A necessary reboot that fights accusations of dumbing down with an artful mix of stealth and violence.

User Rating: 8 | Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Conviction (Collector's Edition) X360
Visceral. It's a word that's overused in game reviews, slapped into descriptions of any game that involves kicking people in the teeth or stamping on their goolies.

It's become so pervasive that EA even renamed one of its tediously monikered regional studios to Visceral Games, adding even more ammo to the argument that it should be placed on the OXM list of banned words. Right next to 'gameplay'.

The problem is, it's also a word that lends itself so beautifully to Sam Fisher's new, gritty combat technique. Fisher's crunching hand-to-hand takedowns are something to behold - this is a man who, rather than lamping someone in the face, smashes their teeth in by punching them with his gun. All this accompanied by audio that sounds like someone stamping on a lettuce.

If you don't wince the first time Sam incapacitates a bad guy by repeatedly jabbing them in the windpipe with the business end of a Beretta, we reckon you're probably a robot.
This outrageously brutal method of eliminating enemies flows into the feature that genuinely revolutionises the way the Splinter Cell series plays.

Each time you pull off a takedown you unlock one-time access to the Mark and Execute option, which allows you to tag two or more enemies with RB and then automatically headshot them by hitting Y. As a result, if you can concentrate your stealthy efforts on picking off just one member of the enemy forces, you'll be rewarded with the ability to mop up a further three or so in very stylish fashion.

At a very basic level, you'll play this strategy in sequence - performing the takedown, tagging further enemies, then hitting Y. Once you get into Fisher's head, though, you can perform manoeuvres that would have Seagal hanging up his ponytail. Our favourite is tagging four enemies, performing one of the Death From Above takedowns on a fifth and then instantly hitting Y to take out an entire room full of enemies in a couple of seconds. If there's one thing better than taking people out stealthily, it's doing it with lightning efficiency. Much like Batman: Arkham Asylum, Splinter Cell Conviction does a great job of making you feel like an utter badass.

That's the core formula that you'll be employing for the majority of Conviction's relatively short single-player campaign. Sam's quest to discover who killed his daughter only clocks in at around six hours, which is disappointing given how long we've waited for another instalment in the series. Over the course of that time Ubisoft Montreal flirts with variety, with mixed results. Highlights include one scene where you're chasing an assassin through crowded areas, which works brilliantly as a break from silent snooping.

There's also the odd moment where you must remain completely undetected, which is a neat nod to how hardcore the series used to be.
Unfortunately there are also mis-steps like one particularly tedious flashback sequence, which demonstrates that if you strip away the interesting stealth mechanics and options for strategic play, what you're left with is a limp cover shooter. That it ends with a whack-a-mole defence sequence as you await extraction makes it all the more snooze-inducing.

Moments like this mean the campaign seems to lose inspiration as it hurtles towards its conclusion. Rather than large areas that offer a variety of strategic options (which are where the game excels), Sam is funnelled into corridors littered with cover and rammed with enemies. Obviously it's necessary to make the game tougher as you approach the finale, but we're sure there are better ways to do it than that.

What makes Splinter Cell brilliant is sizing up an area, working out a route through both the environment and the enemies, and then either executing it with precision or messing it up and frantically trying to fix the problem. Alas, those experiences are distributed more towards the beginning of single-player, so when you've finally got the measure of Sam's skills, you're unable to use them to maximum effect.

If single player was the whole story, Conviction would be in trouble. As it stands, though, Sam has brought along a couple of friends to keep the rubber suit fetish fans happy. Archer and Kestrel are the stars of a substantial co-op campaign that sits alongside the main plot and acts as a prequel of sorts. It's not quite as glossy and cinematic as Fisher's outing - after all, it has to fit on a split-screen - but it's based on the same concepts, stealthy takedowns and vicious interrogations, including one where a poor chap gets up close and personal with an oven hob.

The co-op maps do double duty for a series of modes collected under the title Deniable Ops. They're essentially timed challenges, tasking you with cleaning out the level as quickly as possible, or defending an EMP device from waves of bad guys.

In a neat touch, if you're spotted in Hunter mode (which reminds us of hours spent playing Terrorist Hunt in Rainbow Six Vegas), an extra ten enemies are dropped into the map to make your life very difficult. In addition, there's a two-player adversarial multiplayer mode called Face Off, which just about works. Two spies face off against each other in a level filled with enemies.

You earn points by killing AI terrorists, but the big points are reserved for tracking down the other spy and killing him, which is easier said than done. It takes real mastery of the sonar goggles to get in close enough to identify and take down a spy - you'll mostly find yourself getting plugged by enthusiastic AI patrols.

Splinter Cell Conviction might not have the longest or greatest single-player campaign, but it makes up for this with a substantial selection of alternative modes. That includes the glorious co-op story, which could almost be the centrepiece for the game itself had it not added 'mates' under 'thumbs' on the list of requirements to play. Most importantly, Sam and chums handle better than ever, and the new sense of momentum to the murdering has definitely changed the already impressive Splinter Cell model for the better.

Wherever it is you find it, you'll definitely discover something in Splinter Cell Conviction that reminds you why gaming is brilliant - for us it was those moments in co-op where we operated like a proper stealth team, cleaning out entire rooms in the blink of an eye. In its entirety, it's a substantial package and, as we'd hoped, was well worth the wait.