Rebellion have taken pains to make the whole experience more even, but the real meat of the game is still the sniping.

There are odd moments where you’ll bounce out of cover for no apparent reason, but it’s a minor complaint. Movement is smoother and the animations more realistic, while the cover mechanic is better implemented. Karl has a much more balanced repertoire now, and is able to employ stealth effectively while holding his own in a firefight. The campaign isn’t as long as the last game, but it’s of considerably higher quality. It’s a massive improvement over the all-pervading blandness of V2, despite occasional glitches ruining the experience now and then, with hyperactive corpses and some extreme clipping being prime examples. The desert aesthetics are great on new-gen consoles, whether you’re squinting in the scorching sunshine, or lining up shots under the clear night sky. The change of setting is refreshing, especially as very few WW2 games spend any time in Africa at all.

The plot follows veteran sharpshooter Karl Fairburne as he guns his way through the North Africa Campaign of World War 2.

A new addition is the option to snipe vehicles and enjoy the same slow-mo X-Ray display, which is a real treat when you watch a bullet tear into an engine and ignite it in a fiery ball of righteous fascist death. It’s ridiculously OTT at times and, quite possibly, a wee bit childish. The XP system rewards you for hitting certain organs such as the heart, kidneys and gonads, and the sheer grotesque beauty of a super slow-mo X-Ray headshot has to be experienced to be believed. So it’s not much of a surprise that all anyone cared about when a sequel was announced (apart from the dropping of the V in the title), was whether or not Rebellion had improved on the kill-cam. Sure, the bits in between the actual sniping were utter pants and the AI was slightly less intelligent than a boiled egg, but the joy of executing a perfect shot and watching your bullet travel a hundred metres to punch, in slow motion and Mortal Kombat-style X-Ray vision, into your hapless target’s left eye was just wonderful. Case in point: the somewhat bonkers slow-motion Nazi kill-cam in Sniper Elite V2 might well be the best thing to happen to games since random loot, adding a level of gratuitous self-satisfaction that had never been seen before in a shooter. Who knew shooting Nazis in the nuts would be so much fun? You would think that, regardless of the game, shooting anyone in anything repeatedly would eventually lose its lustre, but Rebellion seem intent on proving us wrong.

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