“100 sniped headshots” – Sniper Elite V2

**Sniper Elite V2** (Rebellion/505, Xbox 360, 2012)

Going right back to the earliest history of video games, to the ‘60s and Spacewar!, they have matched war with sport. Which at some level means matching war with more war, just abstracted. The Olympics still contains an event based on a set of expectations of a cavalry soldier. In earlier days, games’ combination of sport and war often meant a score counter for points awarded for shooting enemy combatants, like in Space Invaders. Over time, scores generally became less significant across a range of games, before coming back in indirectly through multiplayer. Of the #1s in 2012 so far, only the sports game reboots FIFA Street and SSX had anything like the traditional score counter. Narrative campaigns in the blockbuster war shooters of the 2010s focused on action but de-emphasised measuring the player’s part in it.

Sniper Elite V2 is a World War II shooter that goes hard against that trend. Each time you shoot a Nazi soldier with your sniper rifle, a big numerical score gets flashed up. There are multipliers for distance and accuracy, an immediate reward for feats of technique. You can also rack up points with comedy booby traps. Lay a trip mine across a doorway, create a dead body, plant a mine on it and watch someone else blow up, another life gone and 500 points on the board. The game rewards trickery but more so it rewards lots of shooting. There are a finite number of soldiers in each location and eventually they will find their way to your range, encouraged by some thrown rocks if needed.

That this is the main point of the game is very apparent in how it twists some of the shooter norms. Sniper ammo is normally a hard thing to get and a rare treat to use. Sniper Elite V2 is sparing with extra abilities to line up precise shots, but gives you enough ammunition to bring down everyone you need to with plenty of misses to spare. The game’s drama is enhanced through some effectively tension-building loops of music, but it’s not generally about whether you’ll safely survive or not. Instead it’s whether you’ll pull off the particular rad trick shot you’re going for.

There is also another incentive to snipe. Mere scores and accolades are not ultimately the most sports-game feeling bit of Sniper Elite V2. That would be the enhanced close-ups of bullets ripping through bodies, with an added cross-section view so that you can see skeletons snapping as well as blooms of blood. It’s not massively different from Max Payne’s slo-mo tracking camera deaths, but the diagrammatic elements render it firmly into instant replay territory even as it happens live. It feels like there should be an Alan Shearer voice-over to go with it. Look at the technique of that strike! It adds something to the experience, at least for a while.

None of that feels very real, but the game is ostensibly set in real history. One of the game’s achievements is awarded for your 506th kill and is called “World Record”, taking us right back into sports and real-world war (in this case, Finnish WWII sniper Simo Häyhä). As if Häyhä was lining things up and waiting for a flag to go up from a referee to confirm his score was valid. It’s a weird combination that contributes to Sniper Elite V2 feeling like one of the cheapest uses of history yet. Perhaps replacing that with a more heightened and explicitly sporting context would actually have brought more out of its showier mechanics.

It’s once again interesting at this point to remember British magazines’ moral objections to Platoon’s trivialised 8-bit bloodshed in 1988. From there we go to the total lack of controversy generated in 2012 by bringing Mortal Kombat styles of comic gore into a historic shooter with a sports overlay. As ever, the Nazis made for the best opposition to push boundaries with, but the speed of change in taste is best summed up by how developers Rebellion seemed surprised themselves at the knowing shrug this was met with. In a further attempt to get what they wanted, they resorted to a “deliberately controversial” downloadable content add-on in which you assassinate actual Hitler. Even then, their performative puzzlement at complaints appears to have been more significantly more prominent than any actual complaints.