You’d think that blasting bullets into a Nazi’s nutsack would be a thrill that never gets old, but somehow Sniper Elite: Resistance has made shooting SS scumbags squarely in their Swasticles start to seem a little stale. This side story spin-off introduces a new trigger-pulling protagonist and seven sizeable sandboxes to sneak through, all wrapped up in a 10-hour long quest to seek and destroy yet another top secret Nazi superweapon. However, the actual process of infiltrating Axis bases and eradicating the fascist foes within them doesn’t feel all that different to how it did in 2022’s Sniper Elite 5. With no noticeable gameplay improvements, new enemy types, or gamechanging weapon upgrades to speak of, Sniper Elite: Resistance is an unambitious clash with the Third Reich that feels decidedly second-rate.
In some ways it makes sense that Resistance hasn’t advanced beyond Sniper Elite 5, because the events of its story take place at the same time as those of the previous game. Running in parallel with Sniper Elite 5’s Operation Kraken, Resistance’s campaign focuses on thwarting the development of the ‘Kleine Blume’, a deadly nerve agent that those naughty Nazis intend to inflict on the Allies. What follows is a disappointingly familiar procession of breaking into Nazi bunkers to take reconnaissance snaps of blueprints, satchel-charging AA guns to create safe passage for Allied aircraft, and sabotaging machinery in large scale weapons factories to hinder Hitler’s evil expansion plans, along with several other copy and pasted objective types that anyone familiar with the Sniper Elite series will have already experienced numerous times over.
There are nine missions in total, although the final chapter is a fairly abrupt sequence that can be settled in the space of a single shot much like the climax of Sniper Elite 5. While there are some notable settings to stalk through over the course of the journey, like the sprawling French city of the St. Raymond level with its lofted basilica bell tower to snipe from and its network of subterranean tunnels to leverage for surprise attacks, the bulk of Resistance’s levels feel like rehashes of settings from the series’ past, with deja vu-inducing trainyards, underground facilities, and repurposed country estates crawling with Hitler’s homeboys each begging for a bullet. The GoldenEye-ish opening dam level is certainly an impressive sight to behold – and the developers are clearly proud of it since they send force you into a return visit midway through Resistance’s campaign – but there’s nothing here that even comes close to reaching the literal heights of Sniper Elite 5’s towering Spy Academy mission, or matching the Enemy at the Gates-style intensity of its Rubble and Ruin gauntlet run.
Land of Scope and Gory
Resistance’s campaign is therefore pretty unremarkable, but on the upside you do at least play as a new character this time around. On the downside, it basically makes no difference. Whereas Sniper Elite 5’s main man Karl Fairburne was a gruff-talking special operations executive, Resistance’s Harry Hawker is a gruff-talking special operations executive… with a beard. Hawker has been the second playable character in the co-op mode of previous Sniper Elite games, but this is the first time he’s taken the lead. While his muttered monologues are not completely without charm in a Jason Statham meets Michael Caine sort of way, he doesn’t bring with him a skill set that’s at all different to what we’ve come to expect from previous games.
As before, keeping your cover in Resistance involves carefully timing your rifle shots so that they’re masked by spluttering generators, thunderclaps, or the swelling engine sounds of aircraft passing overhead, while also employing everything from decoys to draw enemy fire to rat bombs to blow the bad guys up in the most unhygienic and embarrassing way possible. Hawker can scale up vine-covered walls to quickly move to better vantage points, as well as access workbenches to tweak his arsenal of Nazi-neutering tools on the fly, swapping out grips to enhance stability or adding suppressors to further dampen the sound of each shot. It’s a system that works just as well as it did in Sniper Elite 5 and allows for some regularly tense games of cat and mouse – but although there is a sprinkling of new weapons to find, like the powerful anti-tank PIAT, precious few of them actually make finishing off each fascist feel in any way distinct.
The X-ray kill-cam that follows the path of the bullet from your crosshairs to a gory cross-section of your victim is similarly in need of an overhaul. Early on in the Sniper Elite series, I was wowed each time I inflicted a high calibre colonoscopy or blew an enemy’s eyeball off its stem like it was the spores of a particularly disgusting dandelion, but that bloodlust has long since been sated several times over. While the Mortal Kombat series has seemingly limitless creative freedom when it comes to evolving its signature Fatalities, it seems like there’s only so much you can do with bullets, blood, and bones, and Resistance’s close-up carnage just doesn’t thrill with each kill like it used to. Besides, if I wanted the ugly contents of a Nazi’s brain to fill up my screen in 2025, I’d just go ahead and log back on to Twitter.
I do appreciate the way Resistance retains the emergent uncovering of objectives found in its predecessors, however. At one point I needed to gain access to a locked control room, but during a fruitless search to find the key or even a satchel charge to blow the door off its hinges, I stumbled upon a memo that hinted at a control room access hatch hidden in the room above it. Much like Sniper Elite 5, Resistance does a consistently good job of making you feel like you’re figuring things out for yourself rather than just blindly following objective markers on the map. Although, having said that, it still seems ridiculous that 1944-era binoculars allow you to somehow eavesdrop on conversations from 100 yards away in order to uncover clues to the whereabouts of a specific assassination target.
The Fast and the Führer-ious
Alongside the return of two-player campaign co-op and counter-op invasion modes, Resistance does introduce one new feature. Hidden away in most of its levels are unique posters promoting the French resistance, and if you track them down and have a proper gander at the propaganda you’ll unlock some standalone challenges that can be accessed from the main menu. There are seven of these short, timer-based tasks in total, and they’re effectively split into two forms: one sees you chain together as many close-quarter stealth kills as possible, while the other sits you in an optimal sniping spot and asks you to deal as much death from downtown as you can before the clock hits zero.
Given my personal approach to stealth is slow and steady rather than rough and ready, I can’t say that I particularly enjoyed being forced to slit throats and pull off silenced pistol kills at speed like I was running late for a resistance meeting, but I definitely enjoyed the sniper challenges. Somewhat reminiscent of the Hitman: Sniper Challenge demo that was released as a teaser for Hitman: Absolution in 2012, these long distance killing sprees involve prioritising elite snipers whose deaths adds a temporary multiplier to the points harvested from subsequent kills, which brings a neat bit of strategy to each skull-shattering snipefest. In any case, while these bonus propaganda missions are welcome inclusions they are ultimately fairly shortlived, especially since their gold medal ranks are pretty easy to achieve and there are no online leaderboards to spur on repeat attempts at snatching high score bragging rights.
That’s about it, though – almost everything else here has been pulled over wholesale from Sniper Elite 5. The skill tree is structured in the exact same way as the previous game and features an identical suite of perks, like allowing you to carry more ammo or use a medkit to stave off death whenever Hawker is downed, which meant that the process of gradually leveling up in Resistance was completely stripped of any surprise. The enemies are largely the same hapless, goose-stepping goons I blasted the brains out of back in 2022, and the main villain lacks the screen time required to establish him as anything but yet another generic Nazi officer – which feels particularly disappointing in the wake of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle’s memorably sinister Emmerich Voss. In fact, Resistance’s storytelling has suffered a major downgrade from that of Sniper Elite 5: whereas the previous campaign featured regular interactions between Fairburne and the French Resistance fighters that made you feel like a real member of the underground, Resistance relies almost exclusively on voiceover-driven briefings between chapters to push the story forward in a manner that feels completely detached by comparison.
