Fun stealth, minor annoyances
SC: DA is a very immersive experience. You'll get lost in tracking down your foes, and this game does a great job of making you feel like a spy. The fact that you can save anywhere seems like it's cheating, but really adds to the fun of trying different ways to get by obstacles. Your choices can sometimes be overwhelming. You can kill or not kill, climb or crouch or crawl, or shimmy, and it's always satisfying to be under water, swim up to some thin ice and punch through it, pull a poor unsuspecting guard below and stab him in the heart.
Each mission has it's objectives, and the good thing is, you don't have to do them. You just get rewarded for it, that makes the game much more interesting to me. As you go into the game it's no secret you'll be going undercover, after that you get objectives for the good guys and bad guys. You'll earn or lose trust depending on what you do, and either way it's rewarding as every objective is fun. Although I was a little upset later into the game when they started to repeat certain objectives, but once again you don't have to do them, you'd only do them to earn trust for a side that's low.
I wish they had a seperate story line if you decided to go bad. This game would have been perfect to me if that option was there. But the choices you make have very little impact on the plot, but a lot of impact in regards to trust provided you're playing on normal or hard difficulty.
Some of the acting is really bad, but easy to over look. The characters in the story are unique, and it's actually fun to go through each mission and reveal the plot. It's actually worth playing through just for the story alone, but they went and added amazing gameplay and a variety of tools and options. You can play the game how you want to and that's awesome.
The trouble with the game is sometimes frustrating, guards get alerted at times when there is no way they could have seen or heard you and then you have some guy stalking around slowly for a long time for something you didn't do. A minor annoyance, but can sometimes ruin the whole stealth gameplay. Especially if you are going for 100% stealth for every mission.
Sometimes you have to be so quiet in loud area that it doesn't make sense, but I guess you can't have everything. It's not easy sneaking behind someone working on a computer to get to their file cabinet, sometimes they just turn around for some reason and you were moving at a snails pace. Goodbye trust! Time to reload. This happens a lot in the game... if it wasn't for the save anywhere feature I'd be very angry.
Still it's easy to overlook when you can go many different ways and enjoy alternate routes to play through the game again. I wish there were more achievements and rewards, but there is still plenty to have in this game.
Shock people, punch them out, gut them, slice throats, shoot them in the head, gas them, blow them up, set traps like wall mines. Or... leave them alone and get the job done.
Not to mention the other things you do, hack computers, pick locks, I especially liked the combination locks. Build mines, disarm bombs, and decrypt email. These are all like minigames within the game. Simple puzzles once you know how, and you get rewards to make the repetition go away like electronic hacking, electric lockpick, emp attachment for the pistol and so on. This makes the game much more lovable.
When you aren't avoiding lasers and guards, you'll have fun stalking guards. Distract them or lure them with sounds, record their voices, steal their fingerprints, and double cross some back stabbin foes.
The level design is extremely impressive and non linear in the way that you can decide how you want to go about it, rather than having one path. You do have to get the job done, but how you get there is up to you. This makes Splinter Cell: Double Agent worth the purchase, you'll likely play it several times in solo... and that's just solo.
Then there is multiplayer, which I won't review because I don't believe that multiplayer should be the bigger part of the game. It is definitely hours and hours of fun though. You should own SC: DA. If you haven't played it, you're missing out.