This was a Steam sale impulse buy, prompted by a realization that the most fun that I have in shooters is when I snipe the enemy with impunity from far, far away. I’d never played any game in this series before but a game with large levels, lots of long distance sniping and realistic ballistics sounds good to me. That it’s set during World War Two is a plus for me, with so new shooters going the high tech route.

Unfortunately, the story is crap. I mean, stories in games like this are usually pretty crappy but this is barely-bothering-to-give-a-damn level crap. It even includes the gratuitous death of a friend whom you care nothing about just to try to give it a bit more narrative weight. There are collectible journals that try to offer somehow akin to side stories as well but they’re not any better. It’s best to just forget about the story and treat the various levels as the personal playgrounds they’re meant to be.

The good news is that the levels are fairly generous in size and topographically quite interesting. There are lots of side paths, plenty of cover and quite a lot of thought has been put into sight-lines and so forth. You’ll actually end up sneaking behind enemies ninja-like to kill them with a knife or at close range with a silenced pistol just as often as you snipe them. In addition to regular enemy soldiers to contend with, there are also enemy snipers who can be just as sneaky as you are and enemy vehicles on the maps.

There are the usual set of game mechanics with a particular emphasis on stealth. The maps usually have enough enemies that you’re not really expected to be stealthy all of the time and if anything the game is far too forgiving. There are many, many ways to distract enemies and pull them out of position, sniping at them while using a loud noise to mask the sound of the shot means they’ll never find you and it’s very easy to simply relocate after each shot even if they do hear you. Provided you’re patient, the single-player campaign is a cinch unless you play in iron man mode.

Realistic ballistics mean that the game models bullet drop over distance and wind. Unless you’re playing at the very highest difficulty setting, you can activate a mode that involves holding your breath and focusing. This adds a special targeting recticle that helps you predict where your bullets will land. So in practice sniping isn’t that hard at anything short of Authentic difficulty. One feature that is apparently a trademark of this series is that successfully killing enemies this way turns on an x-ray kill-cam that is rather grisly. A feature I did like is being able to snipe the weak points of enemy vehicles. There’s nothing quite like stopping a tank by shooting its driver through his viewing slot.

Production values are just a shade shy of true AAA-quality. The biggest deficiency is probably the awful AI which makes the game even easier than it already is. Multiple enemies will sometimes stand in the same location, overlapping in the same space. After you’ve distracted an enemy and pulled him out of his normal position, he sometimes gets stuck and will just stand facing a wall doing nothing. In fact, the game is so easy that I’ve never used most of the equipment it gives me. There just doesn’t seem to be a need for things like trip wires, S-mines, or even your submachine gun. The most exciting moments are when you need to quickly snipe many, many enemies in a short time in order to cover allies but there are only a couple of moments like this in the campaign.

There are other game modes including competitive and cooperative multiplayer, a shooting range and a sort of king of the hill mode against endless waves of enemies. As per my habitual practice, I just stuck with the main campaign, though I will admit that I was really lousy at the shooting range. One frustration I have here is that while there is apparently a fair bit of customization that you can do with your sniper rifle, playing through the campaign will only unlock a very small proportion of the available parts. I can only guess that obtaining the rest means spending time in the other game modes. You can even use many more models of rifles in the other modes that aren’t present in the campaign.

Overall this is a solid game but it’s no instant classic or anything. Despite not really offering much of a challenge, there is a kind of fun in being the super-predator of the battlefield that no enemy can so much as scratch. It’ll make you wonder why militaries don’t just field a whole army of snipers. I will note that as much as this game pretends that it’s realistic, it in no way captures the complexity and mathematical reasoning that is required in real-life extreme distance sniping.