“The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.” – Leo Tolstoy

Ever wished you hit your bully from far and immediately ran away like a scared little baby that you are? Well, then this is the game for you. Sure, in this case, the bullies are Nazis and you are hitting them with a bullet from a rifle; but, you get the analogy.

Sniper Elite III is a third-person shooter video game by Rebellion Developments, released in 2014. It’s meant to be a prequel to its predecessor – Sniper Elite V2.  

This game has got the 3 classic elements of a Noel Fernandes game:

• It’s a stealthy, war game, so I’m not hurried and I can take all the time in the world to get the job done.
• I get to say badass things in a cool, husky voice after I shoot someone in the head.
• Regular saving – you know, just in case I die. It didn’t happen that often; 107 times is not that much.

Story

The story revolves OSS officer Karl Fishburne who fights for the Allied Forces in the North African conflict. They never introduce him by name, so if you haven’t played the previous installments like me, you would only know him by Desert Ghost. The story is set in 1942, during the heart World War 2.

The Ghost sets out in his task to assassinate high ranking German officers and gather intelligence along the way. We journey from Libya to Western Egypt to Tunisia in search main antagonist is General Franz Vahlen and his top-secret project.

The story is simple, yet holds your attention. The narration is clear and gives us insight on the why. The only argument I would have was that it was short and would have liked to see the story develop more. The game has 8 stages only. Each stage would take an hour or so to complete and on the face of it, it seems fair. However, the game requires you to do a lot of crouch-walking and waiting. So when you factor that in, the number of enemies are too few and the story leaves you wanting more. A gamer who has good accuracy and who doesn’t mind to get loud, could finish the whole game in no time.

Graphics

The character and vehicle design also seem to be well done. The landscapes are beautiful, particularly during the bullet transitions. They have paid attention to a lot of little details. The bullet transitions are sadly not flawless. It’s all good when the bullet is fired from the rifle. Its travel from the rifle to the target is also brilliant. The annoyance is when it enters the victim’s body. Don’t get me wrong, I love seeing the insides of your enemy getting messed up. However, the rendering on certain occasions results in the bullet killing the enemy by piercing thin air.

zozodj2 Note: Noel forgot to mention that he got to play at low on DirectX. The game supports Mantle which is the precursor to Vulkan and used as the base of Vulkan. The result is that those of you with AMD GPUs can push much harder (my frames went from 70 on medium with Direct X to 110 on Ultra with Mantle). 

Sound

There’s not much to say about the soundtracks here. It seems that they searched for ‘generic army tune’ and played it on loop. But anyway, in terms of the story, the soundtracks don’t really matter. The sound effects, on the other hand, are vital to gameplay and Sniper Elite III has done well here. From the sound effect, you can make out whether you’re being targeted by another sniper. It also allows you to judge if the sound you are making is loud enough for detection on not.

Gameplay

The gameplay is straightforward. But, there has to be a method rather than madness. Just like any other stealth game, more than the shooting, the greater challenge is avoiding detection. You are going to have to travel in the shadows, use cover, time your shots, use traps, and do all of that tiptoeing around the map.

You are dropped at a secure location at the beginning of each stage and you proceed to complete the objectives. That is why the map is your friend. Thankfully, the map doesn’t work like a GPS that moves you to your targeted position. It works like the ones that tourists carry around in their backpack and have to rely on their sound judgment on where they are where they want to be.

The shooting mechanism is pretty simple, especially for the machine gun and the pistol – just point and shoot. The rifle is a bit tricky though. If you are playing at the Cadet level, you simply shoot wherever your crosshair points. But as you playing at a higher difficulty, you have to consider wind speed and the type of gun you are using. Keeping your heart rate in check is necessary for your accuracy, but also necessary for getting a good amount of focus time. Focus time is basically an addition zoom that you receive based on how much air you have in your lung.

Ammunition and other tools are readily available. If not at ammo caches, you can always get them off of your enemies.

The gameplay is vastly different for those who play on the Cadet level versus the Sniper Elite or higher level. Besides the shooting mechanism explained above, the AI also varies as per difficulty. The enemies react quicker and get suspicious more easily at a higher level. However, I didn’t like one thing about the AI – there is a lot of continuity error. For example, the enemy sees the body of a soldier I killed, others get suspicious, I hide, they search for me – this is all fine. But after I diffuse the situation, everyone goes back to normal like there is nothing wrong, all whilst they are walking by the body of their fallen comrade. I would prefer it being like the Hitman games, where enemies are always suspicious wherever a body is found, even after the situation has been diffused.

The kill-cam is awesome but on occasions, overstays its welcome.

zozodj2’s Note: Noel has gone and completely overlooked a couple of point of gameplay.

The game also uses 3 key system to interact with the environment which is a god send for anyone who has had to press a key to kill a guy but ended up putting the lights out instead. So pay attention to the button prompts that tell you which key does what when you start the game and then you can start using your muscle memory.

You get a set of binoculars that you can use to tag enemies like in FarCry 3 and 4 and this comes in really useful when you want to avoid enemies since when they get tagged by the binoculars they get registered on the map and in the world as well.

Every time you get a kill you get experience points, the experience points vary according to how the kill was carried out and if the enemy was tagged earlier. Gaining enough experience points lets you level up which unlocks new stuff like like weapons, weapon modifications and more space to carry stuff which is a blessing in the later levels.

Note Ends.

Conclusion

The ability to watch the gruesome end of your opponent is perversely satisfying. You wouldn’t get much out of the story but the gameplay more than makes up for it, with is varying difficulty levels and really cool sceneries. So whether you are pushing yourself to hit the longest shot possible on every soldier or whether you are trying to get a precision shot on the enemy’s testicles, you will not be disappointed in this game.

Final Score: 8/10