Before Splinter Cell, the modern stealth-action genre is largely filled by the Rainbow Six line of games from the Tom Clancy label and similarly designed titles. However, the emphasis on teams and their sophistication made them too complicated for some players. The ever-present option to resort to outright combat when expedient also diminished their stealth aspects.
Splinter Cell is a new entry to the collection of games with the Tom Clancy branding, and it promises to have a stronger focus on stealth than any other modern-themed game before it.
The result is a rather linear game, but the corridors, hallways, alleys and other pathways that the player would have to go through offered the player the best fun to be had from a stealth-action game at the time: the opportunity to eliminate opponents without them knowing what happened.
The player takes on the role of Sam Fisher, who is a veteran if a bit cynical covert operative. He has been inducted into a (fictional) segment of the NSA under the purview of his long-time compatriot (and important side character), Irving Lambert.
With typical Tom Clancy flair, the story concerns a certain matter of national security having arisen, and no one other than Sam Fisher has the appropriate skill and experience to handle it. He is trusted with it, and will have to conduct missions across the globe to uncover who the enemy is and what his plans are.
Throughout the game, Sam Fisher and other characters will provide commentary and updates on the conditions of the current mission and any development in it. Their voice-acting, which includes that of Michael Ironside, is more than satisfactory in emphasizing the twists and turns in the story.
Speaking of twists and turns in the story, these are ultimately predetermined. However, an unsuspecting player would find plenty of suspense in it as Sam's objectives suddenly change in the middle of a mission or the achievement of an objective will depend on an action that has to be performed in a matter of seconds, among other thrills. Fans of Tom Clancy's books would appreciate the design of the more tense moments in the story.
The game uses a third-person perspective throughout the entire game, which is fortunate as keeping an eye on Sam's surroundings is especially important, as is gauging the distance between him and any object/person in the vicinity. By default, the camera is set some distance behind and over Sam, though the player can change the zoom when it is convenient to do so.
The game starts with a brief tutorial in the first part of the first mission, giving on-screen messages that tell the player what to do to get past certain easy obstacles early in the game. This can be a bit intrusive, though it should be understandable because Sam Fisher is not a rookie agent and the story provides little context for an opportunity to have Sam running through a training level.
However, there are a lot more on-screen prompts throughout the game, which somewhat damages its immersion. Nonetheless, they are always concise and helpful.
Sam Fisher is always not welcome or expected in any place in the game, being the covert operative that he is. Therefore, he has to skulk around a lot; thankfully, the game offers pretty good stealth mechanics, though it also makes use of some brazenly convenient and expedient designs.
Sam Fisher's model is clad almost entirely in a black skin-suit, revealing little more than his head (and his highly athletic build). This gives the thematic excuse for Sam Fisher being able to blend into shadowy areas and not be detected by any enemy that had not come equipped with a light source or gear that can look into the darkness. A handy visibility meter, the presence of which is justified by the canonical mention of optical sensors built into Sam Fisher's suit, tells the player how well hidden that he is.
The player can also shoot out lights to eliminate illumination from the immediate area, though there is also the risk of alerting enemies due to the noise made. Turning off lights using switches also happen to alert guards too; this results in them going over to look for the switch to turn them back on (which gives an opportunity for the player to jump them from behind).
Generally, the player will have to reach almost three quarters down the meter to have Sam considered well-hidden from all kinds of enemies. Different kinds of enemies, depending on how far in the game that the player has gone, will be able to spot Sam at various levels of visibility if he is not well-hidden below that threshold.
Not only does the player needs to make sure that Sam is hidden from sight, he/she also needs to make sure that enemies can't hear him. There are plenty of surfaces that the player character has to stalk through, and despite the soft, malleable soles of his skin-suit, Sam Fisher can still make enough noise to alert enemies if the player does not keep an ear and an eye out for how fast he is moving across surfaces.
This is where his ability to crouch-walk comes in handy. In addition to a more upright posture, Sam can adopt a lower profile, hunching himself or fully ducking to stay under the sight of enemies where there are low-lying obstacles that he can move behind. The posture also affects the noise of his movement, which is reduced.
Furthermore, the player can control his speed of movement quite handily with the mouse-wheel. Striking a balance between urgency and subtlety of movement is important in some parts of of the game, so it is fortunate that the mouse-wheel has been appropriately chosen for this. Unfortunately, there does not seem to be any on-screen indicator that tells the player what Sam's current movement speed is, though this could probably have been for the better as there are quite a lot of indicators on-screen already.
Unlike many other stealth-action games at the time, Splinter Cell's noise mechanic is quite well-done, in that it takes into account walls and other obstacles that should logically block noise. If Sam Fisher is running on one side of a thick wall and there is a guard on the other side, the latter is unable to hear Sam. It may sound simple, but many stealth-action games tend to fail in implementing this.
As to be expected of a stealth-action game, Splinter Cell allows the player character to take down unsuspecting enemies. However, unlike the stealth-action games before Splinter Cell, the player character does not have to be absolutely behind victims to pull off a stealthy take-down; enemies do not have to be completely unsuspecting either to be taken down.
In addition to a fast and silent maneuver that Sam can perform to knock out enemies from behind, regardless of their state of alert, Sam can also assault an enemy up-front, as long as the latter has not brought his weapon to bear. It takes more than one hit to take them down this way, but Sam can make two hits in relatively quick succession to take down individuals without much noise, if his victim has not called out to comrades already.
This handy design may seem contrived to some fans of stealth-action games who are used to and prefer finding the sweet spot behind enemies, but it goes a long way to alleviate frustrations that are typically found in stealth-action games, such as the would-be victim turning around unexpectedly or somehow succeeded in his chances to detect the player character when the latter is close enough behind him.
Sam can also haul bodies around. While he is a lot more visible and slower when doing so, he does not suffer a tremendous increase in the noise that he makes; he also carries them in a manner that won't have their models colliding with other models. This allows the player to move bodies around more easily.
Enemies that have been incapacitated in a non-lethal manner do not ever wake up either, i.e. they stay incapacitated, at least until their compatriots come over to wake them up. While this game design may seem rather convenient, it helps in removing the worry of having unconscious enemies that have been left behind from waking up on their own and coming up behind the player character.
Helping the player navigate through the levels in the game and observe dangers is Sam's very handy pair of goggles, which combines night vision and thermal vision modes together that the player can switch back and forth without much of a problem.
In either of these vision modes, the player's vision loses detail, in return for higher contrast of the view in locations that would benefit from their use. Night vision typically washes out colour entirely, leaving everything in grayscale and removing most shadows; thermal vision removes even more things from the view, except for the very high contrast between cool and warm objects, namely living guards.
These two visions certainly help in spotting dangers, but they also understandably make navigation somewhat harder, especially thermal vision mode, which obscures obstacles like walls and doors. Night vision mode will be the vision mode that the player uses the most, as there are many dark areas in the game to move through. Unfortunately, it also means that the player would not be able to appreciate the graphics of the game as much as he/she would like, because most of the pizazz in this game can only be seen with normal vision mode.
While most of the environments in the game have already been mentioned to be quite linear, there are still plenty of alleys, vents, and other side paths that Sam can take to go around patrols, as well as rails and pipes that he can climb and shimmy across to slip past enemies above their heads, or to surprise them from. These are rather generously located throughout the levels in the game, so most players would not have much trouble resorting to stealthy measures.
As believable as the above stealth-related mechanics are, a discerning player would still have some misgivings about Splinter Cell's designs. One of these is that most missions appear to be expediently set during the night and indoors. Of course, this can be written off as the game's adherence to the theme of well-planned covert missions.
Another game design that can be seen as both contrived and expedient is that alarmed guards will eventually lower their state of alarm when they deem that the area that they are patrolling is clear, even when something horrible has happened, such as some of their comrades having been slain. However, Ubisoft Montreal had thought of how belief-shattering this may be, and has implemented a minimum threshold of guards' states of alarm after they have been alerted to the presence of unwanted persons on the premise.
This meant that the player may not alarm some guards and hope that they will eventually become complacent again after the player had Sam Fisher hidden for a while. This provides much needed consequences in gameplay for having mucked up a stealth sequence.
While enemies in the later stages of the game may be better armed and have better gear or skill to spot Sam hiding in the darkness, they still behave in the same manner as those in the previous stages. They skulk around in the same manner when they are alerted, can be taken down with (mostly) the same moves and stay knocked out all the same after they have been knocked out.
An enemy that has been taken down in either lethal or non-lethal manners collapses into a model that retains collision hit-boxes and, more importantly, does not turn into a ragdoll. Considering that so many other games at the time resort to very convenient rag-dolls for representing bodies with, it is refreshing that Ubisoft Montreal chose not to for Splinter Cell.
If there is a complaint with this, it is that the models for bodies have very stiff collision hitboxes when they are settled down. This lets the player dump models of bodies one of top of another, creating a comical stack of them, which is something that the player is likely to do when there are few places to hide bodies at. (The ones at the bottom will not suffer any adverse effects from the stacking either.)
In addition to his skin-suit and goggles, Sam also has some other equipment supplied by Third Echelon. The most important of these is his SC-20K, which is a multi-purpose gun that can work as an assault rifle, a reasonably accurate sniper rifle or as a launcher for various gadgets.
Sam may not use any weapons that enemies have dropped, and being a rare weapon, there are little ammo and supplies for the SC-20K within the levels that missions take place in. This may seem a bit restrictive, considering that the canon of Splinter Cell has Sam Fisher being described as having had military experience and training with many weapons and should have had the capability to pilfer weapons from enemies and use these against them.
However, this does require the player to think through his/her approach to situations in missions more carefully, which is always an important aspect of a stealth-action game.
Further discouraging the player from resorting to combat as the solution to any situation is that Sam cannot use the SC-20K like player characters in shooters can: he has to enter an aiming mode that prevents him from moving about quickly, there is a lot of recoil from sustained fire, and enemy fire that comes his way can easily knock off his aim.
Sam also has a Silenced Pistol, which is a lot weaker than the SC-20K in terms of being used as a firearm. However, its value will become apparent when Sam can ever only have one arm free, such as when he is climbing across rails, pipes and poles. This allows him to shoot at objects, such as lights, lamps, or the top of the heads of unsuspecting enemies who failed to look up.
As good as Sam is at skulking around, he may not be able to go past any obstacle, especially those that are being watched by guards intently, such as an important checkpoint. This is where some of his non-lethal gear would come in handy.
The Optic Cable can be sent under a door to give the player a view of the other room. The Optic Cable can never be noticed by any guard, regardless of their state of alarm, which can be a bit unbelievable. Still, the player can check out the other room without its occupants getting spooked by a probe slinking its way under the door. (However, the player still needs to be wary of enemies on Sam's side of the door, which certainly can spot him if the doorway is not located in the darkness.)
The Sticky Camera has the same fundamental use as the Optic Cable, which is to scout out areas that Sam cannot reach yet. The player can use the SC-20K to launch it quite some ways away, and then use the receiver system to change the player's view to that of the camera. The camera can be swiveled around too, and can trigger night vision and thermal vision just like the Optic Cable. It can even be launched at enemies' heads to knock them out, amusingly enough.
If there is an issue with this device, it is that the game does not inform the player that the field of view that the camera has is dependent on where the player has shot the camera at and the angle of impact of the camera with the surface that it hit. If the player does not consider this, he/she will end up having a camera that can barely have a good look of its surroundings.
(Fortunately, the Sticky Camera can be retrieved - if Sam can reach it.)
The Jammer is a pistol-like weapon that can be directed at cameras or electricity-consuming light sources to temporarily disable them without making any noise. (However, disabling light sources will still alert nearby enemies though.) If there is an issue with this weapon, it is that it may be a little too sci-fi for a game like Splinter Cell, even though there are real-world projects concerning a similar device.
Sam also has lockpicks to open doors with conventional locks. When these are used, a mini-game involving the nudging up of pins will play out. Fortunately, the display for the mini-game is not so big as to block out the entire screen; the player still can see Sam's immediate surroundings (which is probably only most useful if a locked door is located just around a corner) and more importantly, the player still can hear the sounds around Fisher.
Of course, lock-picking mini-games are anything but new during Splinter Cell's time. Moreover, it is odd that the player is not given the option to have Sam, well-built that he is, to force open the flimsier of locked doors when it is more expedient to do so.
Speaking of forcing open doors, Sam also has access to another kind of lockpick, which can force open doors automatically but is much rarer and is consumed upon use.
Enemies are startled by sudden changes in illumination of their vicinity, so flares can be handy in distracting them. They are also useful in fooling automated turrets. (Living) Enemies can also be distracted with the Diversion camera, which is a camera that can be launched with the SC-20K to not only provide a view of where it landed (a la the Sticky Camera) but can also emit noises to distract enemies with (who may promptly shoot the device to silence it).
These tools give the player very convenient ways to distract enemies with, which is a wise game design. Even without these, Sam can pick up and throw detritus around, though at the risk of enemies spotting where the detritus was coming from.
Taking down enemies up-close in a non-lethal way may not be possible all the time, so the game handily provides ways to take down enemies from quite some distance away, though not as far as the reach of Sam's live bullets.
Most players will appreciate the Ring Airfoil Round, which can be fired at enemies to stagger them for many precious seconds, or knock them out outright with a hit to the head. The Gas Grenade provides a non-lethal solution to bunches of enemies, especially indoors. The aforementioned Diversion Camera can also expel its other payload, which is hazardous gas, to knock out enemies who made the mistake of looking at it for too long. Finally, there is the Sticky Shocker, which automatically incapacitates any victim that has been hit.
Of course, there would be times where Sam (and the player) will find that a non-lethal solution is just not expedient and that killing is a necessity. Fortunately, Sam has more options than just resorting to a shoot-out.
Sam can toss Frag Grenades at enemies behind cover or corners, set wall mines to prepare for ambushes, or shoot hazardous environmental objects if enemies happen to be close by to them.
However, combat is still heavily stacked in favor of enemies in Splinter Cell; enemies generally outnumber Fisher, and they have the benefit of having unlimited ammo as well. They also have some semblance of squad tactics, making use of side-paths and cover to flank Sam, or sometimes throwing grenades to flush him out.
However, as has been noted earlier, enemies behave in the same fundamental manner throughout the game. The later ones may gain more powerful weapons, gear to see in the dark and better armor that makes them tougher, but they generally move and operate in the same way, and their squad tactics also remain the same.
This means that some tactics that the player can use can be considered tried-and-true, such as setting wall mines around corners, hiding in levels above enemies and luring them into a narrow corridor where Sam just can't miss even if he goes full-auto.
Sam is not a tank though. While he can take quite a few shots without any loss in performance, he cannot stay in a heated firefight for too long. Fortunately, there are ways to heal him; he can collect medical kits located throughout levels, and use these from his inventory to recover some of his health instantly. They can even be used during fire-fights, if the player can toggle its use quickly enough; this design of Medical Kits can seem a bit unbelievable, but more importantly, it detracts from the game's policy of discouraging violent solutions to obstacles.
Splinter Cell was originally a game on the first Xbox. The porting over to the PC platform brought the game over quite well, and may have even improved the game.
The most apparent and welcome of these improvements are the game-saving system and mouse-using controls, which are akin to those in other PC games at the time. Of course, a skeptical player can consider these must-have designs, this version of Splinter Cell being a PC game after all.
The improvement that most players would not scoff at is the enhancement of the graphics. The PC version, making better use of the Unreal 2.0 engine and the version of DirectX at the time, produces much more impressive graphics than the Xbox or PS2 versions.
The lighting is the most impressive aspect of the graphics that have been improved. There is a lot more bloom and dazzling lighting, especially in areas where there are many light sources such as a security room filled with screens. They can get rather irritatingly bright though, even in normal default vision.
Textures are a lot sharper, as are the edges of models that benefited from more refining. This helps emphasize the details in the models and their animations.
Speaking of animations, Sam Fisher's movements are the highlight of the animations in the game. Sam skulks with highly controlled motions and sprints with great haste, as well as climb things with believable heft.
When Sam Fisher picks a body up, he does so with canned but very believable animations; the model of the body also retains its humanly believable limitations on joints and arcs of motion for limbs.
Switching vision modes is not done automatically and instantly. While this may seem inconvenient compared to other games at the time that allows the player to switch vision modes immediately without any animation, the player is treated to a brief but very believable animation of Sam flicking switches on his goggles or tilting his head to flip his goggles over onto or away from his eyes.
All these show commendable motion-capture work on the part of the developers, at least for Sam Fisher's model.
Animations for enemies are, however, less impressive.
All enemies appear to use the same set of animations (in addition to AI scripts). They do look and act believably like guards should, e.g. walk, run and shoot like men that had been trained in modern combat, but the lack of variation in their animations can be rather disappointing, considering the amount of effort that had gone into Sam Fisher's animations.
Most of the environments in the game are rather static. However, they are understandably so, e.g. office buildings won't have much in the way of moving things, and this also helps the player spot enemies, which are usually the only things moving around in levels.
On the other hand, environments are very richly detailed, such as the aforementioned security room, which has plenty of lit buttons and well-detailed terminals in addition to video screens. Most of them happen to be essentially office buildings after office buildings, but differences like building architecture and density of security apparatus help make them somewhat different from each other, not counting the intriguing plot elements that justified Sam Fisher's jaunt through these places in the first place.
There are some more impressive places though, such as an Oil Refinery level that do not take place during the night and offer some creative, gravity-related ways to defeat enemies with. There is also a mission that takes place in a rather bloody and gory Abattoir, which could have caused the game to earn more than its Teen rating.
Much of the game sounds subdued, as is to be expected of a stealth-action game where every level generally starts all quiet by default. As most levels take place in office buildings, the ambient noises to be heard are mostly the whir and droning of office machinery, which can be a little boring to listen to.
When the current situation becomes more tense though, the game sounds a lot more exciting.
Sharp, shredding electronic marks swaps in the soundtracks when there is a confrontation between Sam and an enemy, switching over to a harsher, more heart-thumping tune if the alarm is raised. Otherwise, it switches back to a more serene tune (or none at all) if the player manages to get through the confrontation without raising a ruckus.
At a middling level of alarm, i.e. where enemies know Sam is around but has not confirmed his location yet, the music takes on a more suspenseful theme, encouraging the player to have Sam skulking more deliberately and closer to the shadows to avoid detection.
The best aspect of the sound designs are the voice-acting. In addition to Michael Ironside, who provides very fitting voice-over to the jaded and sometimes witty Sam Fisher, there are also other voice-actors and -actresses that provide voice-acting that is just as stellar. One of the more notable of these is Sam's boss, Lambert, who is voiced by Don Jordan.
All in all, Splinter Cell was a very welcome addition to the stealth-action genre. It may not have impressed much with its rather limited and linear level designs, but its gameplay mechanics and presentation have raised the par for the genre.