Sniper Elite VR - few games sound so un-fuckup-able from the title alone, as such this was one of my most anticipated VR releases even before seeing any gameplay. Now that I've finally played through it I can't say it lived up to my hype, but my initial disappointment did give way to a very enjoyable VR game, albeit not quite the game I expected.

Firstly it's front-loaded with bad levels - extremely short, small and frustrating, but you have to go through quite a few of these before the game gets good. It takes some time both for the level design to open up and for the core gameplay to click - this isn't a stealth game, and trying to play it like one is an exercise in frustration.

Enemies are extremely quick to spot you, there's often less than a second to react and it's exacerbated by the usual slow movement you get in VR. In addition Nazi genetic experiments have seemingly granted their soldiers eagle-vision with occasional near X-ray abilities, you'll often get spotted by dudes who look like a couple pixels on the horizon from your POV inside a PSVR headset. Presumably as a consequence of the free movement of VR, it's finnicky in recognizing when the player is behind a wall - and your body is invisible to boot. Just one of many clues that this is a lower budget and less-polished experience, despite the established franchise name and relatively high price for a VR title. Levels also get reused a few times, particularly in the second half, but this isn't too egregious. It's surprising how different it feels when you're coming in from a different direction and with a different objective.

Early on your only method of silent kills are to wait for a background noise to mask a shot. Sounds alright, but it means you'll spend the vast majority of your time lined up and just waiting to take your shot. Plus it's an overly gamey and un-immersive thing to have a plane reliably fly over head every 30 seconds to give you a shot. It gets old fast, especially when you're on your fifth attempt (with a length loading screen between each). Speaking of, Sniper Elite VR is home to some oddly archaic design decisions: namely, there's no auto-save or automatic checkpoints within levels. You have to use manual save stations in each level or restart the whole mission.

There's also very rarely any room to sneak around enemies - levels are fairly claustrophobic more often than not, so you're forced to fight your way through. They're often deceptive too, especially early on. You'll load into what looks like a substantial level only to gradually notice everything's blocked off (you're one of those protagonists who can't get past a foot-high obstruction), and the actual playable level is very narrow and limited. One in particular looks like a fairly expansive woodland level, only to realize you're basically restricted to a ledge overlooking an area to defend. The levels get substantially bigger toward the end and some are really good for sniping, but most trend toward corridor-like design without many genuine open spaces.

Thankfully the checkpoint limitations and all the problems with stealth also stop mattering once you realize the better way to play is to just grab the nearest MP40 and go full Wolfenstein on some Nazis. That's where most of my fun ended up being, shooting people in VR is something that's truly hard to get wrong, and gunning down soldiers in bunker corridors or blasting my way across European towns in PSVR-tier graphics did give me flashbacks to the old Wolfenstein games, and the likes of Medal of Honor or early CoD. That huge period where gaming was obsessed with WWII and more arcadey on the whole - this felt like it was tapped into that lineage. It brings a nostalgic glimmer to my manic sniper-eye to see how far we've come, from the grey square rooms of Wolfenstein 3D to feeling like I'm really inside a Nazi base, physically whacking one on the in the head with his own sturmgewehr. I love technology.

Anyway, that's not to say the sniping isn't good, it's actually great... depending how you play it. Personally I think the Sony Playstation® Aim controller is the only way to go, and PCVR badly needs an equivalent. Long guns never feel right on two separate hand controllers, and while there's a big appeal to manually working the bolt-action and it's fun for a few minutes, good luck actually hitting anything with that setup or making it through the tougher levels here. I almost feel bad, when they've lovingly re-created realistic loading methods for each gun, that I chose to bypass them altogether, but even with its advantages it's just not worth the awkwardness. You spend more time battling with the game than getting immersed - the direct opposite of what VR is meant to do, it's been true of every other VR game to feature a bolt action sniper rifle and being a game designed around that kind of weapon still hasn't saved it here. The aim controller streamlines everything but the pointing and shooting, and the game's far better as a result.

I'm not saying the experience is perfect with the Aim either, there's still occasionally dicey tracking and drift issues, some of which wouldn't even be noticeable if you weren't trying to virtually cap a Nazi general from 400 feet away, but the smallest drift will absolutely fuck your day up now and then here, in addition to the usual occasions where your virtual gun seems to have a mind of its own. Sony's decision to reuse the PS3's motion technology has been a massive compromise for the PSVR's entire lifespan and gen 2 can't come quick enough, but even so I find it clearly the better control option and likely better than the PC VR experience too (I reckon the average rating would be noticeably higher if PC had an equivalent to the aim).

When you're not fighting with the tracking you might be fighting with the sound design instead. 3D sound is a given for VR but it's a bit off here, often enemies will sound like they're right beside you both from volume and positioning, when they're in another room or over ten meters away, and sometimes the audio would sound overly stereo - all left or all right, not feeling like it's coming from a position in 3D space. This is another thing that seems to plague the early game in particular for some reason, but I did get the occasional, jarring phantom yell right to the end.

Any VRhead who's been around the block will know the struggle of sniper scopes in VR, for some reason it's an effect devs have had a seriously hard time producing. In most games the scopes don't work, opting to either have the sniper view pop out as a separate screen within the game world, or fade into a scope view when you place your eye near it, similar to how scopes work in most non-VR shooters. Other games, even polished ones like Farpoint, just give up and slap a basic dot sight on the sniper rifle instead of a telescopic one. The previous leader in this category was Alvo, but however they achieved the effect there caused it to only work in one eye. Look through it with your right eye and it's a fairly realistic representation of a telescopic sight, look with your left and it's all unusably skewed to one side and without usual depth perception. It's an odd thing to witness.

Anyway I don't know what black magic JAW and Rebellion have invoked here, but we finally have scopes working as they should in VR, with either eye, looking both realistic and useable, and the few levels really inducive to sniping here really deliver as advertised, both when lining up your one shot from a grassy knoll and when popping in and out of cover to dunk on these fools thinking an alert status can save them.

The addition of an exotic silenced rifle toward the end also finally makes stealthing a whole level both doable and actually enjoyable. The trade-off is this rifle's relatively low power and range, so there's significantly more necessity to score a head or heart shot, and the worse range means a greater need to compensate for bullet drop and wind. This is where the game fully clicks into place and becomes what it ought to have been the whole way through.

Sniper Elite's iconic markers also carry faithfully over here. There's the "focus shot" that works well enough that, if anything, it's TOO helpful, and it's available on every weapon, although I didn't find much need for it outside of the scoped rifles and the single-fire silenced pistol. Then there's the glorious kill cams, showing massive close-ups of every broken bone and ruptured organ. It's fairly genius, given a sniper's role being fairly detached from the carnage, to put so much emphasis on how much damage every bullet can do and remind one that you're shooting at meaty animals and not just hollow pop-up targets.

Admittedly I found it way too gratuitous initially, this overly detailed gore in full 3D and blown up to a massive scale right in your face in VR, but by the end I was de-sensitised enough for each killcam to feel like a reward, and a little dopamine hit every time I scored a heart-shot.

The weapon selection is aesthetically varied but functionally quite limited. We have three slots, one for a rifle, one for SMGs or shotguns and one for pistols (though you can holster multiple pistols and dual-wield if using two controllers and not the Aim). There's seven different rifles, all available both scoped and with iron sights, besides the semi-auto Gewehr 43 and the aforementioned silenced De Lisle rifle they're all bolt action and I'm not sure there was any real difference besides aesthetics and a bit of capacity variation.

It's worth noting though that the iron sights are easily the most usable and thus the most fun I've encountered in a VR game yet (many games are too blurry or don't have good enough tracking for it to work), particularly on the Lee Enfield, using that one without a scope surprisingly ended up being my favorite gun in the game and probably the most rewarding, and once again gave me flashbacks to WWII games of yore.

The Thompson SMG is notably absent, but since we're playing as an Italian resistance fighter we're instead given the somewhat more exotic Italian equivalents in the MAB 38, FNAB 43 and OVP 1918. To me though the only gun worth carrying in this slot was the MKB 42, with damage and range that (I suppose realistically) rivalled the sniper rifles and ended up being my primary weapon for most of the game. The pistols were almost entirely neglected in my playthrough, never really being needed or helpful, save for the silenced Welrod that's usurped by the De Lisle. There's notably a full-auto Mauser, though the remaining sidearms are interchangeable gameplay-wise.

My last complaint is both one of the biggest and most unexpected: the story, and how it's presented. It's relayed to us in hindsight as our protagonist, now an old man, leafs through his war journal while his grandchildren laugh and play nearby. This serves as our level-select screen. Thus most of the tension is already eliminated before you start, and eliminated anew between every level as you're reminded you both won and survived the war, everything is grand. What's more, your home also serves as the partisan training ground during the tutorial level set decades earlier. The solution is obvious: make the training ground the level-select until you beat the game, then insert the laughing grandchildren and peaceful music as a marker of your success.

The protagonist in Old Man configuration is also the only voiced character (another marker of this game's budget status) - and by God that voice never shuts up. Not only between levels but during, he'll keep popping in with some inane observations to diffuse all tension. Always looking to tell us how he felt rather than trying to make us, the player quite literally standing in his shoes, actually feel what he's describing.

Two particularly ludicrous examples: when approaching a lighthouse, he butts in to say "the lighthouse loomed ahead, I felt very small." A VR game is the one medium where you literally feel the full scale of the fictional place as much as if you were standing there in person, if you need to tell me you felt small you've failed, make me actually feel small instead, and don't take me out of the moment to do it.

Another occurs when a character betrays you during the story. Again, no one else is voiced, a few characters are named but there's nothing to differentiate them and the other partisans are generic NPCs who tend to immediately run into enemy fire. Our guy describes how shocked he is at this betrayal, meanwhile I have absolutely no reference point for who this mute NPC is or any reason to care at all. Just one or two real characters could have added a lot. If they could only afford one actor it really ought to have been for a companion character, at least then you might have someone to care about and could play a level without this guy's intrusive thoughts spoiling it like you're suffering some VR schizophrenia.

Unsurprisingly that also means there's no antagonist. One guy seems to be built up as the big bad but he shows up and is then taken out a couple missions later, with several missions still to go. This is home to one of the longer campaigns VR has to offer, and enjoyably so once it gets into its groove - but in the last third or so I kept expecting it to end after every mission, and when the end finally comes it doesn't feel remotely climactic. It's just another level, and with each one being fairly short and self-contained there isn't much feeling of momentum, just a long sequence of disconnected scenarios. There's really no story structure here at all, which for a WWII game I wouldn't mind at all if the story didn't feel so overbearing on the experience.

Still, all that said there's clearly a lot of love in here as well as a respect and enthusiasm for its historical setting, and it's a damn lot of simple fun once you adapt to it. As much as I disliked the early levels I was sad to see it end and I'm likely to keep coming back for more - each level having optional objectives (though most you'll get on the first run), a load of collectables and each weapon having parameters for 'mastery,' as well as a higher difficulty. There's certainly some asterisks on this recommendation, but if you like shooting things in VR there's enough content here to be an easy buy, even at its relatively high asking price when not on sale, just make sure you know what this game is and isn't before pulling the trigger.

I may be alone in this, but I've been waiting for VR's Call of Duty 4 since I first put on a headset. If you don't know what I mean by that then you probably weren't around to experience the paradigm shift of CoD4 hitting store shelves. A game that was extremely polished and fresh, but also familiar and casual-friendly enough that virtually everyone, even people who had no prior interest in games, had to get in on it. VR needs one of those, the type of game you can put nearly anyone in and have them dying to get their own headset.

Sniper Elite VR definitely isn't that game... but, provided you have an aim controller, it's easily the closest I've seen yet.