Sniper Elite 3: Big Dumb Nazi Stress Ball

“You can shoot them in their what?”

In Sniper Elite 3, you play the role of an individual whose name I couldn’t remember if I tried, a sniper and spy of the Allies’ Special Operation Executive on the trail of a Nazi General looking to deliver a superweapon, a no-joke land battleship of a tank ironically called the Ratte. The Ratte was an actual thing- sort of. It made enough of a developmental papertrail that the fact that it sorta-kinda was being considered at some point by some particularly dumb Nazis during that Late War period where the Reich was literally looking for miracles to deliver the fight, because the thin-ankled, bad-mustached shitbird with the massive speed habit sure wasn’t.

Tanks. It was a giant tank, the Ratte.

It’s unclear what the big idea of the Ratte actually was. Maybe it was an attempt to realize the fever dream of Shermans and T-34s being ground under the treads- literally -by a thousand tonne steel-clad seed of Ragnarok produced by Superior Nazi Science. Maybe it was a real out-of-the-box approach to coastal defense, fight ships with giant tanks, or as they’re better known, “nature’s ships.” But for a host of reasons, the Ratte never emerged from its nest. Reasons such as, “all of them, because giant tanks are terrible ideas.” For one, humankind at this point had not produced a road this thing could roll on without it obliterating the paving under its tracks, and roads are kind of important in wars. For another, Allied bombing and artillery was such that ordinary old Panzers were viable targets, let alone giant clown tanks made out of enough material and workhours to make a squadron of Panzers. But of the many other crushing flaws of the Ratte (who ever needed to go cross country in a tank, anyway?), that last one is really the big one- just producing one, a prototype, hell, even the process of building the prototype would eat money and resources Germany couldn’t spare. So in other words, completing this game’s ultimate mission, stopping the Ratte’s production by sabotaging its production facility and assassinating the project’s overseer, is a decidedly non-elite move to do. The real-ass elite move? The technique of a true Galaxy Brain sniper? Wait for them to produce the Ratte, then kill the overseer during trials, leaving the Nazis with a self-destructive moneypit worth one hundred million of your shittiest relative’s awful boat, nobody to oversee work on revision, and nobody to place the blame on, something that is deceptively deadly to individuals caught in the power structure of unstable and rapidly unravelling idiot fascist regimes. 

None of this matters, though, because on the way to this conclusion and this blog post, I managed to shoot like 3 Nazis straight through their genitals in this game. I know this, because it showed me the exploding nuts, in detail. As a copper jacketed .303 British bullet, a scalpel propelled by a cannon, sped towards its crotchal terminal point, the game went into slow-motion anatomical cutaway of a fascist body in its final small moments of wholeness, showing me The Entire Balls. Masses of matter in motion intertwined in a terribly graphic moment of mathematical and physical interaction, ending in fatal dick destruction.

This game rules.

Specifically, this game is dumb as hell in very smart ways, and it rules because of it. As the series has gone on, it’s evolved from a janky game with the spark of creativity in its gameplay, to something stalking and predatory, a game that feels precise and controlled, where if things go wrong, it’s because you didn’t cover yourself. It’s also ludicrously violent, as dropping a target using the game’s sniping mechanics by default not only shows you the sometimes dazzling slow motion flight of the shot, but also shows it passing through the target. This can mean caving in their ribcage and blowing out their lungs. This can mean blowing a code-violating skylight in their skull. And yes, it can mean fatally Jimmy Rustling Jerry.

I would like you to meet my associate, Mr. Richard Jokes.

And this is my ultimate point. In many ways, this game is clever. This is a stealth game based around lethal takedowns, both at range and up close, and one of the tools it gives you is the ability to booby trap bodies, thus turning the annoying litter of Nazi corpses into tools to punish those still among the living. It uses a Last Known Position system, thereby giving the player the ability to trick and outflank enemies using their weapons and tools, rather than punishing them for making any noise whatsoever. And its sniping mechanic hits a nice two-piece of being both good quality of life for those that don’t want to mess with leading targets and bullet drop, and also just really badass feeling.

But this game will never be about those things. Because, did you know that in this game you can shoot a Nazi directly in he dick? You can. Directly. Even Hitler, you can put in your sights and personally teach that nobody struts when they’re on their knees, especially when he’s been relieved of Die Wenig Fuhrer und Sein Zwei Offiziere.

Shooting Hitler in the dick is DLC for Sniper Elite 2. This is amazing, because who wouldn’t buy that? Nazis, that’s who, who therefore won’t be a part of your playerbase. That’s called a win/win, friend.

The point I’m getting at here is that the Sniper Elite series is a game that has been learning as its gone on, becoming open, creative in its play and extremely replayable. And even if it wasn’t, it wouldn’t matter, because its shooting is so complete, so polished in its execution and so magnificently crunchy and splatter-rich, it can sell on that alone. Because, the reemergence of fascism in the modern day besides, sometimes you get in a mood where you want to punch a pillow. Or, in lieu of a pillow, which serves a function, you’d instead like to put violence a digital Nazi, an individual that you can basically do anything you can think of to, and probably still not be the asshole in the equation. That a game can get by on the sheer satisfying tactile execution of its core mechanic- insert bullet into fascist -is proof of the polish that has gone into its creation. Sniper Elite is a big dumb Nazi slaughter stress ball, a game with a central loop that includes zen like interludes of slow flying bullets and dynamically perforating anatomy renderings. It’s got all sorts of fancy collectable whatnot and upgrade gubbins, it’s got things like bullet simulation physics and heart rate tracking to determine how much your scope sways after coming to a halt after sprinting or climbing. But it doesn’t need any of that, because when you can boil your game down to just one thing, and then do that one thing exactly right, people will notice. No guarantees on how many, but they’ll notice.

And when it’s people noticing a Nazi getting his groin dramatically disrupted from way deep in the backcourt, they remember what they saw.