Sniper Elite 4

It's a good game. Not a great game. You can tell they've made a bunch of these, because it has the feeling of a late entry in a series where the developers have had time to hone the core gameplay loop. By default the game splatters the screen with UI vomit. I disabled all of this by playing on Authentic Plus. Despite the name, it really wasn't too challenging. That's not a complaint, I thought it was well balanced. But for a game with all these difficulty settings, I didn't expect to breeze through on the hardest difficulty. Also, despite having "modular difficulty settings", most of the settings are fake and do nothing. The game is clearly not designed to be played without all the HUD crutches. Even with everything set to minimum, you'll still get a ton of hints and interactive prompts. The most bizarre detail is that despite being a game supposedly about sniping, the map has no scale. Without the HUD there is no way to judge distances in this sharpshooter game, because the game expects you to "tag" enemies and spoonfeed you the information. It is a consolified third person shooter through and through, no way around that. Another strange design decision is that disabling the UI removes all markings from the map, including the location of the objectives. Apparently in this universe they don't have pens. All that being said, it still works and can be fun. The whole game is sort of a power fantasy. You run around killing a hundred Nazis and nobody can touch you. The enemy AI is decent. It's fun enough to exploit and confuse, breaking line of sight and re-engaging or flanking in a controlled chaos. For that purpose the AI works very well. The maps are large and allow for multiple approaches, even if it all boils down to shooting. Which is fine in a game called Sniper Elite. Each mission is about an hour or two if you're being thorough, which is a suitable session length. Much more than that in one sitting would get repetitive. The story and characters are absolute filler. I usually read codexes and lore entries in games, but I didn't bother this time. It's WW2. You're B.J. Blazkowicz. No, wait. Your name is... I don't know. It doesn't matter. Performance is very good. At max settings I could get 240fps at 4K, and didn't encounter a single crash or notable bug.