The first Splinter Cell wowed the gaming industry with themes and gameplay that can be considered refreshing. Therefore, there is little that Pandora Tomorrow can do to replicate that kind of appeal when what it does is build on what the first game has done. However, build well it does.
As in the previous game, the player takes on the role of Sam Fisher, a once-retired but restless covert operative who willingly returned to the service. After the events in the first Splinter Cell, his organization has adopted the same term that was once used by those that the Fifth Echelon had hunted down and broken up; Sam Fisher is now considered a "Splinter Cell", an agent that is given an overarching objective and mission parameters but otherwise is given the autonomy to complete his mission by any means necessary.
This theme of the story, which was particularly noted in the reception of the first game, is much more emphasized in the sequel, as will be apparent to the player when Fisher and his boss, Irving Lambert, utter the ominous phrase "Fifth Freedom" more than a few times.
Of course, this thematic design would ring hollow if the player is not given many options to deal with threats to the mission at hand, so it is fortunate that the game turned out otherwise (though linear map designs for the story mode detract from this somewhat).
Despite being a slightly grumpy and reluctantly aging man (a theme that will be played out to humorous effect a few times throughout the game), Sam Fisher still manages to retain the skills that he had developed during his time as a covert operative. A quick tutorial level reminds the player that he still can skulk around and incapacitate enemies effortlessly, especially in the dark, but provided that the player times his moves well.
Sam Fisher has some new moves, though most of these are context-sensitive actions that only trigger when Sam Fisher is in the right location in the level that has the scripts that allow such actions. All of them are impressively animated (likely with the help of motion-capture), but some of them can be rather outrageous, such as one move called "SWAT turn" that allows Sam to move from cover to cover even if he is well in view and in front of a sentry. (These were removed in the next game, likely because of the disbelief it caused.)
In the previous game, the pistol that Sam uses is often the tool that players use to land headshots at close range or strike out lights. Unfortunately, the default crosshairs that were provided were not refined enough for this task; they were simply too big and not transparent enough to prevent obscuring of the target. The sequel remedies this by giving the pistol a laser sight, which gives a very good idea of where a shot may land. However, the laser sight also comes with a drawback that attempting to land a headshot on a target's face would alert the latter to Fisher's presence. Alert enemies can also see the laser beam. Fortunately, the laser sight is an optional tool, and can be turned off if it is not safe to use.
Pandora Tomorrow adds some new equipment, such as the Flash Bang grenade, which was oddly missing from the first game (likely due to problems in implementing the visual distortion effects). Another new grenade whose introduction is less odd is the Chaff Grenade, which can disable electronic devices for a short time, namely cameras and motion sensors; this is useful if the player wishes to save on Sticky Cameras and other supplies.
The first game implemented limited sources of health for Sam Fisher to recover from damage that he has incurred, but the challenge was somewhat mitigated by the player character's ability to haul around medical kits on his person. The sequel removes this ability, and instead implemented the old-but-proven mechanic of health stations; Sam can only heal when he is close to a medical cabinet mounted on a wall. There are few cabinets in any level in the game, and even so these have limited supplies. They are also often near well-lit places, thus requiring the player to clear the immediate area first before risking a trip to the healing station.
The first game also had some minor annoyances, like Fisher not being able to open doors while carrying a body, since he slings them across his shoulders. The sequel has him carrying a body over one shoulder, leaving the other arm freer to open doors. This would be pleasing to players who prefer not to waste time opening doors when the coast is already clear. However, it does have the slightly unfortunate side effect of making the thinning out of enemy patrols a bit easier.
In the first Splinter Cell, the player can lure enemies over with the pre-recorded whistles that a Sticky Camera can play. In Pandora Tomorrow, Sam himself can now whistle to alert and lure enemies over, which is handy if the immediate area has a lot of cover to skulk behind and around to flank anyone that made the mistake of being inquisitive.
Otherwise, the overarching gameplay of the single-player mode appears much unchanged from that in the first game. The player still has to have Sam hiding and skulking in the shadows, controlling his speed of movement, switching between vision types to pick out characters and objects of interest, knocking out some characters and resorting to lethal force when necessary. He also has most, if not all, of the equipment that he had in the first game.
The first game mostly had threats to the player's progress in the form of armed enemies, but the sequel has more dangers that are of inanimate nature. There are more mines, more tripwires, more cameras and even motion detectors to slow down the player, requiring him/her to make use of Sam Fisher's different vision options to spot them. The game conveniently warns the player of the presence of such harmful objects through warnings that Fisher's colleagues radio over to him.
In many scenarios in the first Splinter Cell, the player simply loses outright if the alarm is raised. If that was not the case, raising the alarm also altered the difficulty from then on (either for the better or worse), with little recourse to reset it. In the sequel, alarms are somewhat easier to handle as they eventually end if the player can hide Fisher somewhere safe long enough, upon which the AI scripts for sentries and guards reset. However, the player may not abuse this too much; on regular difficulty, the player can only raise and outlast two alarms before the third one invokes a game over immediately. However, this can seem thematically odd, e.g. a reverse of the concept behind the proverbial crying-wolf.
Hiding bodies is a bit easier in the sequel, as the game gives a clearer indicator that Sam Fisher is within a sufficiently dark place, the cover from which extends to bodies that Fisher drops there. However, guards will still discover the body if the hitboxes of their models come into contact with those of the body, i.e. they practically step over them. On the other hand, like in the first game, they are unable to revive anyone that has been knocked unconscious (and certainly not those who had been killed).
The single-player mode can be rather short, perhaps even shorter than that in the first game. However, there are seemingly more thrills to be had in the sequel than in the first game, so these may be some compensation. There are a lot of references to the events in the previous game too, so those players looking for canonical continuity would not be dissatisfied by too much.
However, players who are not enamored by the mostly linear designs of the levels in the first game would be disappointed to know that the levels in the sequel are similarly designed in the same manner, which makes for an experience with little replayability.
A minor complaint among many of those who played the first game was that the AI scripts for all of the enemies in the scripts are pretty much identical. The sequel is not much different, which can be disappointing to those hoping for more differentiation between enemies. On the other hand, while they haven't gotten more sophisticated and are still susceptible to being lured towards ambushes and traps, they are still vicious enough to punish the player's mistakes whenever he/she makes any.
It is also worth noting here that there appear to be more enemies equipped with flashlights and night-vision goggles than in the first game, though they still do not have eyes on the backs of their heads and can't look through walls and other solid obstructions.
Like the first Splinter Cell, Pandora Tomorrow gives the player the option to move the camera around manually. For a third-person game, this can make for a silly exploit of looking around corners that the player character does not have line-of-sight for. Other than this unintended (or likely forgone) exploit, the option to freely move the camera around allows for the taking of some interesting screenshots of the game.
As in the previous game, the story mode has Sam Fisher trotting around the globe to undertake missions. Of course, this is a great excuse to develop a variety of locales with different themes. This also makes for a great excuse for the inclusion of different gameplay qualities in the environments, many of which would be familiar to veterans of games with globe-trotting stories. For example, the jungles of Indonesia may be stereotypical, but it offers environments with plenty of places to hide in, such as the thick vegetation of these environments.
They also give the opportunity for the developers to include some set-piece environments, like one scenario where Sam Fisher has to hang onto dear life and onto a train while making his way across its length.
Perhaps the most important addition to the franchise is a multiplayer component. The presence of the multiplayer component is explained away as Ninth Echelon's attempts at recruiting more covert operatives to perform less critical missions that Sam Fisher cannot have the time to undertake.
The premise of the multiplayer has players pitting professional Mercenaries from the ARGUS corporation against Spies from the government proxy ShadowNET. Due to the game designers' insistence on themes of suspense, there can only be up to four players, with permutations of three persons against one and two against two.
While the game designers' insistence on suspense may be understandable, from a thematic perspective, having just one to three Mercenaries guarding an important location is an oddity, considering that real-life professional mercenaries would operate in numbers greater than these.
Nevertheless, the lower number of players in a match contributes to the prominence of the gameplay balancing designs, for better or worse. The Mercenaries and Spies are very different from each other; the former are well-armed, while the latter don't even have lethal sidearms (which is another thematic oddity). The players playing as the Mercenaries are subjected to a first-person perspective, reducing their field of vision, while the Spies get the same third-person camera that Sam Fisher has.
Multiplayer also shows how dark and poorly lit some levels can be. From a thematic perspective, it can be unbelievable that the supposedly professional mercenaries have not bothered to thoroughly illuminate the locations that they are defending. Of course, there is always the excuse that the Spies have cut power to the lights, but that they did so without affecting the other electrical devices in the area, especially security systems, can cause further disbelief.
However, if the player can stomach these thematic oddities, he/she will find that the multiplayer gameplay is well-balanced and fun. The Mercenaries' tunnel vision gives the Spies the chance that they need to creep up on them for almost instantaneous close-combat kills, but their guns – and a melee attack that shoves Spies that are too close away – give them the ability to eliminate the Spies at range, where they are far less deadly.
The Spies have the agility and skill to go to more places than the Mercenaries can go to, which may seem to give them an unfair advantage, but these other places tend to be narrow or otherwise require more strenuous effort to traverse, thus slowing them down and rendering them vulnerable to some of the Mercenaries' gear, which are efficient at flushing the Spies out from these places. The Mercenaries also have traps that they can place at strategic locations of the map to compensate for their lack of ability to be everywhere at once.
Perhaps more amusingly, both Mercenaries and Spies have gadgets of their own that can make each other's work a lot more difficult. The most used of these are the devices that enhance their visual prowess.
The Mercenaries have vision modes that can detect abrupt motion, which is a deterrent against Spies who think that they can get away with skulking around in front of the mercenaries even in pitch-black darkness or thick smoke. The Mercenaries also have a vision mode that detects advanced electronics, of which the operatives have many (and especially when they are actively using them). This can seem a bit unfair, but like the case of the Spies being able to go to more places, there are balancing designs; the environments in the multiplayer maps are often filled with objects that would generate a lot of background noise, thus obscuring the signals from the Spies.
The Spies mainly use the vision modes that Sam Fisher has. These are not as impressive and refreshing as those that the Mercenaries have, but they are still well-balanced against the former.
It is worth noting here again that the Spies do not have firearms. Instead, they have to rely on non-lethal gadgets, some of which are those that Sam Fisher gets such as Flash Bangs and Chaff Grenades. The other gadgets are those not seen in the single-player story mode, such as motion sensors and laser trip-wires that alert them to incoming mercenaries.
As the number of players is very small, the death of any player character would be a serious setback to his team. To prevent this setback from simply scuttling the game, the perished player character can be replaced by another after some time, in the form of "reinforcements". However, there are limited "lives" for both teams.
It is also worth noting here that the Spies have the option of simply knocking out the Mercenaries instead of killing them outright when they are caught. The Mercenaries, like the Spies, have limited supplies of gadgets, and can only replenish them upon a respawn. Therefore, it may be in the Spies' favor to knock them out instead, buying them some time to complete the objective before the Mercenaries wake up. (On the other hand, the players playing as the Mercenaries can do nothing but tattletale to compatriots about the locations of the Spies who knocked them out.)
Such designs mean that either team can defeat the other team by depleting their lives or suppressing them by knocking them out (in the case of the Spies) instead of stymying their enemies' objectives.
Speaking of objectives, these often concern stockpiles of biological weapons that the Mercenaries are guarding, and which the Spies must get at to achieve their objectives. There are three game modes, each concerning a method of disposing of said stockpiles.
Extraction requires the Spies to retrieve and return the stockpiles to an extraction point, which is often one of the spawn points for the operatives. In Neutralization, the Spies have the ability to disarm the stockpiles on the spot, but this will take time, during which the Mercenaries can always attempt to ambush them while they are doing so. Sabotage is similar to Neutralization, but instead of having to manually destroy the stockpiles, the Spies can attach devices onto them to perform the task automatically, though the Mercenaries can always rip them off and reset the Spies' progress.
Although the levels are dimly lit, presumably due to the Spies cutting off most of the lights, there are some levels with automated security still online. Some of these temporarily cordon off regions of the levels, locking player characters, perhaps even of different teams within them. These designs can lead to some tense moments.
Multiplayer can be a very different experience from Sam Fisher's story mode, or even to veterans of stealth-sneaker games. The developers somewhat realize this, and have implemented a brief tutorial which the player can run when accessing multiplayer mode for the first time. However, this tutorial simply places the player into the level as one lone player character, and only covers the basics of movement and the use of certain gadgets. In other words, the tutorial mode is not very adequate.
At launch, there were only eight maps to play with, though unlike the maps in the story mode, these are sophisticated mazes that are ideal for games of cat-and-mouse. There are also a surprising amount of objects and details in these maps, though the lack of maps would eventually diminish their visual appeal.
If there is a major complaint to be had with multiplayer, it is that matches require constant connection to Ubisoft's servers for purposes of authentication and anti-cheating. This applies to the PC version of the game too, which does not receive any options for dedicated servers. This can lead to infrastructural hiccups when Ubisoft's servers go on the fritz, but most importantly, that players have little recourse when Ubisoft no longer wishes to support the multiplayer of the game, which it had indeed stopped. This can result in dissatisfaction and an impression of loss of value.
(It is worth noting here that a HD re-release of this game for the PS3 simply lacks multiplayer.)
With its (generally) competent porting, the PC version of the first game impressed consumers who prefer the PC platform but was not expecting much from a ported game. In terms of user friendliness, Pandora Tomorrow is no different; the checkpoint system in the console versions is replaced with a far more convenient save-everywhere system that is endemic to PC games at the time. The PC version also has better graphics than the other versions, assuming that the player can achieve the recommended hardware requirements; there will be more elaboration on this shortly.
Unfortunately, as for the previous game, Ubisoft decided that the better graphics is a balance against bonus content that is available in other versions of the game; this may not please players who care little for graphics.
For players that would care about graphics though, the PC version of Pandora Tomorrow would not disappoint. There are a lot more objects in environments in the second game, as well as higher numbers of polygons for models, though they are still far from life-like and have a few blemishes like inappropriate lighting when light falls on a model with a lot of contours. Textures are also improved over those in the previous game. The game also takes advantage of the latest advancements in DirectX technology to produce very believable lighting. The best example to illustrate this is Sam Fisher's signature pair of goggles, which cast a more eerie light in the darkness than the goggles in the first game did.
The musical designs for Pandora Tomorrow are completely different from those in the previous game. This is best illustrated via the game's main theme music, which is composed by very veteran composer Lalo Schifrin; while it does not have the suspense of the main theme in the first game, its eerie tunes do elicit a stronger sense of intrigue, which is thematically appropriate as intrigue is one of the main themes of the story in Pandora Tomorrow.
The story in the single-player mode has Sam Fisher going around the world uncovering the tracks of the latest terrorist mastermind to threaten the USA, so there will be characters of different nationalities to be encountered. For the most part, the voice-acting for these characters is quite believable when they are talking in their native languages, but when the game switches over to the English dubbing for dialogues that are important to the story or mission at-hand, the changes in the baritones of the characters' voices can be jarring; the English voice-overs are apparently provided by different voice-actors.
Of course, if the player had opted for English voice-overs all the way, he/she would not encounter this issue, though the authenticity of the game's locales may seem dashed if such a decision is taken.
Otherwise, Pandora Tomorrow has outstanding voice-acting, much of it carried by returning voice-actors, such as Michael Ironside, whose voice is still very fitting for the jaded and weary Sam Fisher, and Dennis Haysbert, who skillfully portrays the authority that Lambert and the murky matters that Ninth Echelon gets involved in.
There are other voice-actors as well, providing the voice-overs for guards and soldiers who often chat with each other about the happenings around the world, if the player cares to overhear them. There is sometimes a benefit to hearing them out, as they may reveal useful information like passwords. At a few moments in the game, there may even be special remarks that Sam would say if the player completely overhears a miscellaneous conversation and then subjects one of the participants to capture and interrogation.
However, a player with a keen ear would notice that many of them appear to sound like they had been voiced by the same few voice-actors.
The sound effects of the game are mostly transferred over from the first. This is not an entirely bad thing, as the virtually real-world settings of the game understandably allow for such conveniences in sound designs. That is not to say that there is nothing new to be heard: the sound effects for certain returning gear from the first game have been remixed, and there are of course new sound effects for the new gadgets.
To summarize, veterans and fans of the first game would find that not much has changed since the first game, but what once worked well still works great in Pandora Tomorrow. Its most impressive – and most disappointing – contribution to the franchise is its entertainingly suspenseful multiplayer mode, but this has unfortunately been discontinued, much to the detriment to the value of the game.