While assessing Sniper Elite 5 two and a half years ago, we defended Rebellion against suggestions that they had “made the same game over and over”. Bluntly, that defense is no longer tenable. Sniper Elite: Resistance is very largely the same game as the Oxford-based studio’s previous effort and barely iterates on the series’ formula at all. As spinoffs go, this new entry is virtually the definition of “more of the same”. The sense of sameness is undeniable – but so too is the fact that Resistance is extremely good fun.
Since Sniper Elite III, Harry Hawker has been a fixture of the series as the character controlled by the second player in co-op play. The gruff British sharpshooter was even more bland and underdeveloped than the main star of the series, gruff German-American sharpshooter Karl Fairburne. This time around, ‘Arry has been redesigned and promoted to top billing. This is because Resistance occurs more or less simultaneously with Sniper Elite 5. It turns out that while Fairburne was destroying the Nazis’ dastardly Operation Kraken, Hawker was on a quest of his own, thwarting another scheme to scupper D-Day.
Breaking with series tradition, Resistance offers no new setting. Like Sniper Elite 5, it is set entirely in France in 1944. Hawker’s mission pits him against “Special Committee C”, a splinter group of Nazi fanatics who do not share Hitler’s reluctance to deploy chemical weapons on the battlefield. There are eight sizable new missions, and a brief coda. The effort on plot and cutscenes has been dialled back compared with the previous game, suggesting that this has been a smaller, leaner project for Rebellion.

As ever, Rebellion offer up some spectacular scenery and powerful vantage points in all modes
The missions are up to the studio’s sturdy standard. While there is nothing as memorable as the breakout “Spy Academy” mission in Sniper Elite 5, there are a number of locations which come fairly close. “Dead Drop” features a sprawling walled town, and “Lock, Stock and Barrels” consists of a vineyard which serves as the cover for a sinister underground facility. Hawker controls and operates in an identical way to Fairburne, and these new missions follow the exact formula of the previous game – and are every bit as entertaining.
The one notable new edition to Resistance is a part of the single player offering. In seven of the missions, a special French resistance poster can be obtained. For each of these that the player finds, a new challenge mission is unlocked. Termed “propaganda missions”, these are short vignettes focused on stealth kills, long-range sniping, or (in one case) open combat. The challenges are finely tuned and satisfyingly tricky, especially the stealth missions which are time-limited – only unobserved “ghost” kills add 30 precious seconds to the clock.
Resistance retains the whole of the suite of multiplayer options from Sniper Elite 5. As before, the best of these is the fantastic invasion mode. While Rebellion have added nothing to this – besides enabling it on the new missions – it is as gripping as ever. It is the invading player, taking on the role of an elite German Jäger sniper, who again has the advantage but both players can expect a supremely tense and satisfying experience. Lurking around the map, listening and looking out for any sign of the enemy’s presence, hugely heightens the thrill of these missions. Actually eliminating a rival sniper, whether by guile or brute force, feels brilliant.
By comparison, the 16-player competitive multiplayer mode is a bit less fulfilling. This too has been brought over from Sniper Elite 5, but plays out over variations on the Resistance single-player mission maps. While sniping focused “no cross” and both solo and team-based deathmatches have their moments and will retain a fanbase, they are rarely as compelling as the single-player missions, the co-op experience, or the invasion mode.

The threat of being hunted by a deadly player-controlled Jäger adds thrills to the campaign mode
Digital Foundry recently made the point that Rebellion’s own Asura engine is beginning to show its age. In the two and half years since Sniper Elite 5, the studio have made no significant graphical enhancements – at least none that are evident in Sniper Elite: Resistance. This is, however, a game which looks and sounds good, and is pleasingly scalable.
The business logic behind Sniper Elite: Resistance seems to make sense. This highly familiar, low-risk game has been developed in parallel with an altogether more ambitious and more perilous project – Rebellion’s all-new survival game Atomfall is due to launch in late March.
Those who had hoped for great strides from Rebellion with Sniper Elite: Resistance will be disappointed – this is strictly more of the same. Many fans of the series will be satisfied, however, because this spinoff is based on such a fundamentally solid and extremely fun template. Those who are at this moment in need of carefully designed sandboxes in which to stealthily smash the plans – and skulls – of fascists need look no further. One might hope, though, that Rebellion have more grandiose intentions for a surely inevitable next mainline game in their storied series.