At one point I fired at a German rifleman in my usual panic-stricken way and as the bullet entered his body in painful slow-motion it ruptured each kidney, passing from one to the other as leisurely as if it were going for a swim. I was visibly wincing at the damage I was doing to these soldiers. This feature is as grotesque and troubling as it is fascinating. But only when you make a particularly ‘skilful’ shot. This kill cam makes a return, only this time it will also include an x-ray image of your round tearing through the target’s body in a very graphic way, rupturing organs and shattering bone before it pops out the other side.
The original game featured a kill cam which tracked the bullet’s path and showed the impact on your target in slow motion. So I think the idea is to show people what sniper rifles feel like and hopefully inform their gameplay a little bit in terms of how they’re playing it and what a gun actually does.”Īnd what a gun actually does in Sniper Elite V2 is this: it makes a horrid mess. The idea that you don’t just charge down the street and shoot the crap out of people – because you’ll be killed. “It’s very important that people understand about the ‘observe, plan and then execute’. “One of the issues I think for us is that we want people to play the game like a sniper,” he says.
And it’s one of the reasons they brought us out here to shoot real guns in the first place. Jason Kingsley, CEO of developer Rebellion, says this is all part of the plan. Of course, it takes me a couple of deaths to realise just how stealthy the game wants you to be.
At heart, it’s a game full of stealth-based missions with lots of patient creeping about, usually followed by a bullet-heavy, explosive finale. The idea is to retain the ‘sniper simulation’ feel of the first Sniper Elite but also to give it pretty graphics and a few stylistic additions. Rather than being an out-and-out sequel, Sniper Elite V2 is a remake of the original game, set in Berlin during the closing days of the war. While the first batch of journos were escorted out to the firing range, the rest of us got a go on the actual game, which I can confirm also has sniper rifles and will now finally talk about at length. I think this joke was intended to put everyone at ease. This included a joke about ‘stealing your watch’ while ‘your bleeding cadaver’ is loaded into the boot of his car (license plate: SN1P3R) in the event of an accident. But even then the reality of the situation didn’t kick in until the firearms instructor started to give his idiosyncratic safety briefing. My first clue that this was not a normal farmhouse was when I went into the bathroom and saw more military boots and camo jackets than bars of soap.
Yet here I was in some remote farmhouse waiting to be handed a loaded Springfield M1-something-something. Did you know I have a recurring nightmare in which I am shot in the head by an unknown assailant – and, in one instance, by Daniel Day-Lewis? Well, I do. It’s not that I hate men with real guns it’s just that I prefer them to be very far away. I had accepted RPS’ mission to go out to the countryside and shoot WWII sniper rifles with complete strangers, despite harbouring very straightforward phobias of both bullets and dying of bullets. Being taken to an undisclosed location and surrounded by men chatting idly about firearms is something more associated with hostage situations than press events.