When you're not having fun, you're bored or frustrated, take your pick.
However, getting to the sniping is either frustrating, boring, or both. In real life, sniping involves hours of sitting and waiting before you line up one or two shots and have to move on. In Sniper Elite, it involves hours of crawling around on your belly while scanning every nook, cranny, and bit of rubble for enemy soldiers, knowing you'll probably overlook their drab uniforms in the equally-drab ruins of Berlin.
Don't worry, though. They won't overlook you. The computer can spot a camo-painted cockroach in rubble from two klicks, and the moment you fire a weapon, all the NKVD in Berlin know your position well enough to radio in an artillery strike. If you get the drop on a squad, the only free shot you'll get is your first, because the instant after you fire, the dead guy's buddies are all firing at you, as if they're bats and you just echolocated yourself for them.
And on higher difficulty levels, the enemies can hit the aforementioned cockroach with a three-round burst from their LMG. The NKVD soldiers are almost as accurate with their machine guns as you are with your scoped rifle, but they can dish out a lot more damage. Even good cover often isn't enough. At one point, I was in a pillbox fifty meters from a single, running soldier. He didn't kill me outright, most of the time, but he always took a big chunk out of me before I could make time to waste him.
Strangely, the enemy snipers can't hit much of anything.
The next problem In direct opposition to standard sniper doctrine and to common sense, you'll be doing most of your sniping on your belly in the middle of the street. You'll shoot up a lot more than you'll shoot down. Not infrequently, an enemy sniper is gifted with a glorious position that overlooks the whole level, and that position is denied you. You can't even enter most of the building, and those you *can* get into either have inaccessible upper floors or overlook empty street. It is an extremely rare event that you'll manage to crawl onto a rooftop, or find a nice, cozy window overlooking an enemy emplacement. From what I understand, for a sniper the ability to set up a position is almost as important as the ability to place a shot. The graphics engine appears to be capable of rendering views from the heights, so it positively baffles me why you can never get there.
To make matters worse, you'll often be forced into close-quarters, toe-to-toe combat with the enemy, but this is unsatisfying. All you can do is find a doorway to camp by and pick them off when they run inside. Direct attack is suicide, because a single soldier can tear you apart in less than a second at close range.
I like this game, don't get me wrong, but it's infuriating to see this beautiful sniping system in place only to get shafted by being limited to street level. The sniping is magnificent, it's true, but there's far too much trash in between. Perhaps the designers were trying to avoid making the game a shooting gallery, but the shooting gallery moments are by far the most fun. So much more could have been done with this game, and I hope there's a sequel that does it.