Man, I am not cut out for espionage infiltration. At the end of my 3 hours I have still not completed the first mission after the prologue/tutorial. I've failed this mission several times, in a row even, because I seem to be unable to properly assess and exploit the advantages I have against the patrolling soldiers.
The prologue is fairly straightforward: You're sent in to hold a city that is under siege by German soldiers that you have to take out, then move into the mountain as you make your way out to a mortar encampment that's in the process of sieging the town you were in. What I find simple and satisfying about this is that in the outpost, most of the Germans are preoccupied with running their mortar guns and you can pick them off brew by crew without worrying that someone might creep up behind you.
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| Maybe it's the fact that this is an active battle rather than an infiltration, or that I'm not just fighting on my own that makes this mission easier than the next one. |
The first mission is much more challenging: You are tasked with infiltrating a German base to hunt for and collect some information about an officer who has been sent there on special assignment. Here you have to sneak around guards who are patrolling or stationed about in strategic locations that can be very inconvenient at times. There are no large artillery pieces being actively used drawing their attention and/or drowning out other sounds, instead you're given some gasoline-powered generators that can be made unstable and will start knocking from time to time and can be used as aural cover but those are few and far between.
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| This is from the first vantage point in the mission. There are five people I need to take out, two of which are on patrol and there's a sixth guy up in the tower that I forgot to tag before I took the screenshot. |
This is why I say I'm not cut out for espionage infiltration, there are not enough "gimme" situations for me to effectively accomplish the mission goals while remaining unnoticed. The only strategy I've come up with so far is to slowly work my way from one end of the map to the other killing everyone along the way like a slow wave of creeping death. This takes a long time, and stops being effective about halfway through the mission when I come across a more largely-populated section of the camp where everyone is in plain sight of at leas two other people at any given time.
The gameplay itself is very solid. When not sighting down the sniper scope the game handles like your typical third-person shooter, movement is smooth, camera control is pretty tight, though some of the use keys are a little awkward to reach with your left hand on the WASD keys. For example, looting a corpse requires holding the "Z" key which is down and to the right from your ring finger on the "A" key and is the closest finger to use; speaking as someone who does not touch-type, pressing the key isn't that difficult but holding it is what becomes uncomfortable. You hold the right mouse button down to use the Iron-Sights on your alternate guns which isn't difficult now that that's become typical of 3rd-person shooters. The big draw of this series, though, is of course the titular Sniper rifle. I don't recall if V2 had a customizable loadout system but SE3 does, and it gives a lot of modification options to the rifle: beyond the base model, you can swap out the stock, trigger, scope, and barrel and each will have benefits and detriments to the rifle's overall stats like scope wobble, muzzle velocity, recoil, and damage. So you weigh each piece against the others like comparing armor pieces in Diablo until you're satisfied.
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| You can have up to four loadouts saved so you can play with various gun combinations. |
Using the rifle has its own set of things to keep in mind: your heartbeat becomes very important as a relative measure of your body's calmness and you can't effectively shoot if it's too high; you can also focus by emptying your lungs much like that one scene in
Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows when everyone is escaping from the munitions factory and the camera is speed-ramping all over the place--there's a close up of Moriarty's sniper guy while he prepares to take an important shot and the film is very careful to let you hear him exhale in a controlled and deliberate manner just as he pulls the trigger--anyway, you do that in this game to get a better shot because a new targeting reticle shows up in the scope showing how much bullet drop you'll have due to gravity over the distance between you and your target that you would otherwise have had to guess at and probably miss.
Also, the game takes the trajectory of your shot and if it will pierce an organ you get a special slow-mo X-ray cutscene of the bullet travelling its entire distance from your gun to your target and then entering their body wherever and going through. It's somewhat realistic, and somewhat mired in movie tropes. Everyone's body snaps backwards, like their spine is a spring under tension that's released the moment your bullet hits them, which has been a movie trope for decades. The more realistic part is the difference between entrance and exit wounds in the X-ray parts of the cutscene, like one time I shot a guy through the back of his head and the bones of his entire face just came apart in the X-ray.
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| We follow the bullet from the beginning of the shot... |
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| ... to the end of the shot. What's really interesting is that the "X-ray view" follows in a nearly fixed radius around the bullet as it approaches your target. |
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| There are even dramatic slow-mo pans around the vehicles as they explode when you detonate the gas tank. |
Overall, I would recommend this game. It is not Sniper Scope, but I don't know that much else could or should be trying to be Sniper Scope. It's very slow and deliberate, you can't go running in guns blazing and hope to survive; you're very much just as fragile and human as the people you are fighting so you have to be very careful about how to handle yourself. I would also recommend getting the Season Pass because having many of the DLC weapons available when you start the game for the first time is very nice. The game + Season Pass package has been discounted to 75% off for the last 3 Steam Sales, so I expect it will continue to do so in the future. At $12.50 I think it's a really good deal.
