Reading preview articles and a few other information leading up to Splinter Cell: Conviction‘s release, I was under the impression Ubisoft was designing it to appeal to new fans as well as old. From the game mechanics being more open-ended and accessible to the storyline, it sounded as if anyone could jump in and have fun no matter the exposure. After all, it doesn’t take much to understand a hero who thought his daughter had died, only to discover the potential identity of her killer and that she may be alive after all.

Only they failed on all parts. Stealth games are traditionally a pain because once you get caught the game is practically over. While Sam Fischer is still pretty vulnerable in Conviction, it’s no longer end game the second someone sees you. The A.I. has been built around where you were last scene, giving you a visual aid to help you run and hide and plan your next move. If this is the concept the entire game design was built off of, then the game could have been a unique and excellent entry into the stealth genre.

Instead, the concept of “accessibility” included “letting people run in like an idiot just firing their guns”.

Well, that’s not completely accurate. You have to take cover, so it’s more like the Gears of War school of “run behind a box and shoot from behind it”. This only harms the game in the long run, as it prevents the stealth moments from really taking off and dampens them with too many moments of mandatory action pieces. Most of the maps are designed with hidden spots to use in order to hide, but not all of them and those hiding spots aren’t exactly useful in every situation.

I cannot explain whether the stealth elements that are in the game are better or worse than previous, as I had never really played a Splinter Cell before. However, something makes me feel as if Sam Fischer’s abilities have been greatly compromised. Each level allows players to be stealthy, but you won’t be climbing up the walls with your legs spread wide like a ninja, waiting to strike from the most unexpected location. Instead you’ll be climbing up a pipe hanging upside down, and maybe you will drop down on them and potentially make your location known to everyone else.

This is fun, of course. As stated, the greatest enjoyment I had gotten from the game was shooting someone in the head, hopping out a window to climb across the outside wall, pull someone from another window, hop back in and stab a guy in the back. That’s the sort of action that makes you feel like some kind of Demigod, or a genuine assassin.

Then the game just decides “hey, we’re going to give you a few corridors without anything more than some cover so you have to play like Gears of War”. Then the game begins to suck and feel like a budget title rather than a major IP. I mean, this is a game that used to be a premiere franchise for the Xbox, one of the reasons to get the system. Yet now it feels like a project completed by a small studio that just doesn’t have the talent to put some good gameplay together.

If Ubisoft wanted to make Splinter Cell more accessible, then all they needed to do was work on the stealth elements. Give the player a ton of options that allows them to not only escape pursuit, but take no time at all to blend back into the environment and take someone down. The tools in Conviction are a nice starting point to that, but they are nowhere near polished enough to become a new standard in the genre.

What could have been the saving grace would be the story. After all, this is a Tom Clancy game, right? Political intrigue! A hero with a plight that the audience can relate to! It really gives the audience a chance to sink into Sam Fischer.

Yet this, too, was completely screwed up. In fact, the game doesn’t feel like it was developed with a story in mind. It feels a lot more like they made a bunch of levels and decided to string something together so it all made sense. On the one hand you have Sam trying to get in touch with his daughter, he’s working with this woman that he apparently knows from a previous game because she put a gun to his head, and there’s this guy narrating the whole thing in an interrogation room. Somehow the President is almost killed.

Y’know, I really couldn’t tell you what this game is about except for Sam constantly asking “What about my daughter?” every step of the way. I don’t know who any of these characters are, I don’t know why Sam sounds like a much older man than he looks, especially when he’s lacking a proper beard for it. Really, I can’t think of a more misappropriate voice for the face. In the end things happen, Sam gets his daughter back (SPOILER ALERT), and the day is saved. Somehow. I think.

The best offer this game has to make is all the extra content. There are single player and co-op missions and challenges to add to game time as well as a multiplayer map. In other words, despite the game not being that long on the whole (a little less than average I’d say), it’s got plenty of extra content in there to entertain. Which is nice if you happen to purchase the game for $10 and find it enjoyable enough. Yet if I had paid $60 for this I would have been very, very disappointed.

I was expecting my first jump into this franchise to be a bit better than this, and I’ve been left with what is no more than an average games with ideas that could really pay off handled by a proper studio.

Discuss this game in the forums