Butler finally gets around to playing some of that Splinter Cell all the kids have been talking about. So what is his belated verdict? More after the jump!
So I'm going to let you all in on a little secret: I absolutely despised the Splinter Cell series. The first three installments are to me, everything a stealth game should not be. You would crouch in the dark for up to 20 minutes memorizing guard patterns and waiting for conditions to be perfect, only to then get completely screwed by a body you hid in the last section of the level and have all of your meticulous planning go to hell. I found this to be the case with the first installment, the second installment, and the third installment, never bothering to play beyond the first mission and a half because it was so mind numbingly infuriating. So imagine my surprise when reports of this game came out and the main point of most reviews was that it was nothing like the other Splinter Cell games. So, after dealing with Ubisoft's 1984-modeled DRM, I decided to give this game a whirl. And you know what's nuts?
Besides these, I mean.
This game can be a lot of fun! (Splinter Cell and "fun" previously being thought mutually exclusive descriptors). If you ever played Batman: Arkham Asylum, you know what it's like to be put in the shoes of a character portrayed as a super-stealthy-badass. That game made you feel like you were Batman, and to certain extents, this game makes you really feel like a world class black-ops spy with nothing to lose. The plot begins fairly simply: Sam Fisher is on a quest to take out the people who killed his daughter, and he is out for blood. It's actually eerily like playing as Jack Bauer in the latest season of 24. Anyway, the point is, the game has a number of ways to make you really FEEL this role. If you've already been reading up on this game, you know about the "mark and execute" capability, but if you don't, the gist is this: If you perform a hand to hand kill (a requirement in order to keep you from being able to just click your way through every area) you get the ability to mark a certain number of targets (depending on your weapon) and with the press of a button, Sam takes all of them out in one fell swoop. It may sound kind of cheap, but dammit, it's WHAT SAM FISHER WOULD DO. He is a highly trained spy, this shit is ingrained in him. My problem with the other SC installments was that I never actually felt like a super-spy. I felt like a jackass crouching in the dark, praying that a light switch wouldn't set me back 40 minutes. There are a variety of other cool takedowns that can be pulled off with the right conditions, such as dropping from above, yanking the target out of a window or off of a ledge, and my personal favorite, the ability to take one of your enemies as a human shield in order to maneuver across open spaces.
So the game makes me feel like the super-spy I'm supposed to be, but is it any fun, or just cool? Short answer: hell yes it's fun. Longer answer: my god does it get old. Each of the first few missions follow fairly decent curves, teaching you the best times to utilize certain tools that you are gradually given (frag grenades, flashbangs, remote mines etc.) in order to take out rooms efficiently. They also make it fairly clear, however, that you are not required to be like a thief in the night at all times. Get spotted by a guard you missed? Take him hostage, pull out your machine gun, and redecorate the room with the innards of his unfortunate cohorts before you snap his neck. Hell, the game encourages you to murder everyone along the way, not letting you progress until every loud-mouthed henchman is dispatched. And you will relish the game's insistence on doing so because oh my god these assholes never shut up. You will here "Come on FISHER", "Fight like a MAN, FISHER", "You're dead FISHER" so many times throughout the course of the game that if it WASN'T already in keeping with the plot that you murder everybody, you would still do it just for the 10 seconds of quiet you get before the next room.
"Gonna take your mother on a date, FISHER! Then I'm not gonna
call her the next da - AAAAAGGGGHHHH"
So you have your variety of options to silence these loudmouths, some more extraneous than others (why in god's name would I ever want a machine gun WITHOUT a silencer as opposed to one WITH a silencer?) and for a while you'll have a little fun with it. Then you'll get the portable EMP and the sonar goggles and all sense of strategy goes straight to hell. Every room becomes "trigger EMP, take shield in ensuing chaos caused by sudden darkness, mark and execute as many targets as possible, hide if any enemies remain, pick off stragglers". I'm not saying there aren't other ways to go about it, but you're just making life harder on yourself. It's not entirely unlike what happened with the extraneous abilities and upgrade tree in Prototype. The sonar vision is especially game-breaking, as it just flat out shows you where every enemy in the area is.
I mentioned above that the game is much more forgiving of (and perhaps encouraging towards) sloppier gameplay, which leads to one of my biggest gripes. Suddenly springing instant-fail mission parameters on you when you've been making it through just fine leaving a trail of corpses approximately the length of the French Riviera. I get that they're trying to get us to use those other skills Sam has in his arsenal, but the point gets lost on me when in 90% of the just barely 10 hour campaign, it does not make one damned bit of difference whether you're stealthy or not. The option is there, but at the end of the day, you are a man with a single purpose and nothing to lose. Well, you at least have one purpose until the rest of the plot comes in and weaves such a tangled web of nonsense and double crosses that you lose all interest. There's something about a conspiracy within the government and an assassination plot and a bunch of dangling threads and oh-my-god-who-even-cares? Look, the plot is garbage. It is exactly what you think anything with that douchebag Tom Clancy's name stamped on it would be.
I want to hit you in the face and feel the crunch of
your old, brittle bones against my knuckles.
I am also aware that this game contains a multi-player component, but honestly, I don't plan on reviewing it because I never played it. The people I have talked to who HAVE tried it tell me it's fun, and I have no real reason to doubt them. I don't know, stealth games and multi-player for me are just not something that should be mixed. Another person is too damned unpredictable. If you would like to hear what those modes of play beyond the single-player campaign entail, go check the Kotaku archives or something. Do I have to do every little thing for you?
There is one more feature in this game that bears mentioning before I go on my merry, long-winded way. Every level has at least one interactive interrogation sequence (most have at least 2 of these) in which you grab a target of interest by the throat, drag them to various objects around the room, then press [c] to find out how you can use those objects to rearrange said target's facial features. They get pretty ludicrously violent, which is a... bad thing? I guess? Do I have to say that to cover my ass? Because seriously, leading a man up to a control panel, smashing his face into it, then kicking him off of a balcony is awesome. In fact, you should probably just go ahead and try that at home.
Try and whip up one of these babies while you're at it! The world
is your oyster!
So in summation: yes, this game is pretty enjoyable when you want to just feel like a badass all around, but the weak plot, random and obnoxious mission contrivances, and the game breaking equipment upgrades all kind of sap the life out of the second half as you blindly mow down wave after wave of henchmen to reach an end that is so absurd that you almost wonder why you bothered. Then you remember that time you cleared out an entire room in 5 seconds using nothing but a mark and execute and a well timed ceiling drop, reset to a chapter where the plot hasn't ruined everything, and redecorate the walls of those earlier levels in new and exciting ways.
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