izigame.me

Not worth full price, wait for a sale --- A big one.
TL;DR, This game plays exactly like it's predecessors. Same bugs, same cringe-worthy writing, little to no quality of life improvements, but also the same addicting formula that keeps us all coming back.
The first thing that struck me was the new voice actor. He isn't to my taste. Fine performance, but his annoying voice paired with the awful writing in these games is not a good combination. I genuinely wonder sometimes if the people who do the writing actually speak English in real life to other people, or read english literature. It's just so awkward, cringy, and technically wrong at times. The studio is British for god's sake, but it seems like the last several games were written by a 12 year old sometimes. The character also says things out of context now - for example, after clearing an enemy area, if you leave and then enter from the direction the game thinks you more likely would, your character will make a remark about how they need to be careful as the place is crawling with enemies.. definitely breaks the immersion. This brings me to the next point.
It seems to me there is a little less player agency now. In all the missions I've played so far, they funnel you from the starting area to go in the direction they want you to go. You have less choice now it seems of how you want to tackle each level, at least from the starting positions available before unlocking more.
They didn't bring back being able to run or move more quickly while crouched. Lame.
Invisible walls galore again, just like in SE5. Most shrubbery, if it isn't tall grass, is an invisible wall. I don't understand why they made this change between SE4 and 5.
Not a lot of variety in weapons - no doubt because they want to put more in overpriced DLC's down the line. Most of the attachments you need to get quite far into the campaign to unlock, as well as a lot of the secondary weapons.
All animations remain completely unchanged in X-ray cams, environmental kills, etc etc. Neither a pro nor con I guess. I feel like they could have got more creative with this, maybe given us some multi-organ damage or improved the visual damage on soldiers when you're up close to match the x-ray cam or method of death etc.
Bugs and general clunkiness seem to have gotten worse. New guy needs a lot of encouragement now to get onto ladders, enemy A.I. is not improved on very much at all, in multiple levels I had enemies permanently stuck hunting for me the whole mission but just standing in one spot, your character still moves like a roblox character, going up stairs is now an issue half the time as he gets stuck on them, I could go on... it's classic SE stuff. You know what to expect, but now it's worse :)
It isn't all bad though. They did sharpen the graphics a little bit, we have a few new enemy uniforms finally (but not many), I do prefer the new colour scheme of the radial menus, and the biggest plus so far has been the maps themselves. I'm only about halfway through so it's too soon to say for sure, but so far none of them are crazy huge, but they are varied and interesting. Most have a good mix of opportunities for long sniper shots, stealth, and close quarters combat.
It is Sniper Elite. If you enjoy that kind of gameplay, you're going to enjoy this one too. It just bugs me that the studio doesn't do more to actually improve the game or polish it up more for us between each title they add to the franchise. Or at least don't charge us AAA prices then.