![]() You can do the whole lot in two player co-op as well. It really ties into the sandbox nature of the game’s campaign, letting you set traps, bait enemies, and just generally indulge in the types of tomfoolery that the stealth action genre allows for. Sure, there’s sniping and sneaking with a silenced Welrod pistol, but there’s also using grenades, tripwire traps and mines, each of which now has additional alternate uses, like making sticky grenades. Get over that little hurdle though, and you can appreciate the game’s major expansion of the series’ gameplay. The first time the game told me to press ‘A’ to jump across a gap, I instead pressed ‘B’ and dropped down to hang onto the ledge. There’s one initial hiccup if coming to the game from other consoles, as the control scheme will feel jumbled by Nintendo’s chosen ‘ABXY’ button layout. It also all performs very well, feeling practically locked to 30fps for me in handheld, and it taking a frame rate analysis tool to spot the rather slight frame pacing hiccups, and dips to the mid-20s when it’s all kicking off. Counting pixels, and I think that the game even tops out at 1080p when docked, albeit with low detail assets making it feel like a clear step down from the other consoles. ![]() Still, there’s effects like screen space reflections for the sea, and it will gleefully slather your screen with depth of field blur for X-Ray killcams. It takes about 4 minutes before the opening level reveals how close to the camera shadow detail drops off, before ungraciously shifting from high detail shadows straight to something that could be dropped into a pixel art game. You’ll notice the shimmering visual noise of all the aliasing as you aim down your sniper scope, and feel a flatness to a lot of the foliage as you sneak around the world. Of course, the Switch makes some very familiar tradeoffs in squeezing that down to size. ![]() It’s also by far the most colourful the series has been coming from the war torn and thoroughly grey Berlin of V2 and the desert setting of 3, the greens, yellows and autumnal reds of the grass, bushes and trees make a wonderful change of pace, as do the distinctive pastel colours of the villas and towns, with several of the levels basking in the warm Italian sun. San Celini Island feels like the testbed for everything that Rebellion wanted to do with this game, with a sprawling map that will take minutes to cross (if you’re taking care not to be caught by Nazis), and with five enemy officers as your prey, ambling about on patrol. Wait… it’s set in Italy? Well, I don’t have a good film reference for that…įrom the off, Sniper Elite 4 is quite staggering, thanks to one of the most emblematic opening levels I can think of in video game history. Sniper Elite 4, though? Surely that’s a bridge too far. Even Zombie Army Trilogy, with its muted and moody graphics, felt like a bit of a shoe in. The port of Sniper Elite V2 Remastered made sense, as a game that was a good seven years old by that point, and even Sniper Elite 3’s cross-gen origins allowed users to feel confident that it would run well, though would likely find itself caught between the generations in terms of visuals and performance. Now, somehow, it’s out on Nintendo Switch, continuing Rebellion’s love-in with the handheld console. It was a game that saw Rebellion throw off the shackles of the PS3 and Xbox 360 for the first time, letting them take the stealth action and sniping of the previous games and drop it into the biggest, broadest levels yet, each a small sandbox where you can meticulously pick your own path between objectives, avoiding patrols or taking them out, getting up to the vantage point to land the perfect shot and then move onto the next. I don’t think too many people will want to fight me if I say that Sniper Elite 4 is the best Sniper Elite.
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