11. Sniper Elite: Nazi Zombie Army 2

After the Nazi Zombies wreaked havoc in the first standalone expansion to Sniper Elite V2, who could guess they’d return for another around? Nazi Zombie Army 2 offers a new campaign with fresh locations and enemy types, and you’ll once again slay undead by the droves solo or with up to three other players. Don’t fix what isn’t broken, but when it feels more repetitive than its predecessor, you have to wonder if it’s really worth it. Nevertheless, it’s more maps for slaying zombies, which counts most for some.

10. Sniper Elite VR: Winter Warrior

Another follow-up that noticeably falls short of the original, Winter Warrior is developed by Just Add Water of Oddworld fame. Given how well the first title fared, you would expect the momentum to continue. A forgettable narrative and iffy controls later, and you realize that’s not the case. The sequel doesn’t even do enough to switch up the formula or spruce up the visuals. The gunplay is still on point, but there isn’t enough content to justify jumping in. A mixed bag overall.

9. Sniper Elite: Nazi Zombie Army

The original and Rebellion’s first attempt at a Left 4 Dead-style undead spinoff starring Karl Fairburne but set in an alternate universe World War 2. The shift from careful and methodical sniping and stealth to gunning down zombie hordes en masse is still a huge shift for the series. Nazi Zombie Army handles it well enough, combining the realistic gunplay and X-Ray Kill Cam with new kinds of threats and co-op. Though it won’t be competing with the best co-op zombie shooters in the genre, it’s a fun ol’ time, if nothing else.

8. Sniper Elite V2

The first sequel in the series, Sniper Elite V2 focuses on Fairburne attempting to stop the V-2 rocket program in Berlin (which explains why it didn’t get a simple “2” in its title). While it received some praise for the realistic ballistics, the AI was a mixed bag, alternating between competent and imbecilic. Respawning enemies and stealth were also points of contention, with sniping being the only aspect that resonated. That’s because Sniper Elite V2 introduced what would become a staple of the series for over a decade – the X-Ray Kill Cam, rewarding kills with a bloody showcase.

7. Zombie Army Trilogy

It’s a close tie between Sniper Elite V2 and Zombie Army Trilogy in quality. However, the latter wins out by not only remastering the first Nazi Zombie Army expansions but including a third campaign. You can play through them with up to four players, choosing from eight different characters (with Left 4 Dead 1 and 2’s cast joining later for an additional eight), and even adjusting the difficulty. The famed ballistics and X-Ray Kill Cam are also present alongside dismemberment, which adds a bit more strategy. It’s still pretty repetitive and lacks much of the series’ nuance, but it’s still good for mindless fun with friends.

6. Sniper Elite VR

The first Sniper Elite VR title and one that boasts a poor narrative with some strange gates stopping you from completing the last few missions. No autosaves, bugs, underwhelming melee combat – it’s almost hard to get on board. Where it excels is in the fine mix of arcade shooting and realistic ballistics. It’s also responsive enough to make racking up points with the most creative kills enjoyable. Still far from the best in the series, but a solid option for those who want a fun sniping title in VR.

6. Sniper Elite 3

After Sniper Elite V2 underwhelmed, Sniper Elite 3 came along and…marginally improved things (while flailing even more in other departments). Technically a prequel, it saw Fairburne venture to North Africa, with new desert locations to deal with. Unfortunately, the story wasn’t much to write home about, and the AI still had its failings. Where Sniper Elite 3 succeeded is in presenting larger more open levels for players to plan out a myriad of approaches.

Sabotaging generators to mask your shots with the sound, leveraging the revamped stealth to tactically take out threats, scrounging for weapon parts, setting up traps – it all felt so liberating (and, of course, the sniping was still on point). Add on improvements to the X-Ray Kill Cam to factor in organs and bone shattering, and on several gameplay levels, Sniper Elite 3 could be a fun time.

4. Sniper Elite 1

It’s somewhat ironic that one of the better games in the franchise is the one that started it all. Sniper Elite launched in 2005, and as far as sniping-focused titles were concerned, it was unlike anything else in the WW2 shooter space. The realistic depiction of ballistics, where factoring in things like the wind, felt fresh and challenging. Sure, you didn’t get the explosive viscera of the X-Ray Kill Cam, but it was still satisfying for a bullet to dramatically reach your target in slow motion. With all the other relatively new tactics, like using louder sounds to mask your shots, it’s no wonder it received attention despite some shortcomings.

3. Zombie Army 4: Dead War

Considering its predecessors, there may not have been many expectations from Zombie Army 4. Yet somehow, everything fell in place, from the campy campaign with its zombie sharks and zoo to the X-Ray Kill-Cam triggering off explosions and well-placed shots alike. Each character has extensive progression and some fun talents; the weaponry went above and beyond, straight-up embracing the elemental and bizarre new enemies debuted, including a zombie tank. Yes, it has overpriced DLC, and yes, the gameplay can still get repetitive, but it’s the series’ – and one of Sniper Elite’s – best offerings yet.

2. Sniper Elite 5

Sniper Elite 5 is not where the series’ truly started to take a turn and really come into its own with the sandbox-style levels and freedom of playstyles. It still excels in those regards, refining the realistic sniping we know and love while presenting some of the best levels in the series. There’s also Axis Invasion, a new mode where an enemy sniper can invade your game, leading to even more tense encounters. The key shortcomings of the series remained, but it felt like Sniper Elite finally carved its winning formula.

1. Sniper Elite 4

And it all truly began with Sniper Elite 4, which took the sandbox-like maps of Sniper Elite 3 and went even bigger. Fairburne was more agile than before, capable of clambering up structures to set up his shots. Night missions introduced new twists to the stealth formula and players were freer than ever to strategically take down enemies, go guns-blazing or take a completely silent approach. While it couldn’t overcome the series’ curse of middling story-telling and AI, Sniper Elite 4 achieved a new level, elevating it into something incredibly fun.

Agent 47 – Hitman Series

Enhanced speed, reflexes, strength and even a slight healing factor – Agent 47 possesses all of this and more, further supplemented by training in all forms of assassination. That includes sniping, as he can take down targets and vanish with barely any trace. Such is his overall infamy that he’s considered a legend in the ICA and will go to any lengths to kill a target.

Years later, a remaster no one asked for has arrived to bring the game to modern consoles, but not much has changed beyond some enhancements to the graphics. Sniper Elite V2 wasn’t very pretty to begin with, and although the upgrade to 4k and HDR is an improvement worth noting, it doesn’t magically improve the dated visuals in any drastic way. Dynamic lighting and improved particle effects are welcomed, and I noticed some hefty changes to the game’s character models. Still, the game is several years old, and it shows. Since the only other notable addition to the remastered version of Sniper Elite V2 is an average photo mode, it’s a shame the visuals aren’t more impressive to showcase players’ best moments.

"The game’s best feature is its primary one – sniping. There’s a lot of attention paid to this element of gameplay that works really well."

Beyond these traditional remaster improvements, Sniper Elite V2 is the exact same game it was seven years ago. Players are placed in the shoes of Lieutenant Karl Fairburne and given the task of running down and taking out German scientists before Russian operatives capture them. The setup is a run-of-the-mill WWII story switched up just enough to make the sniping gameplay logical, and our hero follows suit by being as generic as possible. Still, there’s enough intrigue here to propel players into the conflict and give them purpose for putting bullets through as many skulls as they can.

The game’s best feature is its primary one – sniping. There’s a lot of attention paid to this element of gameplay that works really well. My favorite detail is that the game ties your time-slowing ability to your heartrate. Running even short distances can raise it exceptionally high, and since slowing time is very important to lining up great shots, there’s a fun bit of risk and reward involved in managing the meter. Beyond that, you can expect to spend a lot of time adjusting for drop distance and wind as you line up perfect shots.

It can be a truly mathematical endeavor that makes you feel like a real sniper as you’re perched atop a crumbled building working out the specifics before taking pulling the trigger. And thanks to the aforementioned brutal and satisfying bullet cam, many of those shots will result in grotesque slow motion bullet entry. You don’t just get to watch the bullet penetrate and leave the body; the game will switch to x-ray vision to showcase the enemy’s insides and allow you to stare in awe as you explode various bone structures and organs. If you’ve got a weak stomach, Sniper Elite isn’t a franchise for you. But if you’re intrigued by watching a bullet enter a face and utterly decimate a person’s jaw bones into a thousand fragmented pieces, well, I think you may have found your game.

"You can take a shot and move to a new position to leave enemies searching for you, but because the AI is so irregular and varies from running right at you with reckless abandon to searching endlessly to no avail, there’s not much consistency to rely on."

The remainder of the game is a mixed bag of passable gameplay mechanics and downright awful ones. There’s the expected genre option of stealth killing via silenced pistols or melee, but Sniper Elite V2 gives you plenty of more unique ways to complete your objectives using various tools and a bit of creative thought. You can do things such as lay landmines and tripmines before luring your prey into them with a rock throw, take non-lethal shots at your enemies to lure others to their position, or shoot gas tanks on vehicles to leave chaos and death in your wake. And if all else fails, you’re given dynamite, grenades, and automatic weapons as backup for when things get hairy.

It’s a shame, however, that these backup mechanics undermine some of the best aspects of the sniper genre – true stealth. Sure, I understand that a sniper shot draws attention, but the loss of the element of surprise often turns the game into a traditional third-person shooter, especially during the second half of the game. Worse yet, the AI struggles to keep up with the game’s jump from deliberately-paced sniping experience to frantic shooting gallery. You can sometimes time your shots with background sounds, but the unpredictable enemy detection means that sometimes they hear them anyways and come charging at you. Hell, sometimes they just suddenly and randomly know precisely where you are without you so much as moving, making for some outrageously unfair and unexpected deaths by sheer numbers.

You can take a shot and move to a new position to leave enemies searching for you, but because the AI is so irregular and varies from running right at you with reckless abandon to searching endlessly to no avail, there’s not much consistency to rely on. More often than not, a few solid hits was all I’d get off before the enemies would begin to swarm me and prompt me to bring out my automatic weapon for a full on battle. These battles often hilariously devolved into me watching enemies stare directly at me as they shot a nearby wall over and over, and other times they’d run in literal circles searching for me as I stood in the wide open watching them. My favorite was how often they’d run to a spot and go prone facing a wall as I stood there in plain sight. Of course, when they weren’t being dumb, they came at me like bats out of hell and completely obliterated me.

"Solid sniping mechanics and gory bullet cam deaths are endlessly exciting, and I had a surprising amount of fun at times, but pushing through its 8-10 hour campaign comes with a lot of frustrations too."

This is made worse in the more straightforward corridor levels that basically demand you pull out that automatic gun and go in guns blazing against such capricious enemies. Don’t get me wrong – there’s nothing overtly bad about these segments, but in a game clearly designed to appeal to gamers who love sniping, it’s a bit of a letdown when you’re forced into small aisles and required to either use an SMG or use your sniper like a shotgun, even if the latter of is admittedly pretty cool and made me feel badass.

The various difficulties can sometimes make things even more frustrating. The easiest mode allows you to take quite a beating before going down, but the highest difficulty showcases the absolute worst in the AI and gameplay imbalances. If you’re unable to rapidly calculate for wind and drop distance precisely, you might as well be dead before you even fire a single bullet. Enemies will rain down on you and wipe the floor with your corpse before you can so much as think. It also removes some of the easier mode’s options like the very helpful aim assist and the ability to tag enemies to keep up with them. All of this adds up to unbalanced difficulty whichever way you swing things, further leaving Sniper Elite V2 feeling inadequate .

The later games in the Sniper Elite franchise have elevated the franchise to above average and made significant quality-of-life improvements to its core gameplay loop, so I’m let down that the developers didn’t take any of that into account when remastering the game that brought the series more mainstream. Plenty could have been done to make Sniper Elite V2 stand out, but all we’ve got here is the same clunky entry that we had in 2012. Solid sniping mechanics and gory bullet cam deaths are endlessly exciting, and I had a surprising amount of fun at times, but pushing through its 8-10 hour campaign comes with a lot of frustrations too.

This game was reviewed on the PlayStation 4.

Rebellion Developments recently announced that Sniper Elite V2 would be getting a remastered release on current consoles soon, and now, they’ve released a new trailer that gives a brief lowdown of all the enhancements and new features that are being added to the game, and lists seven reasons why players should upgrade to the remastered version.

These include enhanced visual and updates visuals tech including the likes of new post-processing effects, improved textures and geometry, and new lighting systems. There’s also eight new characters added to the game, while multiplayer modes also support up to 16 players per match (barring on the Switch, where the cap remains at 8). There’s also support for HDR, 60 frames per second frame rates, and 4K visuals (on the platforms that can support it).

There’s also a new photo mode, while all the content the game released following its original launch by way of DLC is also included in the remaster. Check out the video below to get more details on all this stuff.

Sniper Elite V2 Remastered is out on May 14 for the PS4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and PC. There’s a lot more to come barring this remaster though, with Sniper Elite 3 Ultimate also having been confirmed for a Switch release, and Rebellion also having teased Sniper Elite 5 and Sniper Elite VR.

Developer Rebellion recently released a new comparison trailer for the upcoming Sniper Elite V2 Remastered, pitting its visuals against the game’s original release. The trailer, notably, also confirms the game’s exact release date.

The original game, released in 2012 across various platforms, sees you take the role of an American Office of Strategic Solider (OSS) as he looks to capture or kill scientists involved in the German’s V-2 Rocket program during World War II. The third person stealth shooter puts you in a sniper’s shoes, therefore emphasizing a less direct approach to combat in favor of sniping and various other stealth methods, giving players multiple options for how to tackle certain areas and objectives.

You can see how the remastered version stacks up to the original in the trailer below. It will support 4K resolution and HDR on platforms that support them, and includes a new photo mode, seven new playable characters, and multiplayer expanded up to 16 players (8 on the Switch version). The game will release May 14^th of this year for the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Switch, and PC.

Microsoft’s Games With Gold service continues to roll on as Major Nelson announced the newest games arriving for Xbox Live Gold subscribers in February.

Xbox One players will be able to download #IDARB, an interesting indie arena competitive sports game wherein players must sink baskets with the power of jetpacks and other abilities. Despite its minimalist approach to visuals, #IDARB has a ton of content and variety, especially in its player characters, and is an absolute blast to play with friends.

For previous gen owners, Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons and Sniper Elite v2 will be on offer for the Xbox 360. The former is an adventure game where you control two siblings at once on a quest and will be available from February 1st to 15th. The latter is, well, a sniping FPS and will be available from February 16th to 28th.

What are your thoughts on February’s Games With Gold? Let us know in the comments.

City Interactive has announced that two gaming industry vets will be joining their team: Steve hart and Paul Robinson. Steve Hart is coming on as executive producer of CI Games. For the past five years he’s been working at Rebellion Games on titles such as Sniper Elite v2.

“This is a great opportunity to join an established company looking to cement its position as a serious player within the global Games Industry,” says Steve Hart, Executive Producer at CI Games. “CI Games vision, drive and determination to become a bona fide AAA developer should be applauded and having seen the likes of Enemy Front & Lords of the Fallen in production, these are exciting times for the company and I’m honored to be involved.”

Paul Robinson will go into CI Games as a member of the senior creative and design team. Robinson has worked on franchises such as Comanche, Aromored Fist, Full Spectrum Warrior, and Killzone to name a few.

“After more than two decades in game development in roles from AI programming, lead design, to game direction across a broad spectrum of genres, I am returning to my roots working on First Person Shooters with CI Games,” says Paul Robinson. “Enemy Front is an interesting and fresh take on World War 2 shooters and a perfect opportunity for me to use my experience in storytelling and game direction to ensure that the project realizes its full potential in those areas.”

Rebellion are working on a sequel to their successful Steam expansion/standalone shooter, Sniper Elite: Nazi Zombie Army. Sniper Elite: Nazi Zombie Army originated as sort of a DLC for Sniper Elite V2, and has since evolved into it’s own Sniper Elite sub-series.

The game will act as a direct sequel to its predecessor, following Karl Fairburn and his three friends in their fight to defeat the source of the zombie uprising deep in the heart of Berlin. Rebellion’s head of creative had this to say about the new campaign:

“We really wanted to heighten the demonic, nightmarish tones of the first game. The environments, the levels, the soundtrack all give a strong feeling of descent – each encounter, each level becoming progressively more hellish. Most importantly though, we’ve expanded the legions of Nazi undead with some really intimidating new enemies which we’ll reveal soon.”

Rebellion founder and CEO, Jason Kingsley spoke to the hugely positive reaction to Nazi Zombie Army from fans:

“It was amazing. At that point we hadn’t announced Sniper Elite 3. A lot of Sniper Elite V2 fans had been asking for 4-player co-op content, and we thought it would be a good test of our gameplay mechanics. So we thought ‘Why not?” and self-published it. What we got though was a breakout hit.

The co-op and the price put the game on the map, and suddenly we were at the top of the Steam charts. We had hundreds and hundreds of requests from YouTube channels wanting to do “Let’s Plays” and reviews, and the game just took off. When we had a second to breathe, we looked at the player data and it turns out most of them had never actually played another Sniper Elite game. We never knew it would tap into such a broad audience.”

He went on to comment on the possibility of a release across other gaming platforms:

“We have to admit, we underestimated the demand for the original game. All of sudden we had console gamers desperate for us to port the game to 360 and PS3, but without a publisher this just wasn’t feasible. We left a lot of Sniper Elite fans disappointed. They didn’t want to hear excuses from us, they just wanted to play it. As an independent, we’re obviously really excited about what we’re hearing from Sony and Microsoft when it comes to self publishing on PS4 and Xbox One. We think the series could be a great fit for them.”

According to the tweet from Miiverse the port version of Sniper Elite V2 for the Wii U is lacking online co-op play. The fans are not going be happy about this as this was one of the bigger draws of the game that players can actually play online with others and snipe their way through the main campaign’s story-line.

It is strange that the Wii U is getting such a bare-bone port due to the fact that other Wii U titles handle the online pretty well. I don’t know why would anyone buy a port that essentially doesn’t support any kind of online play whatsoever and what is the point of even releasing it to the consumers.

Let us know how you feel about the fact that Sniper Elite V2 is lacking co-op play on the Wii U in the comments below.

Check back on GamingBolt for more updates.

505 Games have announced that Sniper Elite V2 St Pierre DLC is now live on both the digital platforms from Sony and Microsoft.

They’ve sent a press release, and an interesting one at that, which mentions that there’s a counterattack coming form the western front. General Rodebrecht is out to stop you and you can’t let him win.

That’s why the DLC is called St Pierre because that’s where the general has been found according to the new intel and you have to track him down.

There are some new weapons in the DLC like Lee Enfield No 3 rifles and M1D Garand semi-automatic rifle.

It will be available on the PSN and Xbox Live today and will cost 400 MSP or $4.99. We reviewed the main game back in May, and gave it a decent score. Check it out here.

Tell us what you think in the comments section below.