I’ve been a fan of the Splinter Cell video game franchise for a long time. Since it started, in fact, with the original Splinter Cell title for Xbox in 2002. I remember the first time I played the demo, a young Halo fan with a narrow view of the gaming industry and a justifiable hard-on for Halo: Combat Evolved. There was a live-action television commercial for the game, cryptic, stylish. An actor that looked like the Sam Fisher gamers have come to know and love was loading his silenced pistol, crouched on top of a metallic medical table in some random room — I’m pretty sure it was the police precinct in Istanbul, Turkey, if it is any reflection of the original game’s storyline. Anyway, I played the demo and was immediately hooked.
The cool, seamless action, the stealthy sneaking-around gameplay, actor Michael Ironside’s badass voice-overs, it all had me in love with the character and his strange perspective on the world. Like Fisher explains to his daughter, Sarah, in a flashback during Conviction, “You can see all kinds of things in the dark…” Sam is full of observations about the world, but his story is one of evolution and change; sadly, darkness plays a big role in the whole saga.
While the first game was a masterpiece, and its sequels Pandora Tomorrow and Chaos Theory for the original Xbox were just as good, or even better, than the original, the fourth installment, Double Agent, really tested my faith in the franchise. A colossal disappointment for me, as I’m a huge fan of the series. It had a cool moment or two, sure, and the gameplay evolved to keep up with the capabilities of the Xbox 360 — but the missions were bland, the action too familiar, and the story far less engaging than that of Chaos Theory, which is regarded by many as the first truly perfect video game — certainly among the best games for the original Xbox console, alongside Halo 2 and others.
Following the death of Sam’s daughter, Sarah, Double Agent had players leading Fisher on a spiritual journey, chasing ghosts from within the terrorist organization John Brown’s Army, as well as his own U.S. Government Agency, the fictional NSA subdivision Third Echelon. In Conviction, Sam Fisher is a truly free agent, having no ties to his former career — only his friends, memories, and conviction remain. And as a result, the gameplay has changed a great deal to accommodate Fisher’s new temperament. Stealth is reduced to the bone, becoming merely a tactical component — most of the conversational and reconnaissance aspects of the game involve bashing an opponent’s head through a ceramic sink or window, or by targeting multiple enemies’ heads via the “Execute” gameplay function, hitting the “Y” button, and watching bullets and blood spray through the air with the level of flair and badassery you’d expect from a rogue Sam Fisher.
The story follows Sam through a series of revelations about the fate of his daughter, her killers, the now-dead (by Sam’s own hand, in Double Agent) Lambert, who was once Sam’s boss, and other former comrades — such as Agent Grimsdottir, and a fellow soldier who fought alongside Fisher in Iraq during the first Gulf War.
Long-time fans such as myself will find the story up to par with previous installments, and the scale of the events appealing — you get to talk to the fictional near-future President of the United States (a female, notably — feminists rejoice) directly, and eventually prevent her assassination; and there’s plenty of action surrounding the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument, and most interestingly, the final mission takes place within 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, the White House, itself. If you never thought something as patriotic, sacred, and beautiful as the White House could look grim, creepy, and downright sinister, then you’ll be surprised by how messy it gets in Conviction, complete with flickering florescents and blood-soaked wallpaper.
While the story’s all that a fan could ask for, and more, it’s the gameplay mechanics, and just how damn much they’ve changed in this latest game, that really makes the title shine. Stealthy moves such as climbing, shimmying, et cetera, are made more fluid, and a hell of a lot faster than in previous games — apparently Sam’s been keeping in shape. It adds an improved sense of pace to the action, and also makes it easier to avoid the fray of gunfire that sometimes gets to be a little to hot for even Sam Fisher to handle. There’s a slew of new weaponry, which adds a lot of dimension to the gameplay, and all of the primary weapons — all pistols, in light of tradition — are fully customizable and feature unlimited ammo. If that isn’t enough to whet your thirst for stealthy shoot-outs, then the shotguns, submachine-guns, and SC6000s (as used by Sam in prior titles, now available when you…er, kill Splinter Cells) that you can pick up and equip at anytime will.
A surprising change that’s been made to the gameplay is the distinct lack of the one thing that has been Sam’s symbol — his “Batman ears,” as one UbiSoft director put it many years ago — his nightvision goggles. In fact, you don’t wear any sort of enhanced vision goggles until you’re over halfway through the solo campaign. In a mission near the end, you infiltrate — in a stealthy homage to classic Splinter Cell gameplay, which is full of nostalgia — the headquarters building of Third Echelon, and wreak all sorts of havoc. Along the way, you run into a cowering scientist who claims that he was once your biggest fan, and offers you a pair of prototypical goggles which he explains are a new type of sonar vision, which allows you not only to see enemies well in the darkness of an EMP-ravaged endgame, but also to actually see through walls, as if equipped with Superman-style X-ray vision.
If all of the aforementioned data isn’t enough to have you drooling, lusting after the latest — and, quite possibly, final (though I certainly pray it isn’t) — Splinter Cell game, then the knowledge that it comes complete with online multiplayer, both “Face-Off” versus mode and at least two “Co-op” modes, in which players across the globe can pair up, or team up, to “Hunt” down and kill specified enemies, or fight off wave after wave in a horde/escalation-style mode that is a sure test of skill.
The visuals, controls, and physics of the game have evolved right along with Sam’s story and the massive changes that the gameplay has undergone in Conviction, and are a seamless, but aesthetically pleasing, transition from the highly acclaimed visuals, sounds, and physics of earlier titles — particularly those of Chaos Theory, which though released on the original Xbox, remains one of the most beautiful games of all time. No fan of the Splinter Cell saga shall be disappointed upon trying out Sam’s continued story in Conviction, and will certainly be delighted — or made furious — by more than a few shocking surprises along the way.
