World War 2 shooters used to be everywhere. Seriously, you couldn’t move for them. It was all Gruppenführer this and panzerfaust that, then as soon as they appeared, they were gone, like Nazis fleeing the Falaise Pocket. Partly, this was down to saturation – everyone had just stormed the beaches of Normandy too many damn times for it to be fun any more. But that was then. We’ve had a decent cooling-off period, and now it’s time to give the Wermarcht another blimming good seeing to.

And the Russians, it would seem. Sniper Elite V2 takes us right up to the Battle of Berlin, where the Russians were clamouring at the walls while Hitler and his chums gloomily considered packing the whole thing in and forming the world’s first boy band. Enter one American sniper (or two, if you play co-op), on a mission to stop the Russians getting hold of German rocketry tech as the war draws to an inevitable close.

As a sniper simulator, it’s action-packed. That is to say, you might be in the tower of a ruined church when three armoured cars full of MP40-toting Jerries arrive and storm in the front door. Sure, you’ll still be sniping, but it’s non-stop and furious, as you’re throwing grenades from cover, sniping as fast as your trigger-finger will allow, and relocating under heavy fire. Sure, there’s bullet-drop and wind to compensate for (particularly on the hardest skill setting), but essentially this plays out a lot more like a traditional shooter where you just happen to spend most of your time with a sniper rifle equipped than it does like a 1945-era Hitman, where it’s all about lining up that one, single shot. Sure, you can perform stealth kills, and move bodies, and it may even be possible to finish some levels more-or-less undetected, but plenty of the game is spent at one end of a soldier-funnel, shooting as many enemies as possible while they try to overrun your location.

Graphically it see-saws dramatically between imaginative, evocative urban battlescapes, and occasionally eye-rollingly bad, even on ultra settings. In one particular bombed-out library, the bookcases were just a single flat plane, blocky and obvious close-up. But at other times, as you’re creeping through heaps of rubble and clambering through half-destroyed windows and brickwork-choked doorways, you’ll come unexpectedly across a small patch of greenery struggling to survive in the midst of the devastation, and it evokes a moment of poignancy amidst the horror.

Oh, yes – the horror. See, this is Sniper Elite’s gimmick. Now, we’ve all seen bullet cams on shooters as far back as Max Payne, but Rebellion have taken it a step further, with the anatomically-detailed x-ray cam. So picture the scene. You’re on a rain-soaked rooftop overlooking a small twilight-bathed plaza. Two German soldiers are getting a dressing-down from their commander. You line up your sights, flick a glance to the wind gauge, slightly adjust your firing angle, exhale, and fire. The camera circles the bullet in slow-mo flight, Matrix-style, to the point where it enters the front of the commander’s head. Then time slows even further, and the head of the officer becomes an x-ray view, showing splintering skull fragments and ruptures in the man’s brain caused by the passage of the bullet. And it’s not just heads. Livers, lungs, spines, hearts, kidneys… oh, and ‘stones’ as well. Naturally. All of these organs, not to mention the skeleton, are shown to be shattered, pierced and sluiced by your bullets, all depicted in loving, gratuitous detail. Personally, it all got a bit much for me after the first couple of times, but each to his own, I suppose:- If fixating on just exactly what grizzly damage you’re doing to your target is your thing, then the x-ray kill-cam will certainly deliver.