Sniper Elite 4 (Authentic Plus)
This game is so good. It's a 3rd person stealth/action game in a similar vein to MGSV or Ghost Recon, only rather than having a full open-world the missions instead take place in large, self-contained maps, which is honestly how I prefer it. It's also a little rougher and simpler than those games, but I don't see that as entirely a negative either - personally, I can appreciate a game that focuses on the essentials and doesn't bog itself down with unnecessary layers of mechanical complexity and menu management.
On the essentials - you've got your three stances of standing, crouching or prone and an over-the-shoulder camera that adjusts to just the right zoom based on each, a three weapon loadout of a scoped rifle, side-arm and pistol, an item wheel for your healing and explosives, some basic climbing and instant melee finishers, and a sort of light cover-system where your character automatically presses up against nearby walls. Pretty standard stuff, and all in all it feels good - a little stiff (it is Rebellion, after all) but responsive and punchy. In particular I really like that you can sprint while crouching, it feels very natural in combat.
Obviously the sniping is the star and I'll admit, I only became moderately competent over the course of my playthrough but it is quite satisfying to get the hang of manually compensating for drop-off and wind direction and the sound effects and feedback are great. The automatic guns aren't very accurate and have tons of recoil, yet they're still pretty useful because the enemies are very reactive to getting shot at, flinching at near-misses and stumbling around when hit.
The AI is both smart and dumb, in the right ways in my opinion. Their hearing and peripheral vision aren't great but they can see pretty far and their uncertainty period after spotting you only lasts about half-a-second before they alert everyone in the vicinity to your presence. Individually they're not much of a threat - their aim's pretty bad, they often run out in the open and they're easily overwhelmed by gunfire - but linger in any one place for long and soldiers will quickly start filtering in from all over the map and trying to snipe/flank you, and the semi-realistic damage means they'll kill you fast. Luckily, while it's very easy to get spotted it's also pretty easy to slip away, as enemies will usually default to attacking the last place they saw you - all you really have to do is break line of sight and go somewhere else, and the environment easily facilitates this in most cases with lots of different paths to take through the level and opportunities to double-back.
Something about the balance of the whole things just feels subtly brilliant. It can be difficult to avoid getting into a fight between the limited selection of silenced weapons and how quickly you get spotted, and those fights can quickly turn deadly. However, it's not that hard to get out of a fight if you move quickly and there are plenty of places to run - but also, plenty of Nazis everywhere else you go. The game weaves seamlessly back and forth between stealth and action and while neither feels the most polished or deep they both work well enough and compliment each other really well. Playing through it in my sloppy way felt like a proper action movie far more so than a lot of more "cinematic" games to me oddly enough.
The only issue I really had, and this could just be a consequence of playing on Authentic Plus, is that I often didn't know where to go for my objectives. In some cases this was fine - I was able to figure it out just by playing through the level and paying attention to context - but in others I'd wind up clearing out most of the map and running back and forth across it for 20 minutes looking for a fuse box or something I'd missed.