I can't believe this game! I've found a new best-of-breed game in Splinter Cell (SC), and it's simply amazing to me that so many things come together so well in the game. In the past, I said that Medal of Honor: Allied Assault and then Jedi Knight II were the best overall first-person-shooter (FPS) game successors to Half-Life, and I didn't make such a call lightly. I now think that SC has bested them both, and I'll explain why in the sections that follow. Yes, I know that SC isn't really a FPS game, but it's more fun than any FPS game, so cut me some slack!
SC is visually amazing, which isn't surprising given that it's built from the Unreal Tournament 2003 engine. The modeling is fabulously detailed, the character animation is wonderful, the textures are richly conceived, and the lighting effects are simply stupendous. There are scenes in this game that are near-cinematic in quality, and that's a big step forward in the gaming industry. True, SC doesn't look all that realistic, preferring its own special style, but the overall look is superb.
This does come at a price, however, and even though I have a pretty beefy system (e.g., an Athlon 2400, an ATI Radeon 9700 Pro, a Creative Labs Audigy 2 platinum, 1 GB of physical RAM, etc.), it can bog down a bit in some of the lighting- and polygon-intensive areas. Still, the Radeon 9700 Pro is such a beast that I can enable 4x anti-aliasing and play pretty smoothly at 1280 x 1024 x 32 bpp. That's amazing, really, and it makes for an eye-candy feast. The only drawback I've found to enabling full-scene anti-aliasing (FSAA), incidentally, is that it causes some serious slowdown when using the night-vision goggles. Still, you're going to want a lot of machine to get the most from SC, and if you can enable FSAA, it's worth the price in my estimation.
As good as the visuals are, the audio is just as good, or perhaps even better. The subtle bits of music are mesmerizing in their intensity, the voice acting is well done, the sound effects are perfect, and the overall implementation works well. Granted, I'm running the game through an Audigy 2 Platinum card, and it sounds great with that admittedly high-end card. The audio plays a big role in SC, and you're going to want to make sure you get the most out of it. The positional audio is particularly well done, so be sure to play with at least a four-speaker configuration if at all possible. It makes a big difference. Suffice it to say that I have no problems with the audio.
This was the area of SC about which I was most concerned prior to its release. I had played some of the early demos, and I just didn't "get" them at all. I was fighting to make the various gadgets work, the movement felt funny, and so forth. It seemed very much like yet another wretched console port—I despise most console ports because of the degree to which they screw the keyboard+mouse control. Fortunately, the shipping game is almost flawless in this department. All of the keys can be bound, the movement interface works better than other stealth-based games, the inventory works pretty well, and the controls for Sam's diverse repertoire of moves are very simple. Suffice it to say that the interface is almost uniformly wonderful.
My only complaint, really, is that it seems like the gadgets don't always work as they should. In playing through the first mission in the Chinese embassy, for example, I knew I was going to need the laser microphone, so I had it equipped already when I was nearing the point at which I first needed to use it. After the little cut-scene, however, I could not make the thing work to save my soul. If I tried to equip it, Sam whipped out his rifle; if I pressed fire, nothing happened; if I pressed alternate fire, nothing happened. After a few minutes of fumbling around, I was told that I had bungled the job and that world-war three was imminent. Gee, that was fun.
Still, when you consider the rather large number of gadgets that Sam can use, this is a comparatively minor issue in the overall scheme. Despite the wealth of different items in the game, they can all be controlled via a relatively simple scheme. I would have designed the scheme a bit differently, mind you, and it still feels somewhat like a console game at times, but I can overlook these things in light of the fact that...
The game mechanics of SC are fabulous. In my view, they include the best from all other stealth-action games made to date, and then go beyond other titles in several aspects. For example, I loved the Thief and Thief II games, but they had their problems; e.g., the movement speed options were too limited, you had to trust to blind luck sometimes because of the limitations of the first-person view, etc. In contrast, SC fixes all such issues. The ability to change the protagonist's movement speed with the mouse wheel is a brilliantly simple innovation, and the third-person view makes the action far less frustrating, for you can always trust to skill, not luck, in the missions.
Better yet, the sheer variety of moves in the game is huge yet wonderfully simple. It takes very little effort for the player to get the hang of advanced jumps, hanging off ledges, climbing pipes and ladders, negotiating fences, crouching, rolling, and everything else. The developers deserve serious applause for focusing so much attention to detail and animation while keeping it all simple enough to be intuitive. The movement in SC alone sets a new standard for games, and I hope other developers are paying attention.
As if this weren't innovative enough, SC takes stealth gameplay to new levels in light of its mission designs. Some missions allow any number of enemy fatalities, while others have limits; some tolerate a civilian death or two, while others don't; alarms are handled differently (and intelligently it seems) in different contexts; mission objectives develop on the fly in a believable and engaging fashion; all sorts of different tasks are involved, from simple infiltration to laser-microphone-powered intelligence gathering. I could go on for quite some time. Suffice it to say that the game mechanics are as good as they get for this genre. I have no complaints.
As if what I've said thus far isn't positive enough, the story is superb. Yes, the overall mechanism is a bit tired; i.e., I think if I play one more game involving some radical ultra-nationalist from the former Soviet Union, I'm going to puke. Nevertheless, all of the elements of SC come together in what feels like you're playing a Tom Clancy technothriller novel. Clancy fans might get the feeling that Sam Fisher is a high-tech version of the novels' John Clark. In my estimation, Sam Fisher is just as much of a tough guy as Clark, but he's definitely got better gadgets (grin).
The story careens forward, accompanied by a fun and amusing set of pre-rendered cinematics, some of which are very emotionally moving. There's nothing to complain about in terms of story; it's solid, it's believable, and it's very engaging. I hope that other developers will take a few lessons from SC and bring their own games up to par in this department.
Despite the very high marks I've given other aspects of the game, the content nevertheless manages to best them all. The locales of SC are a gamer's dream, and all of them are incredibly detailed and well-realized. The maps are large and interesting to explore, and they make for some pretty extended missions, which feel surprisingly realistic. This is a game whose content is so compelling that the player just gets lost in it, and that's the best compliment I can give.
What I think I like most, though, is the variety of gadgets supplied for completing missions. Most situations provide you with several different possible pathways to resolution, and you will almost always have something in your kit that will help. Sure, I think it's fun to stalk a guard and give him a bullet to the head, but it's even more fun to find non-lethal ways to get past him. The airfoil rings, sticky shockers, etc., only scratch the surface. SC features some of the coolest techno-gizmos I've ever seen, and they radically enhance the gameplay.
In what has to be one of the cooler gaming moment I've had in years, for example, I was faced with an ugly situation, namely, there were three guards patrolling a well-lit area through which I had to pass to complete the mission. I was going over the possibilities in my mind, analyzing their movement patterns and such, when it occurred to me that I hadn't yet tried the diversion camera. I waited for just the right moment and fired one onto a wall near two of them. To my delight, they clearly reacted to the sound it produced and headed over to investigate. I was laughing with glee when they got close enough for me to trigger the knockout gas right in their faces! That was a moment of pure gaming goodness, and SC is replete with such moments.
I have only one substantive complaint with the game, a complaint that is becoming more and more common these days, namely, it's too short. Yes, each of the missions is pretty involved, but there are a mere nine of them in the entire game. Once I twigged to the game's way of doing things, it was smooth sailing from then on. The result was that I completed the game pretty quickly playing for a couple of hours every few nights over the course of two weeks.
For the record, SC isn't as criminally short as games like Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force or Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, but it's not exactly long. By the time I finished it, I had probably spent a total of around 15 hours of play. That's not a lot of time, and, since the game is so heavily scripted, it doesn't have a huge amount of replay value. I'm sure I'll play through it at least once more, mind you, because it's so darned fun, but it's not like some other games that have far more stuff to do during replays. For the money, I would really like another mission or two.
I suppose one might also complain that the game is pretty linear. To people who really loved Deus Ex for its open-ended play, this might be a problem. I'm honestly not bothered by it because I feel like SC gives the player structured enough missions to be fun not frustrating, while leaving enough options available for accomplishing the various goals so that the player can exult in his own decisions. I don't think this is much of a complaint, but I mention it because I know there are some people who simply hate linearity in games. To them, I can suggest only that they'll be missing something special if they avoid SC.
Finally, I think the developers deserve special praise for the way the game scales up in terms of difficulty. In the earliest missions, you pretty much can't swing a dead cat without hitting a medical kit; i.e., you can screw up a lot and still get by. Over time, though, things get harder, limiting your options in terms of fatalities, giving the guards additional equipment, bringing non-destructible lights and cameras into the picture, and even adding guard dogs (with pretty keen senses, it seems) to the mix in the later missions. Despite the increasing difficulty, though, it manages to be perfectly challenging without becoming frustrating. I've honestly been quite surprised to read reviews that say the game is terribly hard. I do think there are some tough spots, but nothing that frustrated me at all, and I (regrettably) have a pretty low tolerance for such things.
SC has no multi-player aspect, arguably with good reason. I personally think it would be a blast to have an agents vs. guards mode to play, or something like that, but I don't begrudge the lack of multi-player support in light of the amazing single-player game. Still, if you're a multi-player maven who hates single-player games, SC isn't for you; of course, I think you're missing out if that's the case, but that's your call.
SC is one of the freshest, most beautifully designed and implemented games to come along in a while. In my view, SC is the new king of the hill in stealth/action games, and, in all honesty, I much prefer playing it to any FPS game as well. SC is a must-buy game unless you're some kind of fusspot who hates stealth and single-player campaigns. As long as you're a typical gamer, or have an even slightly open mind, you owe it to yourself to buy SC as soon as possible. Trust me, you won't regret it.
03/16/2003