After recently playing through Splinter Cell Chaos Theory, I decided to do the same with the latest game in the series Splinter Cell Blacklist. Hoo boy, have I never been so conflicted about a game before :/
GAMEPLAY
First things first, let me just state that I'm actually a fan of the gameplay. The game doesn't have the methodical and deliberate pacing of the classic Splinter Cell games but I don't think it's actually bad or unpolished in it's mechanics. Sam as a character moves faster, interacts with environments more smoothly and generally does what you want without any fuss at all. The enemies are also more aware and harder to lose in higher difficulties due to their increased sight ranges and lower alert thresholds but the additional mobility you have more than compensates. All in all, controlling Sam feels good.
Additionally, if you ever wanted to play Splinter Cell in a more offensive manner, your options here are greatly expanded without removing or hurting your ability to play the game in the pure stealth/"ghost" manner. You can still waltz through almost every part of the game (maybe all parts of it) undetected and it still requires you to be as precise and aware as before.
I beat the game primarily because I wanted to see what new scenarios the designers could give me when it came to each new level as well as experiment with the different styles of play. You can play as a Ghost, which means that you move through the level either leaving enemies undisturbed or non-lethally disposing of them without being detected. A more offensive style is that of the Panther where you kill enemies or raise their alert levels and then avoid them but remain undetected otherwise. Lastly, the Assault style is just that: go in guns blazing and take the enemy on mano a mano. This isn't always an available option and there are segments of the game where you're forced to be a Ghost but they're relatively few and far between.
MUSIC
The music and overall soundtrack to the game was a step back from Amon Tobin's trip-hop styled music. What's in the game now isn't bad or offensive, it's just kinda bland and unmemorable.
EVERYTHING ELSE
Here's where the game really shits the bed. This turned out to be a long, long list for me so here goes:
What did you guys think of this game?
GAMEPLAY
First things first, let me just state that I'm actually a fan of the gameplay. The game doesn't have the methodical and deliberate pacing of the classic Splinter Cell games but I don't think it's actually bad or unpolished in it's mechanics. Sam as a character moves faster, interacts with environments more smoothly and generally does what you want without any fuss at all. The enemies are also more aware and harder to lose in higher difficulties due to their increased sight ranges and lower alert thresholds but the additional mobility you have more than compensates. All in all, controlling Sam feels good.
Additionally, if you ever wanted to play Splinter Cell in a more offensive manner, your options here are greatly expanded without removing or hurting your ability to play the game in the pure stealth/"ghost" manner. You can still waltz through almost every part of the game (maybe all parts of it) undetected and it still requires you to be as precise and aware as before.
I beat the game primarily because I wanted to see what new scenarios the designers could give me when it came to each new level as well as experiment with the different styles of play. You can play as a Ghost, which means that you move through the level either leaving enemies undisturbed or non-lethally disposing of them without being detected. A more offensive style is that of the Panther where you kill enemies or raise their alert levels and then avoid them but remain undetected otherwise. Lastly, the Assault style is just that: go in guns blazing and take the enemy on mano a mano. This isn't always an available option and there are segments of the game where you're forced to be a Ghost but they're relatively few and far between.
MUSIC
The music and overall soundtrack to the game was a step back from Amon Tobin's trip-hop styled music. What's in the game now isn't bad or offensive, it's just kinda bland and unmemorable.
EVERYTHING ELSE
Here's where the game really shits the bed. This turned out to be a long, long list for me so here goes:
- Stupid UPlay Reward System: For those of you who don't know, the Ubisoft client for the PC is called UPlay and it has this feature where you can earn points by doing certain things in games and get rewarded for them. The important thing to remember here is that these points are redeemed from each game but can be used in any other game. For example, I can take the UPlay points I get from doing something in, say, 'The Crew' and use them to unlock exclusive items in 'Splinter Cell Blacklist'. Since I had spare points saved up, I went with the free $200,000 you get from one of the available rewards for Blacklist. This instantly gave me an upgraded radar which allowed me to find even more optional objectives in the levels and earn even more cash by more easily avoiding/silently killing. It pretty much broke the game.
- Stupid Side Mission Format: OK, so what if I'd just chosen not to use the UPlay points. Turns out that wouldn't matter! Independent of the game, you have available Co-op/Solo side missions that you can do for your teammates. One of them in particular, Charlie Cole, has missions that are in a wave format. You get one fixed, small sandbox of a level and groups of enemies spawn in it in a wave format, up to 20 waves. Every five waves, you have the option to leave the mission and keep the money you've earned in it so far. More critically, every wave of enemies means more enemies per wave which equals more money/enemy disposed of (and you do have to either knock out or kill every enemy NPC in a wave) and you also have the option of doing these levels again from Wave 1! This completely broke the game. Doing just Charlie's first side mission up to Wave 10 (with retries) took about 2 hours and gave me $700,000. I used that to upgrade my gear and went back in. 15 minutes later, I'd cleared 5 waves for a cool $150,000. Before this, here's where my character was:
After a few quick upgrades, here's where I ended up:
This led to me spending a couple more hours in just this one level grinding the shit out of it and using it to upgrade the rest of my gear. After that, I had no trouble with the rest of the game whatsoever, because my gear was so far ahead of where it should have been. I had both a fully silenced super-pistol and super-rifle, heaps of ammo for both, Sam virtually overflowed with gadgets and could pretty much sprint up behind all enemies and silently knock them out. It made a joke of the game.
Now, what if I had decided not to grind that level? That's a fair point; after all, I did spend around 4.5 hours just grinding it for money. If I hadn't done that though, I would still have had to spend at least 2 hours going through the rest of Charlie's missions to unlock the best weapons for the Assault style and this would still have given me heaps of money. Given that they follow the same "sandbox with enemy waves" format as each other, you literally can't avoid it if you're trying to unlock all the gear. The game throws money at you which trivializes the challenge of the game and makes a mockery of the upgrade system. Yes, you can upgrade your base but it doesn't really mean much when you have so much money lying around. - The format of the story. A terrorist organization called 'The Engineers' conducts a terror attack at the start of the game. After that, they announce that they will attack American interests once a week until their demands are met. This seems to gel well initially. After all, you have a set time limit between attacks that is prominently displayed to you, you have a motha-fucking plane for a base and you've got multiple missions that you can take on all over the world. Surely this means that, if you take a side mission, you lose some amount of time from the countdown, forcing you to make choices about which side missions to take, right? Maybe you can only do a side mission from Grim and one from Briggs but you have to skip Charlie's because you don't have enough time. Well, don't worry about that because it doesn't matter. Apparently deploying to a sea fort in the English channel, then to the Pakistani Embassy in Yemen and finally to a border crossing in Chechnya takes no time at all! You'll still have the same amount of time at the end of going to all those places as you would have if you hadn't gone there. Perhaps the Engineer terrorists are just really polite?
Another prime example of the format in which the story is presented being funky are the first person sections where you play as another team member. Not only are those sections short and laughably easy, they serve no purpose other than to "mix up" the gameplay for about 3 minutes. It really makes the game seem way more disjointed and unfinished than it should. Throughout the game, there are also parts of the story where you can choose to either kill or spare a few enemy NPC's. This turns out to mean nothing as it doesn't have any impact on the story or gameplay in any way. It feels like the game was supposed to be built around a sort of branching story-line or some sort of morality system that was then just gutted. Even the 3 "styles" of play mentioned previously don't really do anything. Want to go through all the sections of the game as a pure Assault player? Feel free, it doesn't matter in the least to the story! Want to play as a Ghost? Feel free but, outside of slightly higher score/a bit more money, you're not getting anything else out of it. I'm seriously wondering if the plug was pulled on making the game more robust and fleshed out. - Sam Fisher as a character: This is probably the worst change for me and what initially prompted the Syphon Filter comparison in the thread title. The Fisher of the classic Splinter Cell games is a very measured, reasonable and generally humane sort of person. He cares about his job, his country, his daughter and his coworkers. In Blacklist though, he's turned into a reckless, arrogant and very boring Standard Military Character. He's gruff, disrespects, belittles and dismisses his team, never apologizes for his mistakes and is a very poor leader. There is none of the easy camaraderie and gentle humor of the other Splinter Cell games left in this character and, as a result, he's far less likable. In this way, he reminds me more of a sort of souped up Gabriel Logan from Syphon Filter. He's more of an mid-90's super-spy than any sort of relatable, grounded special forces veteran.
- Charlie Cole: Special shoutout to your teammate Charlie Cole. He's basically just a bit of a prick who doesn't serve any purpose other than to be a pretty standard techno-geek who causes more trouble than he's worth and has extremely awkward "comedic moments". Next to the overly grim seriousness of every other character, he just comes of looking like an idiot who's very out of place in the story.
What did you guys think of this game?
