Having made the decision to get off the conveyor belt (for a while!) and not buy Call of Duty: Black Ops, I used my gaming habit to catch up on some really great games that I had missed thanks to borrowing from friends and buying used. Unlike many here this game represented my first Splinter Cell game so, in a way, I am free from the trap of criticising it of not being what I expected in regards the previous games (a common complaint here). Starting the game as a COD player was difficult. In COD multiplayer I learnt that you just keep rushing and shooting and respawning as a tactic whereas early on I realised that a fire-fight is really the last thing I wanted since the NPC characters were not awful and could kill me if there was 3 of them versus me. So the first challenge for me was to get into the swing of trying to stealth everyone first – which I'm told is generally the point of the SC games.
I got into this OK and quickly moved through the game on the normal setting. I quite enjoyed it as a game and liked the way it played even if it is rather irritating in some ways and not as good as it could have been in others. The story is maybe secondary to most gamers but matters to me. Here it is no more than "ok". It builds too quickly into something too big and personally I find the "flashback telling" device to be a bit lazy. As a basic structure though, it does the job and perhaps if I had played previous games it would have hooked me more. Anyway, to the gameplay.
The playing of the game is a bit clumsy. The stealth aspect is rewarding and challenging but the action/FPS style aspects don't really work. They feel tacked on and unnatural while at the same also being useful. In too many levels I alerted the enemy (because of not being that good!) but way was able to blast my way out using a silenced SMG with a scope; it didn't feel skillful to me and it felt a little bit like I had cheaply completed a level – but yet the game more than allows me to do it. I came to understand those who had an issue with the gun-fighting aspect of the game because it did feel too easy to just blast and grenade my way out of a room or to mark everyone having gotten one decent hand-to-hand kill. I liked it, but I would have liked it better if the kills had not come as easy as it did.
This also made the game way too easy. Normal didn't take me too long but once I finished it I started it again on "realistic" and found that I ripped through it – the only difference seeming to be that it took fewer shots to kill me. Changing the subject, I liked the controls despite not liking the lack of control over character speed (no sprint button?). The cut scenes were lazy in their structure but mostly they were good aside from the surprisingly poor lip-synching in some of them. The voice acting helps it as well, Ironside particularly being a welcome and impacting presence in the lead. The music is also great – not only what it is but how it is used (like a movie, it increases in intensity during action sequences or when you have alerted guards and they hunt for you).
The game itself is expanded by the Deniable Ops, multiplayer and co-op. Of these I only did the Deniable Ops. I found the Hunter missions to be great fun as the focus was on stealth, but the ones where you defend the bomb seemed to just be a matter of hiding near the EMP and shooting repeatedly from cover with a silenced weapon (speaking of which, why are their guns without silencers? What is the point of them – surely nobody uses them unless they want constant action?).
Anyway, SP:C is a solid game. It has a solid story, good missions and provided more of a challenge that just the usual run and gun action that I have become used to with other franchises. However it is also a bit lazy in the telling and the mix of stealth and action doesn't really work as well as it should. I enjoyed when it worked but I felt that it cheapened itself by often letting me just blunder my way though when I didn't deserve it – even on the hardest setting. Good game – but not a great game.
