This fortnight's Games with Gold title for the XBox360 is Sniper Elite V2, a sniper realism sim' which set during the Battle of Berlin, but with a different narrative.
[SPOILER ALERT]
The rough plot is that you play as an OSS officer, Karl Fairburne, who is inserted into Germany and tasked with eliminating 5 german V-2 ballistic missile scientists.
You travel to a number of locations destroying underground facilities, eliminating targets at long distance, even sniping and destroying a V-2 rocket prep'ed for launch, and eventually finish off killing the mastermind the day before the Cold War begins.
Overall I found the game enjoyable, immersive and generally fun to play. Judging the right distance for a shot and sometimes timing it with loud ambient noises to hide my gunshot became second nature and I was able to headshot practically and enemy with ease once I got into the swing of things.
The games true colours only came out when I played it through on Elite (Hard) difficulty, because not only did I have to compensate for gravity, but I also have to adjust for wind as well, which took a bit longer to get used to, but eventually I could hit any stationary target in 1 - 3 shots.
The game makes incredible and unfortunately quite excessive use of its "kill-cam" feature, where making a successful and worthy sniper rifler kill (what the game seemed to think was one), you would follow the bullet from your gun, all the way to your target where if you were precise enough it would engage an X-Ray view, showing you the damage dealt to the unlucky soldier.
Whole fun to watch, most of my shots were to the head, apart from the odd one or two that hit a lung, kidney, heart and even *shudder* a testicle..... Yup.... those shots made me cringe.
The areas you play in do have a nice feel to them, nooks and crannies to explore and authentic looking scenery (even if most of is is rubble) etc, however they are quite small, usually revolving around a single building.
Sniping is often performed around the 100m mark, meaning you will instinctively move to the first notch of your rifle and fire because you already know the distance on every soldier in the area. There are a few shots though, which are done at 300m from the target, which are pleasing to perform. [SPOILER] At the end of the game, the main villain tries to escape in a car and you have to climb to the top of a ruined monument to perform what I dubbed "the shot", because your character is totally out of breath from the running and climbing, which makes you scope sway all over the place. On Elite difficulty this shot was murder, taking me 7 shots with the Gewehr 43 rifle, hitting my target at just over 300m.
Some of the terrain was poorly set out. Bodies would sometimes merge into the ruins of a house and you would have to guess where they were to search them.
Soldiers would randomly walk over my trip mines and not trigger them. I'm note sure if they get a chance at being lucky or something but they would often set them off if they ran away and came back.
Dynamite is insanely powerful! In the first mission, if you clear all ground troops and place to two charges as directed, then make a line don't the street from the furthest charge, you can destroy the entire convoy in one go and just have to take out a tank and a handful of troops. The reason I don't like it is because further on in the game I set a trap where a land mine had some dynamite next to it. The dynamite went off from enemy gunfire and nearly killed me through a wall... in fact most explosives, even grenades, will hurt you through most walls in the game.
The game needed more Panzerfaust! 3 shots with one on a single level was pants... it only took one rocket to destroy a tank. the other 2 were spammed into a factory.
The PPSh is supposed to be the fastest firing gun with the least accuracy, but the russian troops were landing shots on me at 200m...!
The biggest thing that annoyed me was the visual range. Maps seem to be set up in sections, if you walk out of one into another it's corresponding enemies will appear and vice-versa. Sometimes I was taking shots from enemies weren't visible, other times I fell victim to soldier who could see directly bellow himself and shoot down at me through the wall he was behind.
HOWEVER! As I said at the beginning I enjoyed it for the 33 hours I played it for so far and can't wait to try Co-Op play on the campaign or specialised missions.
There haven't been many games out recently that I personally felt were immersive, I think the last games I played that had good immersive qualities were Metro: 2033 and Metro: Last Light.
I will admit a small bias towards games set in this era, I'm not entirely sure how to put it, but I enjoyed Wolfenstein, Commandos, watching the Tintin cartoons, kind of a "quick, we need to go to this country, but it will take X days by boat!" and the most common use for a plane was short distance travel.
Meh I'm rambling now......
Nicely made and fun to play, but needs bigger areas, more weapons and more fairer AI accuracy. 8/10
Also, a general update as to why I've been absent for so long will be up as soon-ish as possible!
