Top Ten Best Things About Sniper Elite III: Afrika

You know, when you make a head shot and you get to see their brains explode out the back of their skull? Yeah. That. Well, that, is even more improved in this installment. The eyeballs liquefy when shot, the blood splatter is even better, and the testicle shots, whew, those just LOOK painful. Yikes.

I personally like not having to color by the numbers step-by step. Now, the exception to this is that if you finish some of the maps out of order, you end up too far away for your final mission to be completed, and there's no way to fix it, but you can more or less do what you want. There's a lot of possibilities when you don't have to go in a straight line.

You can make some long shots in this new SE. You can approach every objective from a different direction every time you play. You can become a ghost.

In this installment, you have to be much more aware of your surroundings, and have to go to more work to make sure you stay hidden. This adds a different, more active dynamic to the game, making it less likely to get bored, and just not as easy. You have an attention meter that lets you know how much attention you're receiving, and now, when you shoot without sound masking, most of the time you need to move around to avoid discovery, and if someone knows where you are, and you don't relocate, they will come and find you. Camping isn't as much of an option in this version.

If you kill and relocate often enough, you get ghost kills, and if you get enough ghost kills, you get ghost status. Then, in one of the levels, if you've gotten enough ghost kills, if you eavesdrop on the soldiers, they talk about you, but they call you the Desert Ghost. "one minute you're sitting there, the next minute, your head is gone…"

You heard me. if you place a mine, of any kind down, and don't use it and need to move on, you can pick it up and take it with you. Say WHAT? This is SUCH a nice option to have, so you don't have to scramble to keep your arsenal up.

In SE3, destroying motor pools are an optional objective, you get XP points for it, and it's a lot of fun. You can target the vehicles with your binoculars, and it shows you where to shoot on the vehicles in order to disable them. However, you have to shoot them twice. Once to break through the grill, and a second time to penetrate the engine.

Your job will be to cover someone's back while they escape, and it's a LOT of fun. You basically sit by a cache of ammo, and just fire away. They're almost always concentrated on their target, so they're ignoring you, and unless you stop, or for some reason don't shoot people, it's hard to fail. Having said that, it's still super intense, and suspenseful. You can take a little bit of time and perfect your headshots, then work on exploding some testicles… It's really a blast.

Each level of this installment has replayability up the wazoo. I'll finish one new level, and then do it 3 more times, seeing what happens if I go this way, or that way… Then, you want to go back and use something you just learned on the map two levels ago. This game is a time sink, in the best meaning of the words. I feel like there's no perfect way to do it, but you can sure try some fun things when you've played a level enough times to anticipate what-ish is going to happen, and change your course/actions accordingly. But, even with that, the enemy moves around enough that it's not always the same.