The serpentine streets of war-torn France are impressively extensive, and explorable without the intrusion of loading screens.
Reduce the volume of Sniper Elite: Resistance’s tinny Casio-synth soundtrack and its nighttime levels soak you in a rich, noir atmosphere. The third mission in particular, in which you creep through an occupied dockyard under cover of darkness, is one of the game’s genuine highlights. You’re infiltrating a hotel on the far side of the river, which means inching along and around the streets of Paris in search of classified intelligence, Resistance cells and collaborators marked for death. It’s wonderfully immersive, and allows us to scratch the same Nazi-bashing itch as last year’s Indiana Jones And The Great Circle.
It’s a shame, then, that Resistance can’t produce such compelling hooks with nearly enough frequency. It doesn’t help that moments of tension are often undercut by the new, cud-chewing protagonist. Harry Hawker, a pound-shop Billy Butcher assigned to support the French Resistance and soften up the Nazis before the Normandy landings, can’t go ten seconds without barking something that’s equal parts smarmy and vaguely tutorialising – as if you wouldn’t be able to discern that an MP40 SMG is “bloody good for close quarters”.