This is not a terrible game. It's not even a bad or mediocre game. It even slightly tilts towards "good" but the bitter knowledge of knowing it could have been so much better is really the biggest problem.
The premise is this: you're a sniper who has to complete objectives on an open map while taking out enemy units and avoid getting spotted. Sounds great, doesn't it? In fact, I love sniping and this seemed like a game worth trying! There's even added realism like bullet drop across distances, heart rate, lung capacity, etc. which all influence your sniping capabilities. A great recipe for a great game! ... except Rebellion messed it up while cooking.
Let's start with the problems.
1. the areas are littered with impassable areas with invisible walls. Most buildings are for show and can't be entered which is ridiculous considering that's what snipers do.
2. you don't feel like a proper sniper. While the tutorial vid shows how much you need to sneak, in reality, you can mostly run around gunning them down with a machine gun without a problem. Most encounters are at mid-range anyway where machine guns just work quicker. Even when sniping, things felt wrong. You can reload without having to stop looking through your scope for example and reloading is very fast.
3. Scripted sequences. This is the One, the big flaw that make the two points above look like tiny inconveniences. It's just NOT right for enemies to spawn into place after certain triggers. You can run over an entire map and not encounter a single soldier, then talk to someone and suddenly the place is crawling with them again. It makes a mockery of your efforts to scout the map first. Not only that but several scripted sequences are designed in such a way that the game forces close encounters upon you which, for a game called "Sniper Elite" is ridiculous.
4. If you're not looking through the scope, you're in third person view which is a mistake. For starters, it allows you to look around corners without having to actually move around them. It takes away the tension of seeing if there's a sniper on a roof somewhere while risking getting shot. Why not make it a proper FPS game? The tension a game like this should create is absent because you feel distanced from your character.
5. The game lacks polish. There's so many small flaws left and right that make it feel like this was a console game. Actually, hold on *goes to look on Mobygames* Oh wait, it WAS a console game - that explains things! For starters, the options menu is terrible and bugged, the graphics are mediocre for a game of its age (do realise that Half Life 2 and Far Cry were both released many months before this game was) and worst of all, your character moves at times as if he was wading through jelly.
In the end, this is a game that could have been brilliant IF they had made it a FPS, if they had thrown out the ridiculous spawning, if they had polished the scripts, if they had made sniping feel more authentic, if if if if ... but they didn't and so this is a slight-better-than-mediocre game. If I had to give a percentage it would be 65%. In the end, it doesn't live up to its name and that's what will disappoint people the most.