I don't always suck at stealth games, but when I do, I like to do so spectacularly. I went into my second Sniper Elite Resistance hands-on demo expecting nothing less, having taken a crack at it just months before at Gamescom 2024. The two-hour demo I tackled was painful enough even then, with autosaves (or any saves, for that matter) disabled for press preview purposes. The one I played in November might have been a different mission, but the same parameters applied: no autosaves, no second chances. If you die, you go back to the start of the level and do it all over again.
For me, that meant any and all efforts to perform perfectly were doomed from the start. Sniper Elite champions realistic gunplay as far as the namesake firearm is concerned, each earsplitting shot piercing my enemies' frontal lobes with as much subtlety as an air raid siren. That's how I ended up throwing mission objectives and any hope of stealth action to the wind, opting for an overt rather than covert operation through Nazi-infested France.
