I truly, truly love the Sniper Elite series. I have something close to 400 hours logged on SE5. It is one of my favorite games ever made. I knew this was basically going to be DLC for it, with the same engine, and I was fine with that, even for the kind of ludicrously high price. But this...this is not it.

SE Resistance is a rushed, perfunctory mess. The maps are, with a few exceptions, small, stale and repetitive. Reusing the engine is one thing - cutting and pasting obvious areas I've already played in SE5 is entirely too lazy for a $50-80 pre-release. Movement is incredibly buggy - I've repeatedly gotten stuck on staircases, yeeted into a lake on a zipline, unable to interact with large portions of clearly climbable/vaultable walls, gotten stuck on ladders where sniped enemies magically soldered themselves to them, etc. Despite using the exact same engine, unlike SE5 which runs great on my 4070ti/i9 computer, this stutters and aliases like mad, especially during Xray kills. The kill challenge on mission 7 is currently fatally bugged, therefore making it impossible for me to unlock one of the guns I was most excited about. It's really, really tiresome to pay a premium for the privilege of beta testing.

The loadout balancing is equally a mess. M1 Garand, for example, in the little snippet description is "extremely high damage" in exchange for high recoil. Yet in the stats has the lowest putative damage stats on any rifle. But it still kicks like a mule. It is worse in every regard than the MAS44. Conversely, the putative "all rounder" starter rifle, off rip, hits some 50% harder. Unless you paid to have the 1911 back, there's no real intermediate range stealth pistol options. It's Welrod or bust. The cardinal sin for me though is, less maybe the return of the Mosin, which you can't even get until you've already beaten the campaign because of the gimmicky propaganda mission filler, there's no true sniper rifle in terms of range and muzzle velocity. In a game whose primary appeal is sniping and ballistics mechanics. This is stupid. The obvious play that's coming of them reselling us all the German weapons that you know they already have models for, because they existed in SE5, and you can still pick them up from dead soldiers, is equally gross, lazy cash grab BS.

And last but not least, while SE as a whole has never really been the most story-centric series, this one is SO bare bones, and so slapdash as to be laughable. You essentially get to know zero new characters. The plot is threadbare. The voice acting for Harry is cringe inducingly awful. There's no real antagonist development. You feel connected to nothing.

I was counting the days till this was released when it was announced. I have never felt so let down. I hope they can at least fix some of the balancing and glitches enough to make this playable. But as it stands, save your money and stick with SE4 or 5.

If you haven't played SE5, go play SE5. Same price for more content and less bugs. If you have played SE5 and you are interested in Resistance, Wait for a while. The game is really buggy right now and is quite frankly in its current state, a cash grab. Reused assets to a ridiculous point. Same skills, same UI, same animations, same in game sound track. This is literally SE5 0.9. Needs work.

Edit: I would like to mention that I do like the game to a degree. If SE5 didn't exist this would be fun.
I will provide the list of bugs that I have encountered.

List of bugs I have found:

- Top step of stairs occasionally prevents character from moving forward when crouching.
- On mission 4 character can be spotted through one of the buildings on the eastern portion of the map.
- On mission 5, the intel in building near default spawn is blank and does not show anything additional on the map.
- When whistling, occasionally enemy A at 8 meters will not hear you but enemy B at 15 will. Sometimes search the wrong locations.
-Lightened and Blued and Precision Rifling attachments for the UD-42 have the exact same stats despite different descriptions.
-Enemies will occasionally walk into fires when investigating.
-Cover system is quite buggy. Works as intended about 50% of the time.
-On mission 5 there is a rock texture that is glaringly clipping into the stairs near the quarry entrance.
-Sound detection from gunshots is inaccurate. Fired a weapon with ~30m sound range. Enemy at ~40m heard the shot.
-Mission 6 Kill list objective does not work. Target does not interact with kill item. Also, target does not react to running sound, or bottles.
-Mission 7 Kill list is bugged. When moving towards the cup it indicates missing kill item. After obtaining the kill item the interaction area cannot be interacted with.

Plainly, this is Sniper Elite 5.5. If you are here, it's because you played the others and likely enjoyed them. This is more of the same.... yet not.

Core of what is here:

• For SP and 2-Player co-op, there is a total of 1 intro mission (more of an orientation for newbies... or to ensure no returns on Steam?) and 7 main missions. There is one DLC mission of the always entertaining Kill the Fuhrer. Map size is ever increasing and making for some terrific long shots as since SE4.
  
• For SP mode of Propaganda (kill total number of enemies in specific amount of time) there are 7 missions.
  
• Axis Invasion is still there as introduced with SE5. Good fun if you like it spicy for additional XP on both ends. Still adds an arse-pucker element.
  
• Multiplayer is 3 mission maps for the 3 available modes or 1 map for the No Cross mode.
  
• Co-op Survival mode starts with only 2 mission maps. Feels bare-bones and not as good as SE5. There are 4 operation choices like last time to unlock with the waves to change it up slightly. Nothing new here really, it is the exact same formula. Really surprised they didn't do more in this space and lean into more co-op friendly designs or innovations (escort missions, gather codes to transmit in sequence, assault and retrieval, etc). So many games are doing well because they embraced it.

As much as I am a fan of the series and having spent lots of time with friends on the others, I cannot recommend the game at this time for the following reasons:

• Performance - There is a clearly a performance issue/memory leak, which I filed a bug report and dropped a DXDiag for. Yet, they are instructing all their players to do so in the forums. It is easily reproduced in single-player (SP), shouldn't be there at this stage. Frustrating stuttering that even if you drop it to lower graphical settings does not resolve. Glitching collisions, odd detection for aiming shots (like cannot shoot through a visibly clear area that has a big hit box or boundary so it throws off the distance detection completely), can't walk up stairs at times and gets stuck or on the edge of something hat looks like you should be able to walk there, sometimes you will drop a special weapon on stairs because it thinks you jumped down, can't go through openings specifically designed for crawling or squatting... etc. lots of other small yet annoying glitchy stuff cropping up. AI goes from interesting to knows where you are at all times and shooting through walls. Network code is not too bad, some light hiccups in co-op survival and warping. All rush to market problems that should not be there, surprisingly buggy. The last couple years have been companies beta testing releases with their paying customers... which is a big confidence killer.
  
• Pricing - Charging a premium for just map/mission design with major asset recycle (and bugs). Clearly an expansion of SE5 with a new character thrown in to distract you from what it is. This is a DLC. It is unfortunate that Rebellion is being aggressive with their approach of overpricing and under-delivering. They should be careful or they will price themselves out of customers. SE5 was nearly 15k players on launch...
  
• Innovation - Nothing new here. They kept it very very safe. But that is why we are all here in the first place, right? The formula is good and even great the last few iterations. The weapons are blasé (keeping in the French theme here) and nothing to write home about; really surprised this is where it ended up. It feels like SE V2, SE3 and ZADW4 were the last big push in innovations with the franchise, only small additions or gimmicks since. There is so much more they could do, as well as include their community in. NO ONE likes invisible barriers and walls... come-on, guys, what year is it?! Enemies coming through and dying in unreachable areas behind an invisible wall?? And seriously, no 4 person campaign co-op after ZA and Strange Brigade?? Sorry, but it seems like continued laziness at this point while looking at the market offerings. Not setting a good tone, Rebellion.

I'd say get the game IF you are a die-hard fan AND they drop the price significantly after they addressing the performance/glitchiness. Otherwise, you've played it already and should avoid until they come to their senses. You will have buyer's regret once FOMO wears off. They should have sold Premium Edition at $40-50, current pricing for this is a bit on the ridiculous side. Rebellion may want to rethink their cash-cow approach as they are now treading on their faithful customers that have pre-ordered in the past. You're burning goodwill and trust with this release.

Given all this, I will definitely be hesitant of Atomfall.... I plan to wait and watch with no pre-order or Deluxe Edition because of how this played out.

System Specs:
ACER Predator Orion 7000: i7-12700K, WIN 11 64bit, 32GB RAM, Geforce 3080 RTX, Samsung SSD 860 2TB, Samsung SSD 860 1TB, Samsung SSD 860 1TB.
Monitors - Primary: Acer Predator Z301C 29.5-inch Curved UltraWide FHD (2560 x 1080) NVIDIA G-Sync Display 200Hz - Secondary: Acer Predator XB241H 24-Inch FHD (1920x1080) NVIDIA G-Sync Display, 144Hz
Latest Nvidia drivers - Version 572.16