’Sniper Elite 4’ Makes Fighting Nazis as Gruesomely Satisfying as It Should Be

Sniper Elite 4 is obsessed with ballistics. When I fire a bullet from my rifle, the camera cuts away from my viewpoint through the scope to follow it, the cylindrical lead spinning through the air as it careens inevitably toward its target. When the bullet arrives, its destination influenced realistically by wind and distance, the camera augments my perspective with X-ray vision: the target's skin peels away and I can see the bullet tear through flesh, cartillage, and bone. It's lavish, and disgusting, and perversely satisfying.

In Sniper Elite 4, the latest in a series of third-person shooting games by UK studio Rebellion Developments, you play as a stealthy sniper in Italy during World War II. You're a boring, gravel-voiced caricature whose abstracted stoic masculinity makes Charles Bronson seem like PewDiePie, but that doesn't matter; you've only got one job and being an interesting character ain't it. You shoot important Nazis. Then, for good measure, you shoot any other Nazis you happen to find, too. To break things up a bit, you might stab a Nazi or two. You know, for variety's sake.

The game designers at Rebellion have been at the Nazi-sniping business for a long time, and they're good at it. Sniper Elite 4 is a skillfully crafted little thing, albeit more workmanlike than virtuosic. Each mission takes place in a large environment thick with vertical spaces to traverse---towers and lookouts and open windows to serve as sniper nests and safe havens. Each of the game's eight missions gives you a series of targets and a set of guns, and you get to work. If you play the way the game intends you to play, it's a quiet experience about eighty percent of the time. You creep from place to place, surveying enemy formations in villas, on the coast, and in Nazi strongholds. When the time comes, you take position and fire.

The game's portrayal of sniping—and of violence in general—is attentive and loving, built with the same care and precision a devotee might spend on a model ship. You're asked to compensate for distance and wind direction, and the higher the difficulty level the more realistic and harsh those limitations become. You even have to reckon with the sound your shots make, and you're encouraged to create audible distractions to mask them.

In all of this, Sniper Elite 4 builds up an attitude toward its own violence that's fetishistic, even by the standards of action movie excess. A sniper rifle, after all, isn't a model ship. It's a weapon used to kill people. And the insistence on depicting the effects of a skillful shot on the human body is---well, it's the sort of thing I'm embarrassed to play in front of my wife.

For all these excesses, the game offers up a straightforward explanation. Listen, Sniper Elite 4 says. They're Nazis. The bad guys. It's okay.