Box Art
I’ve always been a fan of the Splinter Cell series and the potential that the media coverage demonstrated more or less, single handedly convinced me I should get back into xbox 360 gaming. Coming into a game with this level of expectation is almost always a precursor to disappointment.
The story begins with Sam receiving some information from a familiar voice that his daughter who was supposed to have been killed in a car crash several years prior my not be as dead as he thought. The approach they took to telling this story was interesting, in the sense that they bounce around the time line to sort of plant the idea of betrayal that you would expect in a spy thriller in an effort to create some drama and tension that it doesn’t seem to me would have been capable in the rest of the story without it. Unfortunately I don’t think it was developed well enough and as such didn’t really have the impact it was supposed to. The single player campaign is very short, and if there weren’t some bottle necks for me I’m sure I would have been really disappointed, but there is a lot of replay value here that I will touch on later.
The score and effects were pretty spot on, but I found a lot of the voice acting was lackluster and not up to my expectations for a title of this size. This sadly Includes some shaky work by Sam himself on a number of occasions. Grim’s voice actor deserve a lot of credit for keeping the whole story grounded, the voice work done for her is easily on par with the best in the industry, and I think without it, it would have made the rest of dodgy voice work stand out that much more. The hands down biggest annoyance of this game, is that the goons Sam is stalking are, well, annoying… They repeat the same lines over and over again, non-stop, it’s really really bad (i remember this scene). “I was at <Insert name of last level here> Fisher! You’re Dead!”, it actually made me turn the game off on a couple of occasions it was so bad.
The game looks very good, and the projected text that they introduced did work fairly well for the objective based messages, I found the video clips they projected passable most of the time, since the picture wasn’t clear enough to watch most of the time. As Sam is in the safety of shadows, the world goes black and white which serves well to let you know you are hidden, however it makes seeing the environment somewhat more challenging, especially if you haven’t had an opportunity to mark anything yet. I had the same problem with The Saboteur, I’m not a huge fan of black and white in games in general I don’t think, especially one as graphically complex as splinter cell.
In their marketing of this title Ubisoft boasted Splinter Cell Conviction’s ability to keep the player as immersed to the experience during the story telling elements by keeping them in control, or by use of the camera to sort of flow in and out. While it’s obvious that this is certainly what they were shooting for, it didn’t come off as at all special, certainly not to the point of being a bullet point for marketing. They also spent some marketing effort pitching these “Interactive Interrogations”, this is flat out a sham, they might as well have put up a little text box with “press “B” to continue”, oh wait, thats pretty much what they did… Instead the video auto-pauses, and you get to hit the button to make it continue again. Sure, you get a little control over what animation plays next by navigating around a very small, closed in by an invisible wall area. Don’t get me wrong, it’s fun enough, and the animations can be satisfying, but don’t sell it to me as some crazy inventive thing you’ve done, you’re not nearly as free to torture you subject as you’re lead to believe you would be. Though it does clearly serve as a means to deliver story while the player is still in control, and it is effective in that sense, just another over hyped feature that I probably would have found excellent had they not made a bullet point out of it. Another example of how they leave the player in control while story is delivered is with the old, directional microphone, point the camera at the targets as they move around the map game! … I hate that game… its not fun, just show me the cut scene next time please…
I must say though, once you get through all of that nonsense, and you get down to playing Sam Fisher, the ex-3rd Echelon operative (not the camera man), this game can be fun! Getting a clean sweep on a room full of bad guys with some clever use of environment, and gadgets it is overwhelmingly satisfying. The unfortunate part for me is that as the game progressed and the rooms became more full, I found myself reacting more than planning and because things are going so quickly you don’t always get a chance to scope out the room for places to set up an assault. Unlike every other Splinter Cell game, this one is pretty well lit so hiding spots are sparse, and you may not know there is a pipe for climbing on the other side of the room. “Mark and Execute” is not a win button, it can be difficult to pull off in certain circumstances when you’re dealing with cluttered room where you lose range or line of sight on patrols and miss a kill, the pace of the combat is quick, and I bet some really good players have some really good methods to clearing out a room. On more than a couple occasions however, I found the best way to clear the way was to mark everyone, charge in and meat shield the nearest guy and use the execute on the rest. Because of this however, I think playing this game again and again would get more and more fun as you learn the environments, so it would be more satisfying sweeps like I mentioned above and less generic hectic sweeps that I frequently saw.
There are weapon crates scattered throughout the game which will allow you to customize Sam’s load out, and upgrade the weapons that are available. But.. alas I don’t know why you would since Sam cannot survive a gun fight, you really rely on your silenced pistol 95% of the time, and apart from the range modification I didn’t notice any real impact of the others. A nice touch I guess, but it was mostly useless.
In addition to the single player mode, there are “deniable ops” which are simply additional scenarios you can drop into, they are kind of neat in that if you get spotted, they call in more reinforcements, thereby prolonging the mission creating a nice little diversion and some more playtime.
So while I wasn’t disappointed by my excessively over-hyped expectations of this game, I wasn’t thoroughly impressed by it either. It seemed like they made sacrifices to make way for their innovations, and left the game lacking in what I would generally call important areas to a game of this ilk. By all means, if the idea of a new take on the action/stealth genre, this is a very good place to start.
