Sniper Elite V2 and More Drab-Colored Shootery Things

     Maybe I'm expecting too much from developers, but would it kill them to make a shooter with actual tension? I understand that shooters require a certain amount of balancing to allow players to recover from firefights, because it is understood that they'll absorb damage or get into tight situations.

For a game that puts emphasis on stealth, masking your sniper shots by syncing up with explosions, sneaking through ruined buildings to silently eliminate patrols, why is there still an abundance of health granted to the player?

SNIPER Elite V2. The word sniper is in the title. If you find yourself in firefights, you're doing something wrong.

As such, the player should be punished for failing to remain unnoticed. Alerting enemies does tend to lead to quick death, but there's still room to recover, which removes the tension of being a sniper.

The biggest issue is that enemy snipers don't present a much greater threat than standard grunts in the game. I could almost understand making standard enemies more forgiving, just to have them pose less of a threat.

But snipers are designed to take out an enemy in one shot, but in this game, they need half a dozen shots to get a job done.

I wanted to have to hunt down enemy snipers, or evade them. I wanted them to be one-hit kill enemies, not run-of-the-mill enemies with sniper rifles and better hiding places. Maybe I got caught up in the expectation.

Pardon me for wanting something closer to Enemy at the Gates in video game form as opposed to an unimpressive, drab, cookie-cutter shooter with a briefly entertaining feature of x-ray shots.

The x-ray shots would have been better if they carried some significance rather than seemingly arbitrary, albeit gruesome, moments.

Is it cool to see someone's skull shattered by my well-placed bullet? Yes. It is especially cool to shoot an enemies testicle and see it in full, gruesome, slow motion? Abso-f*cking-lutely!

Does it need to happen all the time, or on an otherwise standard enemy? Probably not.

Again, it is my expectations getting in the way of the game, I guess, but I expected more of a cat and mouse approach to gameplay. Avoiding enemies to find high perches to pick off important dignitaries, high-ranking military officials and such.

Sniper Elite V2 felt like a basic shooter with sniping elements and too much emphasis on weak story.

I guess what's important, at least for me, is that it is out of the way. It started out enjoyable enough, and the x-ray views of bullets shredding enemies was satisfying, but the lack of any real threat from enemy snipers, thin story and complete lack of significant characters just ruined the appeal over the long haul.