World War II snipers and VR seem like an obvious combination. This is the peanut butter and jelly marriage of virtual reality. Sighting down a scope in VR with the extraneous battle going on all around you as you try to relax to take that one shot before the enemy gets you. It’s classic Enemy At The Gates stuff that translates perfectly to the idea of VR. And that’s what Rebellion thought in bringing us Sniper Elite VR, the latest entry in the long-running Sniper Elite franchise. We’ve previously taken a look at both Sniper Elite V2 Remastered here and Sniper Elite III Ultimate Edition here, so it’s high time we took our reviews virtual as well!
Sniper Elite VR focuses on the Italian resistance to the Axis, namely a survivor of WWII recalling his time with the Italian partisans (known in Italy as Resistenza italiana) during the war. He was trained as a sniper and followed his family into war to defend the homeland against both the Nazis and Mussolini. He narrates the story as you fill his shoes and take up his rifle through 18 stages of action, recalling the tense moments in each sortie, then leaving you to eliminate the fascist threat. It’s a poignant story with ups and downs and some excellent dialogue.
But plot isn’t the main reason anyone picks up a Sniper Elite game. Let’s be honest, these are games made for the people who only snipe enemies in games like Halo because it’s simply more fun. When it’s in a video game, it’s simply gloriously entertaining to take out a horde of enemies with carefully placed shots, slowly and methodically eliminating any and all resistance. And that’s what Sniper Elite VR is designed to do: throw you into the battle like you’ve never been before. You’re given a variety of weapons, but the main one is your trusty rifle. You’ll also get to spend some time with pistols, sub-machine guns, shotguns, and even the occasional rocket launcher. But most of the time, it’s just you and the scope, looking for the opportunity, focusing, and then letting fly right into the brainpan of a Nazi.
Naturally, the killcam that Sniper Elite is famous for is in full effect here, allowing you to follow the bullet to its mark like you’re riding it, then watching it in full-color x-ray while it penetrates the bones and organs of your enemies in slow motion. However, this is VR. Having the camera drag you blasting across the battlefield is a singularly unique experience but it’s also a bit intense when you’re surrounded on all sides visually, so Rebellion provided a handy menu option allowing you to adjust the frequency of killcam shots or simply turn the thing off. Speaking of options available, Sniper Elite VR is interesting because it allows for a wide variety of motion selections. You can play with free movement enabled like a traditional FPS or set teleport points to limit the amount of motion required in VR; a common solution to motion sickness. You can also adjust how the camera motion works, either enabling free look or changing to a snap turn of 15, 45, or even 90 degrees, which further limits extraneous motion. These options are good to have in any VR game due to the frequency of motion sickness in high-speed games, but in Sniper Elite, they’re essential.
Let’s get personal for a moment here. I’ve played a lot of VR on the PS4. Some games are tough due to the weird angles you have to bend at. Others are a bit nerve-wracking due to the vertigo-inducing heights that are simulated by the virtual scene. But I have never before experienced actual motion sickness and nausea in a VR game on the PS4 before. Until Sniper Elite VR. Now, keep in mind that I set the movement settings to maximum in every aspect on this game, just to test them out. And I was fine for the first 40 minutes or so. Then it felt like it was getting really warm in my basement. My VR headset started fogging up. I broke out into a sweat during stage 5 or 6. Then the nausea started and I was forced to rip the headset off mid-game and simply stop. I couldn’t look at a screen at all, and I legitimately thought I was going to throw up. The feeling took a couple hours to subside and I still felt weird the next morning. Never before have I been nervous to continue with a review either, but this time I definitely was, so the next day I went immediately to the menu settings and started tinkering with them to see what combination of changes I could make to avoid motion sickness. I turned off the kill cam, changed the snap camera to 15 degrees, and that seemed to fix most of the problems. There’s something about the combination of abrupt zooming cam follows for killcams, sighting into the sniper sight over and over again, and the strong screen shake from various explosions, often through your scope, that simply manages to overwhelm the senses. Maybe that’s a good thing, maybe not. But beware going in that this is an active, aggressive VR game that can turn even the strongest stomachs.
However, physical debilitation aside, there are some staggering issues with Sniper Elite VR, partly perhaps due to the PS4’s VR tech and partly simply due to design. At this point it is important to mention that the game was played with a Playstation 4 Aim controller. In fact, if you don’t have an Aim controller, simply don’t play Sniper Elite VR. Much like Farpoint, this is a game that’s designed around the Aim. While it is technically compatible with controller-based play, the angles that players have to hold their PS4 controllers at are so weird and uncomfortable that you’ll be hurting inside 15 minutes unless you’re a yoga instructor. In fact, while Farpoint is horrible to play with a regular controller, it’s still light-years ahead of the crazy Mr. Fantastic crap you have to attempt in order to even function in Sniper Elite VR. Anyway, back to the game.
First off is your gun. There damned well shouldn’t be any issue with your sniper rifle in a sniper game, but here we are. As you play through the levels, there’s a weird amount of drift in the gun. Literally standing still, the entire gun can shift up to 40 degrees one way or another for no reason at all. Suddenly, your gun is pointed at a weird angle and zooming in is nearly impossible. Holding down the option button on the Aim controller has no significant effect and the scope doesn’t work properly when this happens, fading out weirdly at the edges and forcing you to hold your controller at bizarre angles in order to make what should be straightforward shots. This issue is less prevalent with the SMG and other weapons, since you don’t need to zoom in and aiming is more of a spray-and-pray affair, but with the sniper rifle, it’s frequently difficult to line up shots. Pause the game and the Aim is shown virtually with a line to its intended target on the menu, and it lines up absolutely perfectly with no issues, making you want to physically attack whichever programmer is responsible for the dichotomy. That’s one problem.
Another is that Sniper Elite VR is really, really not intended for left-handed players (raises hand). Several of the rifles available to you have offset scopes that cant to the left hand side of the rifle, but you’re forced to hold the Aim controller like a traditional gun and your eye for sniping as a leftie is reversed, forcing you to hold the controller away at an angle to make shots that should be normal. This issue disappears with top-mounted scopes, but there are enough of the offset guns that it’s both noticeable and remarkably frustrating. And then there’s the actual gameplay. The Sniper Elite series has a decent AI usually but something is weirdly off about the one in Sniper Elite VR. On standard difficulty, even with crippling scope issues and weird virtual drift, it’s outrageously easy to just casually pick off target after target while standing in the exact same spot for everyone to see. You don’t even have to crouch most of the time, which is probably good since the crouch button only works intermittently for some reason. It’s unclear why that is, but crouch only activates sometimes and at others entirely fails to respond, even with barricades to hide behind at every turn. Getting to those barricades is a hassle too, because instead of a dedicated run button, you have to physically hold the thumbstick down to run, otherwise you’re essentially strolling with a walker through a warzone.
None of that really matters though, as enemies just can’t hit you. You can even run in with an SMG and literally blast everyone in sight, skipping past the tedious sneaking around portions of the game. It gets to the point in some areas where you can literally just ignore all on-screen warnings (if you have them active) and simply walk up to enemies, spraying them with bullets and waltzing to the next checkpoint. Even Wolfenstein 3D manages better than this. It’s such a bad AI that there’s really no challenge, almost as if the algorithm doesn’t compensate for basic tactics like full frontal assaults. So now we have a sniping game where the sniping doesn’t work well, the AI seems to be weirdly broken, and even basic motions don’t work well. This reflects pretty poorly on Rebellion, especially considering how incredibly good other games in the series are.
Visually, Sniper Elite VR gives you what you want. The killcam is brilliant, but hasn’t evolved from previous iterations and still looks mildly cartoonish rather than gruesomely realistic, the levels are constructed in a rather linear fashion, as would be expected for a VR title, and the Italian countryside is suitably detailed and interesting. The low resolution of the PSVR headset leaves more than a bit to be desired, of course, but for the visual capabilities, this is a decent looking game. We’re not talking triple A level visuals, but there’s no pop-up, no frame drops, and the overall design work is quite excellent. Oddly, some of the gun animations and movements are weirdly clunky though, something that you’d expect to have a much more significant level of polish in a game that’s literally all about the guns. Music is well-done but forgettable, fading into the ample battlefield and gunfire sounds that are standard for WWII games. The frenetic combat sounds as it should and the explosions and low-flying planes mix with the hum of bullets to create a symphony of death as is proper.
So now what you’re asking yourself is simply this. Is Sniper Elite VR good? And on the PS4 at least, it’s safe to say the answer is no. Perhaps there will be some patches that fix some of these issues, but for now at least, the venerable sniping franchise has failed miserably in this iteration. If your goal is to shoot some Nazis, sure you can do that, but it’s a struggle to. Sniper Elite VR is certainly not as fun as either previous entries in the series or indeed other types of VR games. It’s fantastic that Rebellion went out on a limb with this one and took a chance to make something new and exciting, but at the same time, the game feels rough around the edges with multiple issues on the PS4. This is a great idea with solid story-writing and piss-poor execution. If you’re dead set on playing a sniping game in VR and you only have a PS4, at least wait and see if Rebellion does some major patchwork to this one, because as it stands, there are some pretty hairy issues and at the end of the day, playing a game is supposed to be fun.
This review is based on a digital copy of Sniper Elite VR provided by the publisher. It was played on a PSVR V.2 unit with a Playstation 4 Pro and a Playstation Aim controller. Sniper Elite VR is also available for PC on the Oculus Rift. Due to the difficulties in playing this game, there were considerable challenges in taking decent screenshots and press shots are used in this review.