Tag Archives: rebellion

Thoughts: Sniper Elite 5

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Okay, so I’ll state up front that I have been goaded into this review a little bit. This goading was not caused by anything Sniper Elite 5 did itself — at least not directly — but prior to playing it I read multiple reviews that favourably compared this iteration of the series to Hitman 2 and Metal Gear Solid V, two of the best sandbox games of the last decade1. Which sounds great, but unfortunately for Rebellion I have also played Sniper Elite 4, so I knew that one of two things had happened here:

  1. That Rebellion had massively, massively upped their game, investing a ton of money into hiring a team of crack designers to shape the emergent gameplay while throwing away the old, dated Sniper Elite engine and starting again from scratch to properly enable all of these modern sandbox features.
  2. That these reviews were talking complete bollocks.

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  1. In particular there’s this “Essential” rating from Eurogamer. I know that games journalists are paid next to nothing and have zero long-term career prospects and this sometimes makes me feel bad about ragging on them so frequently, but then one of them gives Sniper Elite 5 an “Essential” rating and I just can’t let that kind of thing go.
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Thoughts: Sins Of A Solar Empire — Rebellion.

starbase

Rebellion is a bit of an anomaly. It’s a real-time space-based 4X game where you gradually spread the tendrils of your empire out from your home planet into the galaxy at large. It features battles with first dozens and then hundreds of ships all blasting the titanium out of each other with mass drivers and lasers, while swarms of fighters and bombers flit in and out of the fray. It has a staggeringly comprehensive research tree, with no chance that a player will be able to complete all of it in a single game. It even has vestigial trade, diplomacy and culture elements. It should be right up my alley.

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