Damn, my thoughts on this game turned sour after a long ass co-op session with my friend.
- First there's the linearity. We said to ourselves, as we sneaked into the base during the second level, "This isn't too bad, don't see what people are on about". Fast forward 3-4 levels and we're ready to rip the hairs off our chest in boredom. It's so god damn linear, so on-rails. We can't even do any tag-teaming in co-op because we constantly have to be right next to each other to no get hit with the "Waiting for the other player" message, areas getting magically closed off etc. Levels are so tiny and commando-raid focused, some of them barely look like a sniper based map.
- The AI. Holy shit what a mess. First few levels we took it slow, avoided getting spotted, lots of crawling and firing when there's noise going on. We made a few mistakes and quickly learned, the AI is utterly terrible. We had killed around 8 guards and piled them up in an area, a guard spots one of them on his patrol - What happens? He constantly walks between the piles in different areas and constantly utters something in German, "Was ist passiert?" and then on to the next pile. Never doing anything, never going into alert mode or alerting anyone.
So at that point we discovered being sneaky was a pointless waste of time.
BUT, at the same time it's the usual god-tier AI that will spot a sniper 3 miles away in a church tower at night, then they fire a burst with their super-accurate MP40 and actually hit you - That means on higher difficulty levels, you are close to death when they hit you with that burst.
- It's Call of Sniper Elite v2: World Warfare. It's a complete joke, the fastest, most efficient way of getting through a level? Complete Rambo. Run and gun, going twitch Counter-strike on its ass. So many moments where we WANT to sneak, want to be stealthy but the developers purposely made a setup that requires action.
Oh here's a Tiger tanks, oh well just snipe the fuel cap off the external tanks ( Which didn't actually exist on the Tiger tank in that form ) and it'll blow up ... Yeah sure. "Oh you loved that didn't you?" No ... "Okay then! here's 3 more".
Are we getting some sweet counter-sniping action with that line sniper in a tower, just ready to pick us off? No. We're getting 83 snipers placed in every nook and cranny of the map(s). Just a complete cover fest because you know there's a shedload of these god damn snipers you need to kill. Oh and can you spot many of these snipers beforehand? Not really. As some of them are trigger spawns whilst others sit quietly behind their walls where you can't see them until you peak your head out, then them magical AI takes over and they pop up everywhere and take superman shots at you.
It's all just explosions, cheesy cutscenes, lots of action and pew pew pew.
- Technical aspect. While the game runs smooth and we haven't had any crashes, still a slight problem in co-op, two actually. One is, when I get one of the fast-motion bullet cams my friend's game will sort of micro-stutter in some cases - Not good when you need to double tag somebody. Oh and we got to one of the last levels, decided to take a break. We get back and there's only 'unlocked' maps up to the flaktower ( Which I believe are open per default ). So we lost 2-3 levels of progress. We then decided to start from the flaktower again, got to the end, I walked into the cutscene and my friend got disconnected apparently. Went back out to the lobby and next level still isn't available - We gave up.
When even co-op isn't fun, you don' goofed.
Game is quite frankly ... shit.