So recently I decided to replay the whole Splinter Cell series after I snagged them on the recent Steam summer sale. Now here's the thing, this whole series has a special place in my heart, mainly because the first Splinter Cell was among my first PC games that I played back in the early 00's. But, considering that I was in my early teens back then (and having a rough knowledge on English when I first played the games), I said to myself "Fuck it" and installed all the games again and extensively played through them just to see if each game deserves the praise it's getting and if the "bad" games in the series deserve the hate they're getting.
NOTE: I will be spoiling some major plot points from each game, so if by some chance you still haven't played any of these games, you might wanna click away. Also, everything I'll write in the next couple of paragraphs is strictly based on my current opinion, and is not written with the intent to lower each games quality, they're still pretty good, but there are some huge misfires (we'll get to them) So without any further ado, let's get this thing going! Also, I would love to hear your thoughts on the franchise, how it influenced you, what it means to you, and if you're waiting for a new one, eagerly like me?
1. Splinter Cell (released in 2002)
The first Splinter Cell, although being released 16 years ago, surprisingly holds up well today. From a technical standpoint, I had little trouble getting the game to run at 1080p, downloaded one fix, and the game was up and running (this will be relevant for the later entries). The plot is pretty straight forward, you're Sam Fisher (voiced by Michael Ironside) and you're a spec ops sneaky beaky solider who has the most unnoticeable green light shining googles on earth, and your goal is to prevent WW3. Even after all these years I enjoyed the story, and all the kind of stuff you can do as Sam, but I also noticed one thing that no one seems to talk about when they look back on the older games while criticizing the newer ones. You are actually encouraged to kill a lot of people, and the game has a lot of moments when it turns into a shootout. And honestly, those moments would be fine, if the control scheme and the equipment were feeling a little better to control, but considering it's 16 years old I was willing to look through that flaw. All in all i still enjoy the first SC, yes it has some glitches here and there, and the AI spotting can be iffy from time to time, but I was never frustrated while playing it (mostly because of being able to quicksave on PC), and I can still recommend this one.
2. Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow (Released in 2004)
Just like today's sequels tend to be set in a snowy area, I fell like back in the 00's the "cool" thing was to always have a sequel where jungles are prevalent. I remember playing this one a fuckton back in the day. Especially the first mission (mostly because it was installed on every PC in the internet cafe's is used to visit back then). Now, getting your hands on this game today is a little bit complicated, I honestly had to resort to some less legal ways of obtaining a "digital" copy of this game, because the cd version doesn't work on today's operating systems (that's also the main reason why we will never see a real digital version of this game, because Ubi is to lazy to patch out the DRM), but alas, after some tinkering I managed to run it with no problems. Now, in my opinion, PT improved in a lot of ways compared to the original, Sam got some new moves, we are now able to whistle (which can be abused, just like in every stealth game) and the overall graphical quality has been bumped up (understandably). Mission wise, quite curiously, it has the same amount of missions as the first one (My favorite being Jerusalem), and the same thing with the action sequences where the game basically says "fuck it, kill everyone in sight", and actually encourages you to do it that way. Of course there are missions where you are not allowed to kill anyone or alert anybody, which for this type of game is still a freaking good thing, but there are still some things that kinda made me have a huge question mark above my head (for example, the Paris mission, you encounter a scientist locked in a room, about to be breached by terrorist with explosives, after he gives you the info you need, you basically leave him to die, there's apparently no option to save the poor bastard, and Lambert even comments on that). Not to get to deeply into it, I very much enjoyed my new playthrough of PT, and can only recommend this one too. Let's get to the meat of the series, shall we?
3. Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory aka the Messiah of Stealth games (released in 2005)
This game....if you haven't experienced the perfection that Chaos Theory is, leave everything you're doing right now, go beg on the streets if you don't have the money, screw the finals you have tomorrow or that supper important job interview, you go and play this game NOW! To this day I remember how hyped up I was for this release, words can't even describe it. I watched every video they released on this game prior to shipping date, read every article, and played the Lighthouse dome maybe 50 times through. In my opinion this is one of the best stealth games out there one can experience, starting from the technical aspects, which still hold up beautifully today, to the music, and atmosphere, and the sheer amount of choice you're given in each mission. I remember being so blown away by Sam's new animation system, that even when replaying it last week I was still impressed. The addition of the knife was just icing on the cake. The only thing that I would say doesn't hold up would be the character faces, most of them look like shaved monkeys, but hey, otherwise this game is perfect. Each mission allows for multiple approaches, and this is actually the first one in the series to score you based on your performance during a mission, and this time actually encouraging you to play as a "ghost". Everything here is on point....but, as in the previous entries there are one or two points in the game where it turns into a unnecessary action game, but other than that, everyone who's into stealth games (and loves games like Dishonored because of the choices you can make on how to approach each level) should play it. And now, let's go downhill.
4. Splinter Cell: Double Agent aka Mute punished Snake before MGSV was even conceived (released in 2006)
I'm gonna cut this short, during my playthrough I realized that this is by far my least favorite SC. There are so many things wrong with this game. First of all, if you can, play the 360 version of the game and avoid the PC version like the pest. That is if you want to follow the story canonically, you should play the 360 version, apparently the original Xbox and ps2 versions are superior games (this was back when different platforms had different versions of games), I'm definitely planning on trying to emulate the original xbox version in the near future, but until then I have to bitch about the PC version. Getting this atrocity to run on my PC was a pain in the ass and I honestly don't have a clue how I managed to play through this game back in 2006. The sheer amount of glitches and game breaking bugs is incredible and this port easily grabs one of the top 5 spots in my "worst PC ports" list. I baffled how they managed to go from the perfection that CT was to this. The story sounds super interesting at first, Sam's daughter (did I mention he has a daughter) get's killed and Sam sinks into depression, he decides to take a super risky mission where he's supposed to infiltrate a terrorist group known as JBA. While the concept sounds good, the execution is just plain bad, first of all, Sam hardly talks in this game, he's faced with major decisions in the game, and mostly he would react with a sentence or two, like dude, you just killed an innocent pilot, can I see any kind of reaction. Also, for some reason, controlling Sam in this game feels so bad compared to CT. Gone are the choices and multiple approaches you had in the previous game, you're mostly following a straight linear path, and it simply kills the joy of playing this game. I seriously don't want to waste too many words on this one, for me it's a severe disappointment coming after CT, which in all honesty is really sad, because I was really looking forward to this one back when it was released.
5. Splinter Cell: Conviction aka John Wick simulator (released in 2010)
This one split the whole fan base. I remember everyone raging about how "this is not a real SC game!" mostly because of the "mark and execute" feature that got introduced in this one and I totally understand that. If you look at it from a purist point of view, this game throws all the traditions of prior SC games out of the window and decides to make Sam into practically Batman. I honestly didn't mind it that much, by this point the series was on hiatus and needed some change (considering how bad Double Agent bode with everyone). It made even sense story wise. Sam is now a fugitive after all the shit that he's done in DA, and he finds out that his daughter is actually alive, and now the fucker is after all the people who wronged him, of course he's gonna turn into a crazy killing machine. The one thing that doesn't work for me in that context is how Sam turned from moving like a 50 year old in the previous tittles (he actually is around that age), to a Jason Bourne type of super soldier who moves along walls as fast as a monkey. This one is also the shortest game in the series (took me less than 4h to finish), and there's simply no point in trying to do a "non lethal" playthrough, for a couple of reasons:
a) there are countless instances where you simply have to kill all the soldiers in the room
b) you can not choose if Sam is gonna just knock out an enemy or just straight up murder him
c) as mentioned before, story wise, Sam just doesn't give a fuck and wants to get revenge
Still I enjoyed playing through Conviction again, mostly because the PC port works without any major issues, and technically it holds up really well today (I still love the projections displayed in front of you).
This one is simply a love it or hate it, and there's no way around it.
6. Splinter Cell: Blacklist aka the best of both worlds (released in 2013)
This is the one that committed the sin of replacing Michael Ironside as the voice actor for Sam Fisher. To this day, every time I boot up this game I hope I'll hear his voice coming from Sam's mouth, but nope, here's some generic sounding guy playing one of gamings biggest icons. The game in itself is really good, and in my opinion is just slightly behind Chaos Theory. The developers managed to please both sides, if you wanted to continue playing each mission like John Wick, you can totally do that. Want to be a purist instead and feel like you're playing Chaos Theory? You can do that too, just play on Perfectionist difficulty and you'll have the time of your life. I liked almost every aspect of this game, the mission design, multiple approaches, playing on perfectionist difficulty, Sam's movement, everything (except the voice actor, as I stated before). I honestly thing that it might have been better if they had a different protagonist instead of replacing the actor (although, to be fair, Michael Ironside had to step down because of health problems). I think this is the game where Ubi took a hard look at what they did wrong in the previous games and managed to improve substantially. It's a shame that it didn't sell as expected which led to the current drought that we're having with the SC franchise.
I tried to keep this as short as possible, all in all, the SC franchise still remains one of my favorite stealth game franchises with all of it's shortcomings. It was nice to return to the whole series in the course of the last two weeks. Now I fell a little bit burnt out, but I got the perfect cure for that in the form of the new God of War, so I'll be enjoying that in the next weeks.
Let me know your thoughts, what's your favorite SC game, and when did you jump into the series?
NOTE: I will be spoiling some major plot points from each game, so if by some chance you still haven't played any of these games, you might wanna click away. Also, everything I'll write in the next couple of paragraphs is strictly based on my current opinion, and is not written with the intent to lower each games quality, they're still pretty good, but there are some huge misfires (we'll get to them) So without any further ado, let's get this thing going! Also, I would love to hear your thoughts on the franchise, how it influenced you, what it means to you, and if you're waiting for a new one, eagerly like me?
1. Splinter Cell (released in 2002)
The first Splinter Cell, although being released 16 years ago, surprisingly holds up well today. From a technical standpoint, I had little trouble getting the game to run at 1080p, downloaded one fix, and the game was up and running (this will be relevant for the later entries). The plot is pretty straight forward, you're Sam Fisher (voiced by Michael Ironside) and you're a spec ops sneaky beaky solider who has the most unnoticeable green light shining googles on earth, and your goal is to prevent WW3. Even after all these years I enjoyed the story, and all the kind of stuff you can do as Sam, but I also noticed one thing that no one seems to talk about when they look back on the older games while criticizing the newer ones. You are actually encouraged to kill a lot of people, and the game has a lot of moments when it turns into a shootout. And honestly, those moments would be fine, if the control scheme and the equipment were feeling a little better to control, but considering it's 16 years old I was willing to look through that flaw. All in all i still enjoy the first SC, yes it has some glitches here and there, and the AI spotting can be iffy from time to time, but I was never frustrated while playing it (mostly because of being able to quicksave on PC), and I can still recommend this one.
2. Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow (Released in 2004)
Just like today's sequels tend to be set in a snowy area, I fell like back in the 00's the "cool" thing was to always have a sequel where jungles are prevalent. I remember playing this one a fuckton back in the day. Especially the first mission (mostly because it was installed on every PC in the internet cafe's is used to visit back then). Now, getting your hands on this game today is a little bit complicated, I honestly had to resort to some less legal ways of obtaining a "digital" copy of this game, because the cd version doesn't work on today's operating systems (that's also the main reason why we will never see a real digital version of this game, because Ubi is to lazy to patch out the DRM), but alas, after some tinkering I managed to run it with no problems. Now, in my opinion, PT improved in a lot of ways compared to the original, Sam got some new moves, we are now able to whistle (which can be abused, just like in every stealth game) and the overall graphical quality has been bumped up (understandably). Mission wise, quite curiously, it has the same amount of missions as the first one (My favorite being Jerusalem), and the same thing with the action sequences where the game basically says "fuck it, kill everyone in sight", and actually encourages you to do it that way. Of course there are missions where you are not allowed to kill anyone or alert anybody, which for this type of game is still a freaking good thing, but there are still some things that kinda made me have a huge question mark above my head (for example, the Paris mission, you encounter a scientist locked in a room, about to be breached by terrorist with explosives, after he gives you the info you need, you basically leave him to die, there's apparently no option to save the poor bastard, and Lambert even comments on that). Not to get to deeply into it, I very much enjoyed my new playthrough of PT, and can only recommend this one too. Let's get to the meat of the series, shall we?
3. Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory aka the Messiah of Stealth games (released in 2005)
This game....if you haven't experienced the perfection that Chaos Theory is, leave everything you're doing right now, go beg on the streets if you don't have the money, screw the finals you have tomorrow or that supper important job interview, you go and play this game NOW! To this day I remember how hyped up I was for this release, words can't even describe it. I watched every video they released on this game prior to shipping date, read every article, and played the Lighthouse dome maybe 50 times through. In my opinion this is one of the best stealth games out there one can experience, starting from the technical aspects, which still hold up beautifully today, to the music, and atmosphere, and the sheer amount of choice you're given in each mission. I remember being so blown away by Sam's new animation system, that even when replaying it last week I was still impressed. The addition of the knife was just icing on the cake. The only thing that I would say doesn't hold up would be the character faces, most of them look like shaved monkeys, but hey, otherwise this game is perfect. Each mission allows for multiple approaches, and this is actually the first one in the series to score you based on your performance during a mission, and this time actually encouraging you to play as a "ghost". Everything here is on point....but, as in the previous entries there are one or two points in the game where it turns into a unnecessary action game, but other than that, everyone who's into stealth games (and loves games like Dishonored because of the choices you can make on how to approach each level) should play it. And now, let's go downhill.
4. Splinter Cell: Double Agent aka Mute punished Snake before MGSV was even conceived (released in 2006)
I'm gonna cut this short, during my playthrough I realized that this is by far my least favorite SC. There are so many things wrong with this game. First of all, if you can, play the 360 version of the game and avoid the PC version like the pest. That is if you want to follow the story canonically, you should play the 360 version, apparently the original Xbox and ps2 versions are superior games (this was back when different platforms had different versions of games), I'm definitely planning on trying to emulate the original xbox version in the near future, but until then I have to bitch about the PC version. Getting this atrocity to run on my PC was a pain in the ass and I honestly don't have a clue how I managed to play through this game back in 2006. The sheer amount of glitches and game breaking bugs is incredible and this port easily grabs one of the top 5 spots in my "worst PC ports" list. I baffled how they managed to go from the perfection that CT was to this. The story sounds super interesting at first, Sam's daughter (did I mention he has a daughter) get's killed and Sam sinks into depression, he decides to take a super risky mission where he's supposed to infiltrate a terrorist group known as JBA. While the concept sounds good, the execution is just plain bad, first of all, Sam hardly talks in this game, he's faced with major decisions in the game, and mostly he would react with a sentence or two, like dude, you just killed an innocent pilot, can I see any kind of reaction. Also, for some reason, controlling Sam in this game feels so bad compared to CT. Gone are the choices and multiple approaches you had in the previous game, you're mostly following a straight linear path, and it simply kills the joy of playing this game. I seriously don't want to waste too many words on this one, for me it's a severe disappointment coming after CT, which in all honesty is really sad, because I was really looking forward to this one back when it was released.
5. Splinter Cell: Conviction aka John Wick simulator (released in 2010)
This one split the whole fan base. I remember everyone raging about how "this is not a real SC game!" mostly because of the "mark and execute" feature that got introduced in this one and I totally understand that. If you look at it from a purist point of view, this game throws all the traditions of prior SC games out of the window and decides to make Sam into practically Batman. I honestly didn't mind it that much, by this point the series was on hiatus and needed some change (considering how bad Double Agent bode with everyone). It made even sense story wise. Sam is now a fugitive after all the shit that he's done in DA, and he finds out that his daughter is actually alive, and now the fucker is after all the people who wronged him, of course he's gonna turn into a crazy killing machine. The one thing that doesn't work for me in that context is how Sam turned from moving like a 50 year old in the previous tittles (he actually is around that age), to a Jason Bourne type of super soldier who moves along walls as fast as a monkey. This one is also the shortest game in the series (took me less than 4h to finish), and there's simply no point in trying to do a "non lethal" playthrough, for a couple of reasons:
a) there are countless instances where you simply have to kill all the soldiers in the room
b) you can not choose if Sam is gonna just knock out an enemy or just straight up murder him
c) as mentioned before, story wise, Sam just doesn't give a fuck and wants to get revenge
Still I enjoyed playing through Conviction again, mostly because the PC port works without any major issues, and technically it holds up really well today (I still love the projections displayed in front of you).
This one is simply a love it or hate it, and there's no way around it.
6. Splinter Cell: Blacklist aka the best of both worlds (released in 2013)
This is the one that committed the sin of replacing Michael Ironside as the voice actor for Sam Fisher. To this day, every time I boot up this game I hope I'll hear his voice coming from Sam's mouth, but nope, here's some generic sounding guy playing one of gamings biggest icons. The game in itself is really good, and in my opinion is just slightly behind Chaos Theory. The developers managed to please both sides, if you wanted to continue playing each mission like John Wick, you can totally do that. Want to be a purist instead and feel like you're playing Chaos Theory? You can do that too, just play on Perfectionist difficulty and you'll have the time of your life. I liked almost every aspect of this game, the mission design, multiple approaches, playing on perfectionist difficulty, Sam's movement, everything (except the voice actor, as I stated before). I honestly thing that it might have been better if they had a different protagonist instead of replacing the actor (although, to be fair, Michael Ironside had to step down because of health problems). I think this is the game where Ubi took a hard look at what they did wrong in the previous games and managed to improve substantially. It's a shame that it didn't sell as expected which led to the current drought that we're having with the SC franchise.
I tried to keep this as short as possible, all in all, the SC franchise still remains one of my favorite stealth game franchises with all of it's shortcomings. It was nice to return to the whole series in the course of the last two weeks. Now I fell a little bit burnt out, but I got the perfect cure for that in the form of the new God of War, so I'll be enjoying that in the next weeks.
Let me know your thoughts, what's your favorite SC game, and when did you jump into the series?
