complexity maxes out at luring enemies to a spotwith a corpse, or an explosion, or a tossed rockand blowing them up or shooting them when they get there. There are no cardboard boxes or nonlethal options. Granted, it is a game with gruesome slow-mo x-ray shots of organs exploding, including brains and balls, so I wouldnt expect to find sleep darts.

I can't help but think of the Crypt Keeper whenever this happens.

I started having more fun after I stopped striving for stealth perfection. Instead of how can I sneak in here and take out my target silently, the game has become how can I kill every fascist on this map?

One tactic Im fond of is to take a shot to make some noise, then circle around the alerted soldiers and embarrass them, shooting the backs of their heads while they look the wrong way. Or Ill fully play it as an action game. On one big, green section of the Italian countryside, for example, I decided that a certain hill was mine, and disregarded stealth altogether. I ran to one side, then the other, and then back again for I-dont-know-how-long, killing every soldier who tried to climb the hill and root me out. After that, I strolled up to formerly locked down objectives, satisfied by the knowledge that everyone who used to be guarding them was in a heap at the bottom of a hill.

Sniping is as simple or difficult as you want it to be. You can remove ballistics all togetherbullets always go where the crosshairs meetor include gravity and wind in the equation. Even with those influences turned on, letting out your breath slows time and produces a big red box that shows you where your bullet will go, so its still not hard to hit an eyeball. Bump up the difficulty to Hardcore, however, and its up to you to judge distance and wind.

Using the guide removes most of the challenge to aiming (its probably different using a controller) while having no guide requires intimate familiarity with a rifles bullet velocity, and is something Id only attempt on a second playthrough. It does feel markedly better to sink a shot without such direct help, though, so I wish there were a middle ground. Maybe the red box fades away after a moment? Its a tough thing to solve. I also wish the custom difficulty settings were more granular. I haven't found a way to remove the guide without playing in Hardcore mode, which removes a bunch of other HUD elements, such as the minimap and ammo counter. It's possible I'm missing something, so I'll keep trying different settings, but it isn't obvious.

Getting good enough to play without any UI help takes practice.

Another minor annoyance: Sniper Elite 4 tends to autosave in the middle of fights rather than during safe moments, and I've ended up reloading into near-death situations. Thankfully its possible to manually save whenever you want, which becomes a necessary discipline. The weapon progression isnt great either. So far Ive had no incentive to try guns other than my starting Springfield, which has better stats than any of the other rifles I could unlock thanks to upgrades Ive earned by using it. And before the games even out, there are multiple greyed out rifles marked DLC, which is disheartening.

Sniper Elite 4 runs great, though. The big levels take seconds to load on my SSD, it supports ultrawide resolutions, and outside of tiny graphical glitches Ive noticed during cut scenes, it looks sharp. The animations and environments lack much in the way of charactermost of it is best described as World War 2 videogame artbut the Italian hills and villas are pretty, and on my old Nvidia GTX Titan it runs at a comfortable 60-80 fps at 2560x1080.

Theres still a lot for me to play withthe entire campaign can be played in co-op, plus theres a co-op survival mode and competitive multiplayer modesbut Id be happy with Sniper Elite 4 if it were just the solo campaign. It's out on Tuesday, and I'll have a full review after I've done some sniping with friends.

Go here to read the rest:

Sniper Elite 4 review in progress - PC Gamer