Sniping games seem to form their own sub-genre in the crowded first person market. From the disastrous Sniper:Ghost Warrior to the original Sniper Elite, it is a genre that does not seem to have too many supporters. Nonetheless, Rebellion Software has seen it fit to revive it’s cult classic series and bring it to the next generation. Unfortunately, despite the shiny new coat of paint, the game suffers  from a major identity crisis, leading the once promising series deep into the path of mediocrity. Sniper Elite V2 acts as a sort of “revamp” for the original game.

Once again, you take control of American OSS agent Karl Fairburne who has been sent deep into war torn Berlin in 1945 to single-handedly stop the German nuclear secrets from getting into Soviet hands. Predictably, the story has you track down the most evil fictional Nazi’s ever imagined, complete with scars and ugly snarls. There are no notable secondary characters and you are literally alone during every mission. The roughly six hour story does not do enough to satisfy any narrative nerve and only drives this game deeper into the mediocrity hole. The main problem with Sniper Elite V2 is that it completely misses the point of what a sniper game should be. Instead of creating a decent stealth game with some cool sniping opportunities, the game forces you to engage all enemies in the room in order to continue.

The average level will involve some sort of artificial hallway, be it a bombed out street in Berlin or a V2 rocket facility, littered with enemies and a sniper or two perched in a building. You would think that the best approach would be  to sneak your way around the patrol, by either not being noticed or quietly picking out enemies. However, the linearity of the game prevents you from taking any other routes other than where the patrol is. You cannot traverse through broken down buildings and flank you enemy, you cannot sneak your way into a sniper’s nest, or even find any alternate routes to your objectives. Sneaking past the patrols is out of the question since the enemy snipers are guaranteed to see you  and shooting them will get the attention of every enemy in the area. There are times where background noise can be used to cover the sound of your shot, but it is few and far between. The game is built so you have to become a one man army and dispatch all of the enemies as quickly as possible.

Now, to say that a game fails at one thing does not mean that it does not succeed at another. You would think that when taking away the useless stealth, Sniper Elive V2 would be a half decent action game, but it even fails at that. Bullets are realistically impacted by gravity and wind meaning lining up a shot can be more difficult than anticipated. There is a focus system that is activated by how calm the sniper’s heartbeat is, meaning that is you were sprinting to knee high wall you are using as cover you will have to wait a minute to have a super slowdown effect. One of the few redeeming features of Sniper Elite V2 are the gruesome killcams that follow the trajectory of your bullet and show an x-ray effect as it breaks bone and  pierces internal organs. It rarely gets old and can bring about a few macabre chuckles.

Not everything in Sniper Elite V2 is horrible. There are a few cool features in place that make setting up a good shot enjoyable. If you wound an enemy they will lay on the ground screaming for help until another enemy comes by and helps them up, in which case you can finish him as well. The game encourages you to lay traps, such as using a trip mine on a door or setting a landmine on a dead body, in order to make your escape easier. However, the game will often make you escape through a different path than the one you came from, making any premeditation useless.

The amount of complaints toward this game keep stacking up. There is no Nazi swastika in the game for whatever reason, making the red and black flags in its place stand out like a sore thumb. The graphics do not fare well, with character models in the Xbox 360 version looking like Ken dolls and a horrible draw distance that makes one wonder why Rebllion used such a limited engine for a game that requires a good draw distance. To add insult to injury, the enemy AI did not graduate from kindergarten, leading them to get stuck behind walls and unable to notice you when you are right next to them. Even more annoying is the fact that they seem to have ridiculously good aim while blindly shooting a fully automatic machine gun from behind cover, hitting you in the face when you are 500 meters away in a watchtower.

To put it simply, Sniper Elite V2 is a broken game. There are cool ideas in place but the game containing them is a waste of time. The poor game design completely misses the point of a sniper game and manages to make this a painful exercise in patience.

Velvet Assassin is the new stealth game from SouthPeak Games, based loosely on the life of Violette Szabo, a French secret agent in World War 2. The strongest elements of the game involve stalking around in the shadows, stabbing Nazis in the back or face and switching the attractive protagonist in and out of various form-fitting outfits “" generally a pretty winning combination “" but offers little else to make the quality of the content match the strength of the concept. The writing is hammy, the story is not particularly compelling or well told, and the gameplay is drawn out and repetitive, all of which conspire to undermine the game’s purpose of getting the player to empathize with the historical figure at the center of the gameplay.

To be fair, historical gaming is a pretty unexplored genre. I know Call of Duty and Assassin’s Creed attach names and dates to their gameplay that are accurate at least according to Wikipedia, but at the end of the day, the history isn’t what’s at stake. You don’t play Assassin’s Creed to learn about the nuances of geopolitics in the Holy Land during the Crusades, you play it to knife suckers in the back. Given this, the fact that SouthPeak is using Szabo’s life as a selling point for the game (it’s on the back of the box and everything) is a bold marketing move that will, ideally, open up a dialogue about the merits of interactive media in more highbrow contexts in the future. If Velvet Assassin had been executed perfectly, which, sad to say, it wasn’t, it could have been a high-minded, almost literary game, and I would like to commend SouthPeak and Replay Studios for taking a step in that direction.

Velvet Assassin has problems, but it does have some solid elements. The meat of the gameplay involves sneaking undetected between areas of light and shadow, and the cinematography is striking and organic. Twilight, moonlight and harsh floodlights cast plenty of natural looking shadows for you to stalk around in and hunt patrolling Nazis. The game does a good job of emphasizing the stealth gameplay over any shooter elements, making the form of gameplay fit well to the spirit of the story. You have a silenced Colt pistol for most of the game but it’s very little match for the German guns, and if you get spotted, you really have to work to get yourself back into seclusion unharmed, so you can’t just charge into a room guns-blazing with any realistic hope for success. Stealth take-downs are infinitely more satisfying anyway.

The gameplay takes place within the fevered dreams of a bed-ridden Violette, recalling her missions while laid-up in a French hospital. This allows for an in-game power called “Morphine Mode” in which Violette doses herself with morphine, the Nazis freeze in time, and you can reposition yourself “" or kill a guard “" as you see fit. This isn’t a necessary component of the game, and really just an out for when you get spotted so you don’t necessarily get gunned down the first time. Also when in morphine mode, Violette’s costume changes to a scant night gown, which is as good a reason for a not-completely-believable video game gimmick as I’ve ever heard, and while it’s a fairly interesting facet of gameplay, it feels tacked on and is a little strange.

The controls are pretty simple, which makes for a very quick learning curve, but also makes most of the movement and standard assassination maneuvers pretty repetitive. You can drop into a crouch, which secludes Violette in the shadows and quiets her footsteps, allowing her to get right up behind the unsuspecting Nazi guards and take them out silently; provided none of his buddies are watching. There is some variation, like shooting explosive barrels or activating a patrolling guard’s grenade so that he will walk the active grenade over to another group of soldiers, but for the most part there’s a typical sneak-and-stab drill that it doesn’t take long to get good at, and then bored with. Don’t get me wrong, it can be incredibly entertaining and satisfying to deftly pull off a silent Nazi assassination “" my encounters with the first few groups of guards in the training level left my heart racing “" but the Nazi AI, while deadly enough once you’ve been spotted, is unrealistically stupid.

After sitting and watching a guy walk the same 20-foot stretch of hallway indefinitely without seeing the leather-clad British lady in the shadows at his feet, your enemies resemble less the ruthless soldiers of Call of Duty and more the moving platforms of Portal, where all that mattered was the right timing in a specific sequence to get from point A to point B. The game is pretty linear, so after you’ve got the movements of the next series of guards memorized you can just blow through them in less than half the time it took you on the first try, and if you’re on your second or third run through of a series of guards, the suspense of the game disappears completely and you’re just going through the motions for the hell of it.

While a compelling narrative might have seriously bolstered the repetitive gameplay, the game’s presentation of the story was very disappointing. There were definitely good elements to the story “" the character of Violette, Nazi antagonists, heartfelt letters home from Nazi soldiers you just assassinated “" but the presentation is so awkward and at odds with the rest of the structure of the game that it really detracts from the game more than it adds to it. All of the information about the story is conveyed via Violette’s not-particularly-well-voice-acted narration and occasional feverish hallucinations, but there isn’t really anything like cinematics, or character development, or any real connection between the player and the characters “" a real shame considering this is supposed to be based on real events and people. The story is certainly present if you care to piece it all together, but really, when you’re crouched in the dark waiting to stab your next Nazi, your motives or mission objectives won’t have any more or less meaning if you watched the story scenes or just skipped over them.

In the end, Velvet Assassin puts forth some solid, though occasionally mediocre, gameplay, that will appeal to stealth fans looking for some straight-up sneaking around. The story behind the game and the association with Violette Szabo, though selling points in the game’s advertising, are not its strength, so if that’s what you were looking for, try something else. At full price, with the low replay value, I wouldn’t recommend Velvet Assassin for purchase, but it wouldn’t be bad in your Gamefly queue.

Velvet Assassin is available for Xbox 360 and Windows and retails for $59.99