Sniper Elite: Resistance review - unexpectedly compelling and moreish

As befits a game which is all about hiding in long grass and taking out enemies from unfeasible distances, Rebellion’s Sniper Elite franchise has remained firmly below the radar, even while quietly amassing a large and enthusiastic following.

With its overarching WWII comic-book vibe, underpinned by impressively rigorous, finely fettled third-person shooting and enemy AI, it has always offered super-seductive gameplay without exactly challenging one’s intellectual boundaries which, I’d contend, places it in guilty pleasure territory.

It's less than two years since the last major iteration, Sniper Elite 5, released, so I guess you could describe Sniper Elite: Resistance as Sniper Elite 5.5. Resistance, as you might imagine, cleaves very closely to the well-established franchise blueprint – once again, you’re essentially a one-man army, in the form of an SOE operative, cutting a swathe through masses of Nazis behind enemy lines in World War II, employing stealth via brutal takedowns and ninja sniping skills, backed up by a lurid but immensely satisfying x-ray killcam that shows your bullets penetrating enemies’ specific internal organs.

A new protagonist

But Sniper Elite: Resistance does offer some differentiation from its predecessors. For a start, it puts you in control of a different character, giving series protagonist Karl Fairburne a rest. This time around, the fate of the war rests on the broad shoulders of Harry Hawker, like Fairburne an SOE agent. To be frank, I found playing Hawker almost indistinguishable from playing Fairburne – they both have the same moves and skills. Hawker is a tad grittier and more working-class, however, with a trace of Cockney in his accent.

Story-wise, Sniper Elite: Resistance is set in a very specific time-frame and location: specifically France, in the lead-up to D-Day. The SOE has got wind of something which could put a serious spanner in D-Day’s works: a super-weapon being developed by Nazi boffins designed to wipe out any Allied invasion force, wherever it may land, elaborate misdirection notwithstanding.

Long, involving missions

That story plays out over seven, satisfyingly large and detailed, missions, along with a prologue and an epilogue. All of which are set in France, but across a variety of settings that take in rural idylls such as a vineyard and a picturesque dam, along with several meticulously recreated urban environments. Sniper Elite: Resistance uses Rebellion’s long-established in-house Asura engine which, as can be expected, impresses even more than it did in Sniper Elite 5. (Read our guide to the best game development software for comparisons to Asura.)

Asura has always been particularly good at generating impressive-looking environments, and sure enough, the ones I found in Sniper Elite: Resistance were uniformly stunning, with notably fine texture work, convincing water and so on. Lighting also seemed to be a notch improved compared to Sniper Elite 5, especially indoors – at one point, I found an operational film projector and felt compelled to walk in front of it for a bit of shadowplay.

I played Resistance on Xbox Series X, on which it looked extremely crisp and convincing, although the cut-scenes (admittedly pretty few and far between), which took a more comic book-influenced visual approach, felt a tiny bit incongruous compared to the bucolic 1940s scenery on display elsewhere. But even that visual discontinuity merely served to emphasise Sniper elite’s curious mix of comic-book sensibilities and period rigour.

Gameplay-wise, Sniper Elite: Resistance will offer few surprises to anyone who has played any of the previous games. It’s hard, and you have to make maximum use of Harry Hawker’s myriad skills, along with his ever-growing arsenal. Hawker has three guns – a pistol, a submachine-gun and his trusty sniper rifle – backed up with things like mines, grenades, decoys and bottles for misdirecting enemies and a whistle for attracting them closer for takedowns.

As I progressed through the missions, I acquired more exotic forms of ammo, such as explosive rounds and subsonic bullets which complemented silenced weaponry. Workbenches let me upgrade all my weapons, and being able to equip a silenced submachine-gun as well as the standard silenced pistol proved particularly handy.

Comforting gameplay

Playing Sniper Elite: Resistance was something like pulling on a comfy sweater: I found the act of plotting my way through serried ranks of Nazis infinitely comforting. As in Sniper Elite 5, all of Resistance’s missions are long and involving, with multiple main objectives along with plenty of hidden ones: extensive exploration was the order of the day, and after completing the campaign, I returned to many missions in search of maxing out the rating given at the end of each one.

That offered plenty of replay value, but there’s a lot more of that offered by different elements of the game. Some of which are familiar: Invasion mode, in which you invade other players’ campaigns as an Axis sniper and they invade yours, is back – you can switch it off or make it invite-only. And you can play the campaign co-operatively with someone else.

Propaganda mode

But Sniper Elite: Resistance has a new mode which I greatly enjoyed. Entitled Propaganda, and unlocked by finding French Resistance propaganda posters in the missions, it offers short but intense blasts of action focusing on one particular form of gameplay. There are three types: sniping, stealth and frontline combat. Each session is time-limited, but you can earn extra time by, for example, pulling off headshots when sniping or explosive-kills in combat.

The one problem with Propaganda mode was that it could be tricky to find the unlocking posters (providing another reason to revisit the campaign missions), but it provided a great change of pace, distilling the gameplay from the long missions down to short high-octane bursts that also enabled me to hone specific skills.

Factor in all those elements and Sniper Elite: Resistance amounts to a pretty meaty package which lacks very little in comparison with a full franchise-iteration release. As with its predecessors, it’s a joy to play – the realistic AI that powers its Nazi enemies means that you really have to employ both skill and strategy to prosper. Plus it looks great – noticeably better than the already impressive Sniper Elite 5 – and its storyline, while fictional, still comes across as convincing, and adds plenty of jeopardy that plays into the gameplay.

It is, of course, by no means the sort of must-buy blockbuster that gamers will have been talking about for months. But in common with previous Sniper Elite instalments, it’s a game that you will find unexpectedly compelling and moreish should you take the plunge and play it.

Sniper Elite: Resistance will delight the existing Sniper Elite fanbase, and should, in truth, impress any discerning aficionados of third-person shooters in general. If, given recent events, you’re growing tired of griping about wannabe Nazis, why not work off your frustrations by killing a load of digitally recreated ones?

Sniper Elite: Resistance - verdict

A visual upgrade on Sniper Elite 5, a new game mode that offers immediate fun and an engaging new campaign, Sniper Elite: Resistance is always fun but rarely reinvents the gameplay set by the series.