“Military shooter” has kind of become a dirty term these days. It used to describe a very specific type of shooter, the kind without pig-aliens or cyberdemons. Nowadays, it often means “AAA twitch fest that everyone with a trigger finger and an IQ north of 40 plays”, though that's largely unfair in my opinion. Regardless, military based shooters have certainly come to feel analogous with Hollywood's blockbuster action films in terms of their pace and authenticity. But trends are there to be bucked and it seems developer Rebellion and their WWII era shooter, Sniper Elite V2 are eager to do the bucking. I had chance to sit down with Rebellion's Head of Creative, Tim Jones a few weeks back for a guided demo as well as some co-op action, and had a pretty good time exploding some Nazi heads.

So first, a bit of back story. You play as an elite U.S. Sniper named Karl Fairburne, who has been inserted into Berlin at the tail end of WWII. His mission: to either capture or kill Germany's V2 rocket scientists to keep them from either continuing to make breakthroughs for the Germans, or defecting to the Russians. And the coolest part of the whole mission is that it actually happened. The game is based on a real life directive issued by the Office of Strategic Services in 1945 called Operation Paperclip. Of course liberties have been taken with mission specifics and whatnot, but the fact that the scenario isn't merely a pie-in-the-sky concoction to give players another excuse to shoot Nazis is pretty refreshing. So even when things happen that clearly couldn't for the sake of making an entertaining video game, the ways in which the game remains true to reality give it a unique feel that separates it from your Modern Warfares and your Battlefields.

There's a lot more differentiating V2 from these titans however, not the least of which is the fact that it's played largely from a third person perspective. When it comes time to make with the sniping, you get a first person view, but everything else is handled in third. This ends up making a ton of sense since everything besides the shooting essentially plays out like a stealth action game. I was surprised how many good stealth mechanics were packed into a game about shooting. For instance, in one area a church bell would sound every so often and when it did, an indicator would pop up in the corner of the screen to let you know that if you shot at that moment, the sound would be effectively drowned out, keeping your presence a secret. Another sweet mechanic, straight from Splinter Cell: Conviction, was showing an on screen ghost of your character to indicate where alerted guards last saw you, allowing you to set effective traps or flank their position. Other stealth standbys like suppressed weapons, corner peeking, and hiding bodies all play a prominent role as well.

Of course at the end of the day, the game is called Sniper Elite and as such, parts of the game require you to be what many Modern Warfare players would technically categorize as a “filthy, camping noobsack”. While the reality of being an elite sniper is endless waiting and set up (read: boring) the game manages to get creative enough with it to keep it entertaining. The center point of this is the sniper “kill cam” that rewards particularly impressive shots with a cinematic, slow mo tracking shot following the bullet from barrel to brains, even giving an x-ray view of what a .30 caliber round does to a human skull. Despite the gore porn, it's actually a sophisticated system that takes wind, range, bullet weight, and elevation into account and the resultant effects on the enemy's anatomy are entirely physics based, not scripted.