Sniper Elite: Resistance review: "Balances action and stealth with a level of success that very few games manage"

The only thing better than dropping a Nazi to the ground and knowing they'll never get back up, is dropping dozens or hundreds of Nazis to the ground and knowing they'll never get back up. That's what you'll be doing during your time with the Sniper Elite: Resistance campaign but, as ever, this is no simple shooting gallery. In fact, this game balances action and stealth with a level of success that very few games manage.

It's occupied France, 1944. The look and feel of the game will be immediately familiar to series fans but, this time, you're not playing as Karl Fairburne. This time, former supporting character Harry Hawker takes the spotlight. Or perhaps I should say 'arry 'awker, as his cockney accent is thick enough to style your hair with. Indeed, there's enough ham and cheese in the dialogue and delivery to give texture to an otherwise straightforward story, which serves as an ample backdrop to the hugely enjoyable act of blowing fascists away.

The first mission, the shortest and simplest of the nine (with the exception of the last, which is essentially an epilogue), is a great introduction to what to expect. One of the first things you see is a bridge in the distance, and wouldn't you know it; there are Nazis wandering around up there, and you have a sniper rifle. You don't have to try to take them out from such a great distance, but come on, you're at least going to try. I certainly did.

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Even if you're not familiar with the series, Sniper Elite: Resistance speaks a language that you're bound to understand. Long-distance sniping requires compensating for bullet drop and wind direction, crouching makes your footsteps quieter, tall grass hides you even though the top of your head is usually poking out, that kind of thing. Sniper may be in the title, but this isn't Camping Simulator, and you'll likely find yourself pulling out a pistol or SMG in a tight spot. Going back to that first mission, you're quickly introduced to the idea of Climbing Up Things on your way to the bridge. This becomes more important in later city levels, where clambering up a wall might offer a shortcut or access to some hidden kit.

Snipe for the picking

Each map has its objectives, both primary and secondary, spread across great distances. It's in your best interests therefore to stay hidden as much as possible, which is where climbing up to sneak through buildings and across rooftops comes in handy. It's disappointing that your opportunities to climb in this way are very limited, but to be honest, in many situations you'd just end up getting spotted if you hadn't already taken out nearby enemies anyway. A little more frustrating is the fact that some waist-high walls and fences can't be hopped over. Most can, but a small number can't, and you won't know which they are until you bash 'arry's knees against them while futilely hammering the mantle button.

Nonetheless, there's a lot to love about the core experience. There's a strong Hitman 3 vibe despite the lack of a disguise ability. In addition to the aforementioned stealth elements, enemies can also be lured and distracted, and you can even hide bodies. A few other familiar elements are present, but flipped in ways that will render tactics you might use in other stealth adventures ineffective.

If you enter combat, you're spotted, and/or an alarm is triggered, enemies will – as you'd expect – hunt for you if you manage to get out of sight. You just find somewhere to bravely hide until they call off the search, right? Well, you can do that here, and the 'investigation' will eventually end, but with a few caveats. Enemies will now be bolder and tend to move more erratically than you might be used to. That makes the risk of getting found higher. Also, once the all-clear is given, enemies don't usually wander off back to their previous posts like good little boys. If you attract attention and don't manage to clear soldiers out, you've now created an area that's much more dangerous. Perhaps you took out that guard after he spotted you, but now, there are six enemies where there was previously just one.

Silencers (usually only found on looted or hidden weapons with limited ammo) are present, and often a good idea to use. They reduce the sound of gunshots rather than eliminating it altogether, however, meaning you need to be sure there's nobody close enough to hear when you use them. Using an unsilenced rifle to take out an enemy sniper isn't a guaranteed way of getting caught, but you'll want to make sure you're far enough away, and not in line of sight of the keen-eyed enemies. The open world nature of the maps encourages you to think about where to go and how to get there, and ensures multiple playthroughs differ from one another.

Stealthy diet

I finished the campaign in a little under 10 hours on medium difficulty, but that was just the beginning of my time with Resistance. When I started over, kicking things up all the way to Authentic, it was the same game but a very different experience. No health or ammo on the HUD, no ability to tag enemies, no multiple zoom levels on the binoculars I rely on to carefully scope out the environment, and of course poor old 'arry was now much more fragile.

I found myself creeping forward more slowly; being less likely to pull out my loud but effective MP40 for short-range kills; picking my fights more carefully than ever, rather than indiscriminately scattering corpses across the ground like a child spilling a box of fascist lego. With the guardrails off, missions took at least twice as long, but I enjoyed every minute. Scoring a long-distance kill without the benefit of time slowing or a guide to where the bullet would land while using Empty Lung is immensely satisfying.

It's worth pointing out that although there are a handful of pre-baked and very well balanced difficulties, you can tweak the experience to your liking to a wonderful degree for a custom experience if you prefer. You can make sniping easier or harder, enemies more or less alert, and so on. You can also adjust the frequency of the signature X-ray cam (now activated for short-range and melee kills as well as sniping), or turn it off completely if you'd rather live completely in the moment.

New to the series here are the Propaganda challenges. Seven of the maps have a Resistance poster hidden somewhere, and should you manage to find and collect it, you'll unlock the associated challenge in its own little chunk of the map. The stealth challenges are particularly interesting. Instead of playing as Mr 'awker, you're a member of the Resistance armed with little more than a beret and a silenced pistol. You have 20 enemies and a time limit, with ghost kills (completely unnoticed, for the uninitiated) extending the timer, and high-value targets boosting your score multiplier. Time doesn't start until you get your first kill, meaning you have as much time as you like to explore and plan. The best scores are only achievable with a perfect combination of speed and stealth; it's a mode that seems ideal for co-op but, unlike the campaign, that's not an option.

The servers were pretty quiet prior to release, so I wasn't able to test the traditional PvP multiplayer modes or try out Survival alongside somebody else (playing solo, I found it a little frustrating, and the constant onslaught of alert enemies antithetical to the rest of the game). However, I was able to put some time into the returning Invasion mode, and this is where I see most of my time in Resistance being spent after release.

Fried reich

The premise is simple: invade a player's campaign, hunt them down, and kill them (allowing invasions is optional). Stealth suddenly becomes much more important for the defending player, as if they trigger an alarm, the invader will immediately have an idea of where they are. On top of that, if the defender is spotted by a soldier that's been tagged by the invader, their precise position at that moment will be identified.

'Invasion phones' are scattered across the map and, every few minutes, can be used by either player to mark the location of the other at the time. This avoids you wandering around for hours having no idea where one another are, but invasions can still be tense affairs for both players. That said, invaders who have played through the campaign themselves have something of an advantage. A knowledge of where the objectives are relative to your starting position usually gives you a good idea of where to start or where to lay traps.

You may be imagining long-range sniper battles, and I had one of those, but a game is much more likely to end at close range with an SMG or humiliating melee kill. Sometimes this will be preceded by a sneaky mine trap (which I've been on both ends of), a hail of bullets ending your attempt to self-revive. My finest moment so far is the long-range headshot I scored on a player who was in the process of leaping through a window, a detailed description of which is now at the top of my CV.

I'll still be going back to the campaign. There are collectibles I haven't found, insertion points I haven't unlocked, and still a few Nazis I haven't found to kill. It's not exactly a huge leap away from the last entry (in our Sniper Elite 5 review we called it "brilliant and brutal"), but what Resistance does, it does brilliantly. Should you feel the urge to wipe the world clean of fascists, and to do so with style, this is worth pulling the trigger on.

Want to continue being silent but deadly? We've got a list of the best stealth games with your name on it, as long as you keep quiet.