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    Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Conviction

    Game » consists of 20 releases. Released Apr 13, 2010

    Splinter Cell: Conviction is the fifth installment in Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell franchise. Sam Fisher breaks apart from the Third Echelon in order to find the people responsible for the death of his daughter, only to find that not everything is what it seems.

    sundowner_'s Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Conviction (PC) review

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    A case of stolen (or rather forgotten) identity.

    Conviction is a hard game to enjoy mostly for it's lack of anything that made the first three games interesting. It feels like a game lacking identity which is upsetting as it delivers an interesting story albeit through the guise of a twitchy cover-based shooter.

    If there is one thing the games industry lacks is contemporary stealth games that don't feel too far from home. Something that feels like it almost certainly could happen a day or a month down the line. That's why I enjoy the Splinter Cell series' so much. While it certainly does take a few liberties on the realism front and it does rely on a few common cinematic tropes in order to deliver it's story, it still feels realistic and it carries a certain weight to the gameplay that delivers such an intense and satisfying stealth espionage experience. This is where Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Conviction really falls flat. The most notable issue I have with the game is the fact that it is so desperate to be a twitchy cover-based shooter and yet the gun play feels akin to that of Splinter Cell (released in 2002) or one of the other previous gen games. You might ask why that is an issue. Well in Splinter Cell, using your weapon was very much a last resort. As a result of the time or the intentions of the developers, shooting your gun was a hefty task in and of itself what with the floaty controls and the aged game engines. Conviction does an excellent job of emulating that gameplay and it's entirely to the detriment of the game.

    There is a sore lacking of identity in Conviction that doesn't sit right with me. Here we have the fifth game in a series of games that have had nothing but successes as far as I'm concerned. Splinter Cell, it's sequel Pandora Tomorrow and the followup Chaos Theory were fantastic games that delivered exactly what I described above, a realistic and satisfying stealth experience. The sort-of-first of the next-gen Splinter Cell games was Double Agent which had Sam act as an agent for opposing agencies and it managed to bring out this fantastic conflict of interest as well as maintaining most of what made me love Chaos Theory and the rest. Where these four games are so strong, Conviction is weak. It has a very uninteresting, very clunky "stealth" system which basically boils down to shifting between some poorly placed pieces of cover and either executing (note: there is no non-lethal attack) or bypassing guards entirely. The trouble with this is that every level, even the ones that almost force you to have to stealth, is designed to be played like a cover based shooter. Every single level was a long narrow room with pieces of cover dotted along the way and very rarely you could navigate a ventilation shaft or climb up above the roaming guards. There was never an instance where I felt stealth was the sensible option, it was only ever something I attempted to do with varying degrees of success and ultimately still lead to me almost having to kill guards lethally.

    It is this dissonance in the level design, gameplay and how the game presents you with any situations that make it extremely hard to play and enjoy. One of the more offensively lacking features was the ability to move (dead) bodies around, out of the view of prying eyes. This meant that I had to be careful about who I killed and where because my decision was final. At face value that sounds interesting. It would be cool if my actions mattered and I had to place my shots carefully but none of that is inline with the gameplay precedence set by the franchise in the past. If I could have moved bodies around that might have taken some of the sting out of the lack of any real stealth mechanics. Another thing that makes this so disappointing is that the game really wants me to shoot everyone, there are far more action packed loud fully automatic weapons than there are descrete options. Everything about the level design, the gameplay, your available toolset wants you to shoot everyone and move on. Even some of the random guard dialog alludes to the fact that Sam is and always has been a stone faced killer liable to put a bullet in your back the minute you turn away. Even Sam's best friend and old military buddy claims that when Sam gets angry, you do not want to be on the receiving end of whatever volatile object he may be wielding. Where did this come from? Since when was Sam this person? Sam was never that guy! Stop saying that!

    It doesn't help that the enemy AI is so laughably easy to manipulate and cheese by standing at a corner and letting them file in one by one, executing them right in front of their comrades. The scripting for the AI is also just terrible. If you shoot out one of the hundred lights around any given level, the guards immediately engage FIND-SAM-FISHER-MODE. There is no logical build up to their suspicions, they don't even investigate what broke the light. Their knee jerk reaction to anything is to scream Sam Fisher's name and start the prowl not before they quickly give up, ignoring the broken lights and their three dead friends and returning to their default patrol route. It makes for a very frustrating and almost funny kink in the gameplay that serves only to reiterate how misaligned Splinter Cell has become with itself.

    The plot was rather nebulous at times with the majority of it being delivered through terribly low framerate cutscenes often on par with something I would expect out of a previous generation Splinter Cell (or any) game. I never once at any given point knew exactly what was going on, I was sort of just given a task and I would run toward it gunning guards down until I got there. For what it's worth, the payoff for the plot is pretty good and I found my self enjoying it and ultimately found my self to be happy with how it turned out. I just wish they had elaborated more on the characters involved and had Sam spend more time with other characters. The fact that they chose to have Sam's friend narrate the whole thing left a large disconnect between myself and every other character. There was never a time where I felt like I was connected to or even interested in Sam's closest "friend" Grimsdottir throughout or even Sam's daughter Sarah, who is all he really wants to get back to after all is said and done.

    I feel if I go on any further I will be ranting and not actually sharing my thoughts on the game. This was written mostly because the new entry in the franchise "Blacklist" is being released tomorrow and I decided to give Conviction a play through in order to gain some context, as I had left the series at Chaos Theory and had consumed Double Agent's plot through other means. That is also why this review is being made now despite the game being released over 3 years ago. Perhaps I've been harsh on the game as it certainly does feel dated but the trouble is it feels dated long before 2010. It feels like it belongs to 2005 in terms of how it operates. Here's hoping that Blacklist reconciles with the games of previous years, which seems like what maybe the case, and I can finally enjoy Splinter Cell again because as it stands Conviction may just have one to many hindering convictions of its own.

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