Sniper Elite V2

Just played through the demo, here are my impressions:

The game is easy. REALLY easy. It might just be the demo level, but I played on the hardest difficulty (which advertises "brutal enemies") and only died once. (when I ran around a corner without looking and got pumped with a full mp40 clip at point blank range.) The enemies basically just run around dumbly and take cover at random with their head still exposed. Basically, the enemies feel like fish in a barrel, waiting for you to kill them, unless you specifically run out into the open. The demo level is pretty linear as well, with convenient ammo crates every 100 feet.

The kill cams are cool. The whole game seems to be designed around this feature. Apart from these, the shooting (when using a pistol or smg) feels a bit clunky with the third person view. There's a variety of ways to kill people and it feels satisfying to pull off a very long range shot on a baddie. The sound effects and camera scripting during the bullet-in-flight events are varied and intense, and make you feel way more badass than you actually are. On my second shot ever, I randomly hit the grenade on a guards belt and it exploded, shattering his ribs and killing him. That was pretty unexpected and cool. What would have been a cool feature is cutscenes for when you miss a target, which show the bullet narrowly missing and crumpling on a wall with cool bounce physics and whatnot.

The character movement is nothing special. You can sprint, crouch, and go prone. You cannot jump, but can climb over certain things. I don't even think you can climb appropriate geometry unless it's scripted specifically so you can. Falling 5 feet will almost kill you. You can throw rocks to distract guards, but from what the demo presents, there isn't much of a point; sniper ammo is pretty much infinite and you're at low risk of dying by sitting back and taking potshots.

What I expected of this game is intense sniping action with very good scoping physics/mechanics and every possible detail put into the trajectory of the bullets/ the result of the shot you set up. The demo reveals a generic shooter with very cool killcams, but a lack of detail in almost every other area. I expected a little more overall in today's shooter saturated market. The game feels like a mod of Gears of War; unsurprising since it uses the unreal engine (the grenade throwing is the same, as is the cover mechanics) The game is pretty fun, but the killcams are pretty much the only feature which makes it stand out from other shooters and make it worth playing. I wouldn't pay full price for this game, but I'd pick it up during a steam sale. The gameplay, aside from the bullet cutscenes, is nothing special. Silent scope meets Gears of War. Sort of. I would have liked to see more focus on tactical descision making, open worlds, and non-waypointed objectives, instead of "kill all the dumb AI baddies in this linear level, one at time, in cool ways". Who knows though, maybe the demo level was just badly designed and the full game is better.

The game advertises multiplayer and single player co-op too, and if it plays bullet cutscenes during multiplayer does it pause the game for everyone? If it doesn't pause the game, then it basically stuns you for 5+ seconds after every kill, but without the cutscenes the game is extremely generic.

TL;DR:
Gears of war engine shooter with awesome killcams but otherwise uninspired generic shooter gameplay.