I usually pirate games to see if I'll like them enough to purchase them, and after turning the difficulty up from the easiest one to the default level for a second playthrough, all I can say is I'm glad I pirated it.

I won't be buying this game any time soon. The franchise is a World War II sniping game, with its gruesome looking killcams which go all X-Ray on you and show all the various bones and organs being destroyed as your bullet passes through your victim's bodies. The folks who make the game, Rebellion, love to talk about their "realistic" features, but so far in my experience (and I've played the second through the fourth games in the franchise), the only thing "realistic" about their game mechanics is the killcam.

Playing on "Cadet," which is the "Easy" mode of the Sniper Elite franchise, you just point and shoot. There's a diamond that appears in the middle of the scope when you let all the air out of your lungs to get the best shot, and that diamond stays in the middle of the scope on Cadet difficulty, because on that difficulty you just aim and kill. Higher difficulties, though, have bullet drop as well as wind to take into account. On those difficulties, that diamond that appears in the scope when you empty your lungs will appear in a different location, and you just align that diamond with the target, and the diamond turns red when you have a clear shot. So in theory if you're 500 yards away from somebody as opposed to 100 yards away from them when you snipe them, the red diamond will be lower in the scope for the longer distance, and if you have the added wind resistance turned on, the diamond will be lower and somewhere to the left or the right of the scope to accomodate for wind.

That being said, though, playing on "Marksman" difficulty, which is the next level up from "Cadet" and the default setting of the game, I've had the red diamond at the very bottom of the scope when I was aiming at a guy 10 yards away. Yes, I did say 10 YARDS. So I'm sitting there, aiming at the moon just so I can hit a guy 10 yards away from me, and when I shoot, the bullet hits the ground... because aiming at the moon to hit a guy 10 yards away and hitting the ground with the sniper bullet is somehow "realistic." What in the actual fuck are you people smoking, Rebellion? If this was "realistic" I might have to raise the scope a notch or two for a guy almost a mile away, but you think I have to aim at the moon itself to hit a guy 30 feet in front of me in order for your ballistics to be "realistic?" Fucking get a clue, you dumbasses, this is NOT realistic.

The same crap was present in the previous two games as well. I don't know about the first one. Although I have a copy of it I only installed it once, couldn't really get into it though. I know the graphics weren't all that stellar, but I think Sniper Elite 1 came out around 2005 so that's understandable. But the folks at Rebellion spend so much time on graphics and their signature killcams that they must not have time or the money to deal with making the game actually work properly. So the graphics are awesome, but the game mechanics outright suck.

And getting them to fix their shit is like getting pretty much every other game developer on Earth to fix THEIR shit. Sniper Elite 3, which came out in 2014, still has gamebreaking bugs that were in it on the day of release. Just look at the crap I brought up in my previous journal and you'll see what I'm talking about. I'm sick of having to play games on the easiest difficulty level just because the devs were too damn lazy to make the game's mechanics work properly. Like I said, I'm glad I pirated it. I will NOT be paying for this game. I don't buy games that are broken and never get fixed, and on the off chance that I do, I promptly use Steam's refund service. Fix your shit and your "problems" with piracy will be greatly reduced. But you won't do that, because fixing your shit requires 1) taking responsibility for your bad decisions, and 2) work. Those are two things you fuckers absolutely will NOT do, and so the "problems" with piracy will continue. And people will continue to steal your shitty products to avoid having to pay for your half-assery and you will (hopefully) eventually go bankrupt... and you'll go to your grave thinking it's everyone's fault BUT your own, because you are just that narcissistic and delusional.