I think this has become one of my favourite game franchises.
Current tally is 108 hours on SE4, I've completely maxed that out and done all the DLC. I decided to start the whole game again a few weeks ago rather than pick up from my old save. I also dropped the STUPID idea of using the cheaty suppressed sniper rifle that basically means you can shoot endlessly with gay abandon because the baddies can never get a lock on you.
SE5 I've done 50 hours on, that's for completion of the campaign and all DLC released to date, but there should be more coming on the season pass (which I have). I actually want to go back and do this one again because I didn't complete all the optional objectives on all missions.
And in the last few days I've started on SE3, this was available for stupidly cheap on Steam (five quid or something, for the super mega complete deluxe edition) so I thought I'd have a punt at it, even though it is getting on a bit now, and it holds up absolutely fine. The graphics engine has been improved for SE4 and SE5, and they've improved some aspects of the controls and whatnot, but fundamentally it is MOAR SNIPER ELITE which is precisely what I was after. The levels are quite small compared to SE4 and SE5, but I can live with that.
What I generally like to do is kill every single Nazi on the entire level, even though I don't have to. Because there are only a finite number of baddies on each level, and they don't respawn, it is possible to systematically kill the whole genocidal lot of them.
One of the DLC levels in SE5 was to kill Hitler, and the idea of it was to work out where he was going to be from one of seven possible locations, and cleanly take him out. I was just like, fuck that, and spent an entire evening killing every last Nazi on the whole level, leaving Hitler until last. In the end the AI effectively just broke, as it was clearly designed around Hitler having EVIL NAZIS around to support him, so he ran to the top of a flight of stairs in his evil Nazi house and stood still, awaiting his fate. I did a save before engaging him and then reloaded it about twenty times, to kill him in as many different ways as possible.
Oh yes and there's a another thing, QUICKSAVE and QUICKLOAD like what games had in the good old days. F5 is quicksave, F9 is quickload, and both take literally just a couple of seconds. On one of the splash screens the game even advises saving your game regularly. Checkpoint save systems are absolutely one of my top pet hates in modern video games.
Incidentally SE4 is currently on sale on Steam, you can get the mega deluxe edition with all the extras, for £6.49p. I paid more than that for chicken and noodles for my lunch one day last week, although admittedly it was very nice chicken and noodles.