While he continues to find his way into games other than his own franchise, Sam Fisher’s clearly still alive and well with Ubisoft. Likely waiting until the time is right, and getting the right development team together to usher in Fisher’s return, it’s been a long time since another entry in the Splinter Cell franchise. 2013 marks a little over seven years since the last entry, Splinter Cell Blacklist, released on the Xbox 360 and PS3. Now, with an entire console generation dividing between the previous and the next, many are awaiting any potential news on a new entry, which has long been rumored and hinted at. Sam Fisher’s own adventures have been gone a long time.
Fisher had some missteps towards the end of his career, but a few of the earliest Splinter Cell games were some of the best in the whole series. Some entries simply haven’t aged all that well, while some have aged gracefully. Other entries never really had much of a footing to stand on in the first place, one of which doesn’t necessarily count as a mainline game. Certain entries tried new gameplay concepts/ideas and experimented with the formula, to varying degrees of success depending on which Splinter Cell fan played them. Ranking all the Splinter Cell games together, it’s pretty obvious which one is arguably the best, but there’s quite a few great games in between as well.
This game in particular is a bit of a stretch, solely because it was an exclusive PSP title, but Splinter Cell: Essentials is technically a mainline entry in the Splinter Cell franchise. Rarely does the game actually seem like it, aside from Michael Ironside reprising his role as Fisher. The gameplay experience in Splinter Cell Essentials is barebones at best, paired with equally abysmal controls that make the whole experience hollow compared to any other Splinter Cell game. Hardware restrictions are going to be an obvious detractor for games on PSP, but this was especially true for Splinter Cell. Not many Splinter Cell fans are willing (or able) to play Essentials.
Between 2005 and 2010, Ubisoft attempted two very different approaches to the Splinter Cell franchise. Both Double Agent and Conviction made key changes to the game’s typical foundation: Double Agent retained a familiar gameplay style, but focused more on systems, narrative choice, and morality. Conviction stuck to a largely linear experience, but shifted the gameplay into a more action-oriented/hybrid stealth experience. Each game was ambitious in its own right, but never really quite amounted to anything comparable to past iterations. Changes featured in these games were either scrapped entirely, or heavily scrutinized in future entries.
Frankly, in each game’s own right, both Splinter Cell: Double Agent and Splinter Cell: Conviction aren’t egregiously bad games. It’s in direct comparison to the whole franchise where these games really show weakness. Splinter Cell Conviction simplified a lot of the stealth mechanics to emphasize its new gameplay approach of lethal fluidity, paired with its Jason Bourne-esque premise of Fisher going rogue. Splinter Cell Double Agent focuses more on undercover meta-stealth rather than actual hiding in the shadows, with choice-based narrative decisions impacting the game’s ending. Each has redeeming qualities, but don’t compare to earlier titles in the series.
The Splinter Cell games in this tier are serviceably good in every regard, making each game more iterative than formative, compared to the higher tiers. Splinter Cell Pandora Tomorrow and Splinter Cell Blacklist largely continued the efforts of each game’s respective predecessor. Splinter Cell Pandora Tomorrow transposes Fisher to Indonesia to deal with a biological threat, only slightly different from past games’ storylines. The game plays a lot like the first Splinter Cell game, albeit with different missions, but an overall very familiar return for the series. Rather than push the series forward in tangible ways, Pandora Tomorrow is more like a Splinter Cell-2.
Splinter Cell Blacklist functions in a similar vein for the overall series, but also adapts many of the controversial changes of Conviction into more stealth-oriented gameplay. Blacklist was the Splinter Cell game with arguably the most gameplay variety and flexibility, emphasizing three distinct gameplay methods of “ghost,” “panther,” and “assault.” Players also had the most freedom of tackling objectives, side missions, and challenges with loot/equipment-based progression. However, gameplay freedom doesn’t necessarily translate to success, as the plot to Blacklist was overly generic compared to past storylines. Overall, both games were largely safe Splinter Cell games.
Most fans will find that the original Splinter Cell game genuinely holds up quite well, as it would establish most aspects that define early entries in the series. There are plenty of aspects both visually and gameplay-wise that certainly date the game, but overall the experience is still genre-defining. The at-the-time impressive lighting system, which would become the franchise’s stealth bread and butter, was introduced in the first Splinter Cell and still remains excellent. While mission structure is still largely linear, the minutiae of objectives and tasks emphasizes Fisher’s variable tool set greater than almost every other Splinter Cell game after it, save for one.
Longtime fans of Splinter Cell likely won’t be surprised to find that Splinter Cell Chaos Theory is still the franchise at its best. Even if the game is aesthetically dated by modern standards, the lighting system and stealth mechanics are still the most refined in Chaos Theory. The game’s relatively complex, information warfare conflict between warring nations and organizations is still one of the most nuanced and interesting storylines in Splinter Cell.
Gameplay-wise Chaos Theory made things far more open-ended over Splinter Cell and Pandora Tomorrow, with different objectives and maps playing out more like puzzles than linear stages. Standout missions like the Bank and Battery emphasize the best moments of stealth sandboxes throughout all Splinter Cell games. Enemy AI will certainly seem generic by modern standards, but at the time, Chaos Theory‘s manipulative gameplay experience was (and to an extent still is) unparalleled. If there was one Splinter Cell game to play definitively, it’d be Splinter Cell Chaos Theory.
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