Sniper Elite: Resistance's Invasion mode is the perfect game of cat-and-mouse

Happy Lunar New Year to those who celebrate, and you should, because it's a fantastic excuse to eat your weight in dumplings. At least, that's what I did at the weekend and life feels better for it this week. One of my hosts for the evening, Dom Preston, has a food newsletter called Braise and wrote up last year's party. Braise is pretty good.

Otherwise, I've been spending my evenings trying to avoid the contant grim darkness that is the UK in January and alternating between Escape From Tarkov and Sniper Elite: Resistance, the latter of which I reviewed for PC Gamer. There's never a bad time to sling lead at Nazis, but right now feels like a particularly good time, and Rebellion's AA WW2 shooter is a blast, even if it isn't doing much in the way of innovation. 

My favourite part was a returning feature from Sniper Elite 5, the Invasion multiplayer that reminds me of when every shooter had its own weird multiplayer mode. This happens less now, probably because most shooters are designed multiplayer first and then taken offline as soon as they're no longer profitable. 

Invasion rips. It's the Dark Souls invasion mechanic except you can bait the invader with a mine, or hurl a grenade at them like your'e playing the world's deadliest game of catch. 

Sniper Elite is probably the best guerilla warfare simulator out there. Sniper Elite: Resistance, like Sniper Elite 5 before it, sets you loose in a giant map and gives you a couple of goals. Structurally, it feels somewhat like Hitman, if Hitman was made for World War 2 Dads. You'll hide from german patrols, dodge and weave your way around tanks and just genuinely make yourself a nuisance in whichever theatre of war Rebellion have chosen to feature this time. 

It's also in a little bit of a golden age. Sniper Elite 5 was phenomenal, Sniper Elite: Resistance is more of the same, only slightly less impressive for followijng the blueprints laid out by Sniper Elite 5. Sniper Elite: Resistance is notionally a stealth game, but in reality it's a game about using your wits as a force multiplier to take on a numerically superior foe with a lot more guns than you have. 

In Sniper Elite: Resistance, you will have to resort to violence eventually. The trick is making sure the fights you pick are winnable, the enemy weak and strung out enough that they can't fully react when excrement hits fan. 

This is a cool fantasy, but because your NPC opponents are, well, NPCs they're quite easy to manipulate. An individual soldier represents basically no threat to you beyond his ability to alert other soldiers. So once you've learnt the best way to exploit the patterns, the only real challenge is the game's slightly awkward movement and learning where the objectives are. Things become kind of rote at that point, even though I enjoy winging a sniper rifle round in from 400 metres. 

ENTER INVASION MODE. 

Sorry for the caps, but just imagine I swept in, arms held aloft like I'm about to try and sell you a monorail. Because, Invasion solves pretty much all of the problems, dropping an enemy player in as the Axis sniper, a free-thinking human foe that will be roughly as smart as you are and almost completely unpredictable. 

Dropping into Invasion mode you'll drop into a single-player or co-op game and get to work trying to track and kill the player characters while they're trying to complete their mission. You never know quite what you'll land in at any given time. 

Sometimes you spawn in and discover Rambo has been through. The streets are full of bodies or eerily empty, distant gunfire rings out. These are my favourite, because you'll likely get an easy kill on your opponent as they lick their wounds after the most recent firefight. The scariest ones are when you load in and the map is completely untouched. This means you're trying to track down Solid Snake out there, you have basically no clues and they'll know you're coming. 

As the invader, you get to give you brain a real work out as you look for clues and try to predict what the protagonist will do next so you can position yourself for an ambush. It's thoughtful work and despite the fairly forgiving shooting, there's some tradecraft to setting yourself up in a vantage point that's not too obvious to anyone trying to countersnipe you. Any German soldiers that you mark will report back to you if they spot the main character, so it's worth tagging soldiers much the same as you do in the single-player game. 

As the actual protagonist? The invadee, if you will? The announcement that someone has invaded your game usually indicates shit is about to get real. I always take this as a bit of a challenge, and try to dig in and set traps, expecting the invading sniper to work their way towards you. 

Of course, this doesn't always happen, but after a little while phones around the map become available. Both players can use the phone and it will tell you the rough location of the other player. However, there's a catch: the other player will also be given  your location. This feels well balanced and is a fun way to keep things moving. There's also a brilliant "the call is coming from inside the house" moment when you're given a location 30 metres away. 

The beauty here is that there are so many different ways to play, each invader and invadee have their own style of play, and you never know what you'll get until you engage. Some players are incredible snipers and easy to counter up close, whereas some players will fight like a cornered animal as soon as their back is against the wall. 

Sniper Elite: Resistance isn't the first game to try this. Dark Souls and later Elden Ring managed to do this well, but Bethesda's exceptional Deathloop had something similar. Here though, it just feels like the perfect palette cleanser to keep players on their toes. 

It's a pretty unique experience, and the only time to play it is probably at launch, as players work their way through the campaign. So, why not hop on when it launches tomorrow? Maybe you'll spot me. If I don't see you first.

Gibs

• Vikki Blake's Sniper Elite: Resistance Review is excellent, but Vikki always is. 
• Gun Game is coming to Call of Duty: Black Ops 6. I've already uninstalled and and moved on to other games, but Gun Game is usually a blast. It won't be enough to get me to reinstall it, but bring Gun Game to everything, that's my opinion. 
• Doom: The Dark Ages is coming out on May 15 and it looks great. Doom. DOOOOOM. 
• This gem for music - it's a YouTube link because the video is way more fun than listening to it on Spotify.