The Sniper Elite V2 demo on Steam is a fine little taste of gory sharpshooting fun, but I'm afraid I haven't been playing it right. I assumed I'd be haunting the shadows of Berlin , stalking one or two soldiers at a time and waiting for mortar fire to cover my shots. Instead, the demo mostly features larger groups which I recklessly pelt with lead, giving away my position without a care. I can play it stealthier, but even on the hardest mode, it isn't necessary.
I'm eager to play the full game—the demo is already a rare bit of quality single-player sniping, and though it'll surely bother some, watching slow-mo X-ray kidney puncturing is 100 percent fine with me. What bothers me isn't gore; it's that Rebellion promises "the most realistic simulation of military sharpshooting yet available." It's fun, but the demo hasn't convinced me that Sniper Elite V2 is a realistic simulation at all. It does simulate ballistics (gravity and wind speed), but it doesn't test my nerves: if I miss a shot, I stay in-scope and keep firing, and if I blow my cover and take a bullet, a bit of hidey-time heals me right up. Red Orchestra 2 seems to me like a much more realistic overall simulation.
Admittedly, though I may be a sniping nerd, an absolutely pure sniping sim might be too tedious to maintain more than a few hours of my interest. Still, I'd be happy to see V2 become a little more tactically challenging later on (and it definitely could—this is, of course, only a demo). What do you think? If you haven't played the demo, I've cut together bits of my playthough in the video above.
