While Sam Fisher stays faithfull to his conviction, the game goes far from the series. Not too far though.
User Rating: 8 | Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Conviction PC
The game takes the story after the events of Double Agent. In fact, three years have passed, to be more specific. If you haven't played that game, I won't spoil anything. Although it ties too well to the previous game, the story isn't highly cerebral and the gameplay differs alot from it's predecessors. Sam Fisher is not the same, things have changed since he left Third Echelon and chose to disappear. It's worth going into details, the story is great and filled with a crazy conspiracy that leads to Sam's past and forces him once again to fight against a new threat. And this time it's really personal. It's all cliches and generic if you think about it too much, but the story keeps the player invested, entertained and goes to extreme lenghts as to shape around the new gameplay style, to show why and how the game changed. And, in my humble and generous opinion, it gets the job done. Ubisoft delivered what they set out to do. Even in what gameplay offers. Your actions are limited. There's no more choosing between objective and while the maps seem bigger, they're not. There's a huge missed opportunity now that they decided to implement cover based stealth and they focus on a more straight forward action shooter. You can't hide bodies anymore or choose to not kill enemies, but the AI is so dumb that sometimes it just doesn't matter. I can only recall in a small amount of time the main campaign lasts that stealth is imperious or else you lose. And that is probably the weirdest level design ever invented. There are these levels where it looks like you have so many possibilities, but most of the time the obvious path is the best way to finish a level. And bodies lying around isn't much of a problem for the enemies. They'll scratch heads for a few minutes, but after that they'll resume whatever predetermined paths they were following. The weapons are many, but you'll mostly use the trusty silent gun and a whole bunch of gadgets and explosives, all upgradable. Unless you want to play rambo. For that I recommend the easiest difficulty. The enemies are dumb, but if they spot you, it's better to run hide and hope to forget they ever saw you, which they will. Also stay in the dark, shoot lights and freak out enemies. It's a nice touch, the desaturated while in the dark system. It doesn't make a lot of sense, but you'll forget all about the goggles after some time. But when you think you've forgot all about the goggles, they show us a new type of goggles, the Sonar Goggles, that have only two functions in one: night vision and uv detection(i think), the second meaning they can scan the environment in a sonar fashion to detect enemies and lasers. But wait, there's a catch. They made it so that you can not overuse them: some enemies, Third Echelon operatives (yes, that's true) have the same technology and if you use the sonar to detect them, they'll also detect your position. Yeah, try feeling overpowered now!
There a large amount of unlockables if you can accomplish certain feets, like blowing up three guys with a sticky cam. You get points for that and use them to upgrade your weapons.
The co-op expands on the story, but the gameplay is all that matters here and I found it even better than playing Sam Fisher's campaign.
Voices are awesome. Michael Ironside returns as Sam with his gritty bada** voice. All other characters have personality and development and actors performance is highly professional. It's no denying the huge production value, but near the end it's starting to seem pushed and lazy. There are some memorable moments, great scenes that gives Fisher feelings and real emotions that we never seen before. All of this helped by the great graphic quality overall and incredible facial animations.
I can't talk about bugs or glitches as probably those have been fixed in the mean time for PC, or I might be just too lucky. Thus I agree with Kevin VanOrd's review for console in parallel with my vision of this game for PC.
