![]() ![]() The enemies are pretty smart, sometimes frustratingly so. The gameplay provides a decent challenge. Everyone: Fighting the Germans (and the Russians) With that said, the plot is not too memorable, and acts mainly as a means for you to pretend you’re playing for something more than the headshots. The story takes place over a few days in one city, but the time of day and locations range from the city square in the afternoon to a decrepit church at night, and the experience is quite varied overall. This isn’t necessarily to the detriment of the gameplay though. You’ll face the same types of objectives as you play through the story: infiltrate the location, place explosives to detonate remotely, kill the target, and so on. You’ll often clear out the enemies guarding a location from a distance, and then venture inside where they’re lurking around every corner. The game usually manages to strike a nice balance between close quarters stealth and longer ranged sniping. Hundreds of infantry, dozens of snipers, and a handful of tanks will fall prey to your trigger finger. You will be surprised at just how much firepower the enemy will use in an attempt to stop just one pesky US sniper though. ![]() It would be nice to have a friendly voice around sometimes, and I will certainly be persuading one of my friends to join me. There is a war going on after all, and it seems a little odd (especially since we know who won) that there seems to be no one else around fighting on your side. I imagine this is why they threw the ability to play through the campaign with a friend online as a spotter-sniper team, along with a few other co-op modes. While it is thoroughly invigorating to take out a tank with your sniper rifle by hitting the cap of the fuel tank, or to finish off an entire group of enemies from a distance without being spotted, it does get a little lonely at times when the action is low. You are truly a one man army, and it’s up to you to be your own sniper, spotter, and backup team. They don’t want it badly enough to send you in with some assistance however. Your mission isn’t just to kill the bad guys you’re crippling what remains of German forces while also trying to keep the Russians from getting their hands on German scientists who have intimate details of the V2 rocket program - intel that America wants for themselves. Don’t let that deter you too much though the story itself is a little different from what you might expect, thanks to an added Cold War twist. That’s right, like the first Sniper Elite, it is yet another game set during what is possibly the most overused historical period in the history of the genre. In the campaign, you take on the role of Karl Farlsburg, an OSS officer deployed to Berlin during the final days of World War Two. So when I played through the demo of Sniper Elite V2 on PS3 for the first time, I knew right away that I had to have it. I’m talking about stealthy, tactical, “one shot, one kill”, one man (or in my case, girl) army, invisible threat kind of sniping. I don’t mean the camping at the back of the base, guarding my precious kill/death while my teammates go for the objective kind of sniping. Off TV play is also here, but that doesn’t make up for the fact that the heart and soul of the V2 experience is simply absent.This will probably get my name put on a government watchlist somewhere, but I really love sniping. The team has added some Gamepad features such as weapon and item swapping along with the quintessential map, but that isn’t enough. We know the Wii U has a decent online infrastructure the system also has enough power to render the game, so why remove one of the key features in what could have been the definitive version? If that isn’t enough, the fact that this is labeled at full retail price on store shelves is nearly a slap in the face. Co-op was one of V2’s strongest bullet points, and to see it removed from a version released over a year after its source material is baffling. The co-op mode is also absent from this version, as well as any sign of online play at all. ![]() The campaign, as I mentioned, is still here, but players have to take it alone. How did it not make it into this version? This is perplexing on so many levels considering there is a version of the original game with that content packed in. For the most part, that experience still remains on the Wii U minus any of the DLC. It even had DLC that allowed players to pin down, and eventually take out the infamous Hitler in a cool alternate universe type spin-off. The original Sniper Elite V2’s campaign was a solid, if not flawed romp through the eyes of a sharpshooter during World War II. ![]()
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