Sniper Elite 5

I pulled up the co-op lobby on a Friday night, sent my friend a code, and within two minutes we were coordinating flanking shots on unsuspecting Nazis in occupied France. That is, frankly, the fastest path to a good time this game offers, and it delivers. Sniper Elite 5 is a third-person stealth-action game set across nine large sandbox missions in 1944 France, built around the satisfaction of patient, mechanical sniping, bullet drop, wind, heart rate, sound masking, and subsonic rounds all factor in at higher difficulties. Drop the difficulty down and those physics get dialled back into something far more arcade, so the learning curve is genuinely adjustable. New to this entry is a traversal system that lets you zip-line out of hot positions, shimmy along ledges, and climb vines to reach sniper nests the previous games could only dream of. The sandbox design takes clear cues from Hitman-style level structure: each map has primary and secondary objectives, multiple approach paths, and a post-mission performance graph that shows you how stealthy or loud you played. It rewards replays. The multiplayer suite is the real reason to talk about this one with friends, though. The headline feature is Invasion Mode, a Dark Souls-inspired mechanic where another real player can drop into your campaign as an Axis Jager sniper, use AI soldiers to hunt you down, and turn your quiet mission into a cat-and-mouse standoff. You can locate them using in-level phones, and camping too long will get you punished by the game itself. It is tense, optional (toggle it off if you just want to focus), and genuinely one of the more creative PvP ideas in recent action games. Beyond that, the full campaign supports two-player online co-op where you can share ammo, call out targets, and heal each other. For larger groups, Survival Mode handles up to four players defending against enemy waves, think Gears of War Horde with bolt-actions. Competitive PvP goes up to 8v8. The bad news for couch co-op fans: there is no split-screen. All multiplayer is online only, so the Saturday night group will need to be on their own machines. The singleplayer campaign has some friction worth flagging. The story around Karl Fairburne and Operation Kraken is functional at best and aggressively forgettable at worst, reviewers across the board called it background noise, and they are not wrong. Enemy AI has inconsistencies too: patrols can reset suspiciously fast after you hide, and enemies occasionally get stuck in cover and just wait for a knife. On lower difficulties this turns the game into a gallery shoot, which some players will love and purists will hate. Map traversal on foot can feel slow given how large the levels are, since you cannot commandeer any of the vehicles on the map. Close-quarters combat with the SMG and pistol works but feels noticeably clunkier than the long-range sniping it is built around. The X-ray kill cam remains the series calling card and it still lands every single time, now extended to pistol shots, melee, and landmine kills too. For newcomers, the accessibility options are solid: colorblind modes, difficulty sliders for individual mechanics, and the option to completely remove bullet-drop simulation. Veterans who want to dial everything to authentic will find enough depth in loadout customisation, weapon attachments, and self-imposed ghost runs to get real mileage out of the nine missions. The 84% Very Positive Steam score on nearly 30,000 reviews and a Metacritic of 79 both reflect a game that does what it sets out to do without dramatically reinventing itself. Crossplay support means your friends on other platforms can join your PC session without friction.

Riley · Scout Team

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