It’s almost shocking to realise that Sniper Elite as a series has been around for 20 years this October. Between the main series and its zombies themed spin-offs, which I’m sure were not at all inspired by Call of Duty, the new entry Sniper Elite: Resistance makes for a total of 12 games in the series. Which is insane to think about when you consider there are 7 years between the first two games in the series. Sniper Elite has always been in the World War 2 time period, fighting back against the axis and giving it’s own take on major events. Resistance is no different, this time featuring Harry Harker as the main protagonist. Resistance takes place in 1944 France in the build up to the 6th of June, 1944. 

Sniper Elite: Resistance is split up into a handful of sections for you to enjoy. The campaign, Propaganda Mode, Axis Invasion, Survival, and Multiplayer. As it’s the mode with probably the least to talk about, let’s start with the multiplayer, just to get it out of the way. The game is called  Sniper Elite so you can probably guess the multiplayer involves a lot of trying to avoid your enemies, and sniping them. This is something I’ll touch on more momentarily, but if you intend to play the multiplayer, I would highly suggest getting used to “Authentic” difficulty first. It will help a whole lot. As for Survival, it’s your pretty standard horde mode with enemies rushing you round by round until you win, nothing crazy going on.

Sometimes this game can be damn pretty.

So, the other three modes are semi-connected. With that said, let’s talk about the campaign. I honestly had a lot of fun with the campaign this time around. While I had fun with the past couple Sniper Elite games, I usually fell out of interest with the campaign part way through then it was either “I’ll come back to this later” or “how quickly do I think I could rush this?” neither of which happened this time around. One spot I will say the game definitely lacked though is map variety. Everything felt very similar throughout, when there are only 7 full missions, one half mission, and one not-really-a-mission mission, there would be room for a little bit more variety to go into each map.

Through the campaign there are a handful of things you can do in each of the 7 full missions. Each of these have 3 stars to earn for doing the side objectives, killing a certain enemy, and completing the mission. On top of these, there are a lot of collectibles to find, snipe distance medals to achieve, and even the target has a specific “kill them this way” usually to unlock a new gun or something along those lines. This is one of those spots where issues start creeping in. Sniper Elite: Resistance is far from a perfect game, and there are a lot of spots that make this glaringly obvious. The first one I’ll bring up is this specific kill list task, in the mission “Lock Stock, and Barrel.” Basically, the reward is for killing the target with poison, now it turns out that this is glitched. While you can pick up the poison, and see the target’s cup glowing to show you should interact with it, you can’t actually put the poison in the cup. That makes this kill list, at this exact time, impossible to complete.

Believe it or not, this guy couldn’t see me here somehow..

The thing is, this isn’t the only kind of major glitch in the game. The other REALLY big one that has caused me a lot of problems is enemies falling through the floor. Now, that should be great, right? One less enemy to deal with. Except for one major problem, it then means they can see you and shoot you through every surface. You also can’t shoot them, no that would just be silly! Instead, you need to run like a maniac, hoping not to trigger more enemies, to get far enough away to lose aggro. This happened on a few different maps and led to at least a couple restarts because it’s almost impossible to lose enemy aggro when that happens.

Flying through the sky, not a care in the world, no one is gonna stop me now!

Going back to the collectibles, one of the modes, the Propaganda Mode, is directly tied to finding propaganda posters throughout the campaign to even play. These are score based mini missions that task you with doing things a certain way, whether it’s stealth, sniping, or a straight up combat mission, your goal is to complete them as effectively as possible. These missions are fun, but can be frustrating to complete with three stars (getting a certain amount of points). They also reuse portions of the campaign, but give them a little twist, like a holiday party happening in the streets for instance.

Lastly, the Axis Invasion. If you enjoy being a nuisance to people, you can easily sink hours into this mode without even realising. In Axis Invasion, you join the other side and invade someone’s campaign. Think of it like an invader in Dark Souls, or Elden Ring, your goal is purely to eliminate the enemy sniper. While in this mode, the host is able to call in to see your approximate location. You will be able to do the same thing to the host, but it gives away your location when you do this, making it a bit more risk vs reward. One somewhat complaint I have with this mode is the fact that you’re a sniper, but the game will punish you for waiting for the enemy to poke their head out. I get it, no one wants to sit around waiting 3 hours to finish a mission, but again, we’re meant to be snipers.

Easily the worst collectible to find, this campfire..

In terms of comparing this to Sniper Elite 5, the last game in the main/non-VR part of the series, I wouldn’t say there is much improvement. This very much feels like a continuation of that game. The sound effects of the weapons and everything else feel very similar, while the music may have a bit more French inspiration, it loops quite quickly. The mansion in the aforementioned “Lock, Stock, and Barrel” mission feels very similar to one I remember seeing quite early in Sniper Elite 5 as well. With the amount of content put into this game, and how much feels reused, it does feel like you get a bit shortchanged calling this a full retail game. As much fun as the game itself is, there’s just a bit of magic in the actual map construction and overall polish that isn’t there all the way through.

Overall, while there’s a decent amount of content in Sniper Elite: Resistance, it feels like an upscaled DLC that didn’t exactly need to be released as its own separate game. On that note though, it was released as it’s own game and still features the best campaign of the series that I’ve played. The lack of map variety means the maps that are there are utilised to their fullest extent throughout the campaign, which is nice to see. The biggest issue overall are the glitches, which in time can be fixed at least, but at this time made the game a little more frustrating than it needed to be.

Sniper Elite: Resistance is available now on PS5, Xbox Series S/X and PC.

Reviewed on Xbox Series X and on PC with an i7-12700k, RTX 3060, and 16gb RAM.

A copy of Sniper Elite: Resistance was provided by the publisher.