Review: Splinter Cell: Blacklist
When I was a student I didn’t just play Splinter Cell; I made an art form of it. My flatmate and I completed the entire game in co-op mode without being spotted once, by anyone, ever.
We owned the shadows. It took us weeks; months maybe. It would be beautiful if it wasn’t such a massive waste of time and youth.
We played it for so long that when I ventured outside, which wasn’t all that often, I’d feel anxious walking under street lights, mentally shooting them so I could remain under cover of night. It seeped into my consciousness to such an extent that as a reporter years later, when giving a fake name as part of an investigation, I chose “Douglas Shetland”, one of the game’s recurring characters.
I played every title in the franchise until 2010’s much-maligned Conviction, which seemed to sacrifice all the best bits, like the need to skulk around shadows, in order to appease a generation raised on Call of Duty and Crysis.
The latest instalment, Blacklist, promises to merge the Splinter Cell of old with the newer, more gung-ho style, with mixed results. The opening levels are frustratingly difficult, with slightly clunky controls that mean Sam (Fisher, the game’s protagonist) doesn’t do exactly what you want him to. I got shot. A lot. And in Splinter Cell when you get shot, you tend to die. So I died a lot. It’s based on checkpoints, so you can get right to the end of a section only to be mauled by an alsatian and have to do the whole thing over.
And then somehow it was five hours later and I was hooked again. Blacklist isn’t for players who want to just run through levels – you have to think about what you’re doing. It offers three playing styles: Ghost, in which you avoid all enemy contact, Panther, which is creeping around and bashing people over the head, and Assault, which means making everyone explode in a mist of brains. All are effective in their own way, although parts of the game force you to abandon your preferred style, which is annoying.
The story is exactly the same as the ones I remember from years ago: terrorist organisation blah blah covert mission blah double cross blah blah your daughter is on the phone blah. It doesn’t really matter: it’s both fleetingly engaging and completely forgettable, which is fine.
The Wii U’s GamePad allows for some nifty little touches; when Sam slides his camera under a door the grainy image appears on the tablet screen. Similarly, piloting an ariel drone is done using the GamePad (annoyingly, the main screen switches off, instead of showing what is going on in the live environment).
Every now and then it veers wildly off course (for example a top-down ariel sniper sequence that looks like it was made in 1987) but overall Blacklist is a worthy addition to the Splinter Cell canon.
First published in City A.M.