If you’ve played the last couple of Sniper Elite games, you know pretty much exactly what to expect from Sniper Elite: Resistance. In fact, but for featuring Harry Hawker as its protagonist instead of series mainstay Karl Fairburne, this could easily have been branded as Sniper Elite 6. But then that might have put the pressure on to try and seriously advance the series, where Resistance feels like more of a classic standalone expansion pack – not that this is necessarily a bad thing.
We’ve gone hands-on with a second mission from Sniper Elite: Resistance, following up from our first go back at Gamescom 2024, and what I said then holds true now. This is sniper stealth-action comfort food, not to mention the WW2 setting and almost pantomime villainy of the Nazis, who just so happen to have another wunderwaffe in development.
Deep in occupied France with Harry linking up with the local French Resistance, this mission dropped us into a heavily guarded city of Lyon at night, looking to follow up on Resistance intel about mysterious cargo passing through the city’s train station. Along the way, you’ll also have to break into the Gestapo HQ at the Hotel Terminus, and try to inspect a cargo haul within its basement. After the castle town infiltration of my first hands-on, this is another urban setting that will equally provide you with a ton of hiding places and an awful lot of potential dangers from guards in high places.
Starting off on a hill overlooking the city, your eye is immediately drawn to the many spotlights and sniper spots – there’s a wild and excessive amount of sniper scope glare that will help you find snipers in the dark. Pulling out a handy set of binoculars, you can spot and mark enemies from all the way across the map, highlighting their positions for whenever you’re able to pull out the sniper rifle and make your tentative progress safer. Those binoculars also have a very capable parabolic microphone built-in, letting you listen in on conversations from a good long distance, potentially revealing clues from the loose lips of patrolling guards, soldiers and Gestapo.
Check the mission map, and there’s a bunch of main and side objectives to take on across the sandbox level. Each level has a high-ranking officer to take out from the Kill List, there’s a side mission to try and check in on a Resistance safe house (which has been found by the Gestapo, the surviving members fleeing to a backup hidey hole elsewhere in the city), and then the main mission objectives. There’s also new propaganda posters that will drop you into a quick side mission, though we didn’t find this, and the returning Axis Invasion mode that you can engage with or completely ignore.
Harry comes with a familiar set of tools – a trusty Welrod, an SMG for moments where you just need to spray and run away, and of course one of the game’s many sniper rifles. Alongside that, there’s a variety of explosives, traps and grenades that you can use in certain situations, such as booby trapping a noise maker or (in what was at least incredibly immoral at the time, and now illegal) a dead body that might draw an enemy near.
You’ll want to scrounge from the map to broaden your selection of gear, and that Resistance safehouse was an absolute treasure trove of different mines, ammunition types (subsonic bullets won’t be as noticeable to enemies), and limited use special weapon like a silenced sniper, though these do still emit enough sound that you need to be aware of nearby enemies being alerted. Then again, it’s not too difficult to get some noise cover for your sniping by sabotaging a diesel generator and timing when you start blasting.
It did take me a few goes to really get into the swing of things with this level, thanks in part to some wayward Welrod shots getting me discovered. It’s easy to get spotted more generally, thanks to plenty of overlooking spots from snipers, including two bridges across the city’s river, and once the alert has been raised, soldiers come rushing to your last known location – thankfully a zipline makes for a very handy escape route. I also noticed some guards walking around with flashlights in addition to the sweeps of searchlights from guard towers.
It all kicked off when getting to the opulent Hotel Terminus, the number of enemies in this area meaning I was spotted almost immediately and the time pressure of our hands-on time coming to a close forcing me to sprint through the building, up the stairs, set a satchel charge on the Gestapo office and then quickly grabbing what I could find in there before figuring out how to get the Hell out of there. Luckily a zipwire got me out into the gardens… but with the area on high alert, I was quickly spotted again and gunned down just as our session came to a close.
I do wonder what the future holds for Sniper Elite after the release of Resistance. We’re at a point where Rebellion’s take on stealth action and sandbox levels has maybe come to its evolutionary conclusion, so that Sniper Elite 6 might have to be a more fundamental reworking of the underlying game engine and gameplay core, pushing the production values higher. Resistance has some dated quirks, like certain waist-height scenery being oddly impossible to vault over, or the way characters slide into position for a melee takedown.
For now, though, Sniper Elite: Resistance will give another batch of good ol’ Sniper Elite action. It’s solid and dependable, and it’s always gruesomely amusing to see the series’ staple X-ray kill cam trigger as you explode someone’s testicles from the other side of the map.
