Happy Fallout eve everybody! I, like the rest of the video game community, am breathlessly anticipating the imminent arrival of Fallout 4. The lead-up to a major release is often a weird time, as I find myself in a position where the game I want is only days away, but need a distraction while I wait. I personally hate leaving a game half-finished, so it becomes a delicate balance of finding a game that fills the wait time but wraps up just as the new hotness gets released.

Of course, I grappled with this issue last week, when I finished the whimsical Broken Age and needed something to keep me occupied. Diving into the old Steam backlog, I settled on Splinter Cell: Blacklist, the 2013 Ubisoft Toronto attempt to revive the struggling franchise. The evolution of the Splinter Cell series has been quite odd, to say the least. The original trilogy from the Xbox/Gamecube/Playstation 2 era still stand as some of the best titles from that generation. Here was a western answer to the unapologetically Japanese Metal Gear Solid series. Sure, the story was as forgettable as most games with the Tom Clancy stamp, but the gameplay was actually competent. The controls were silky smooth, the light/dark dynamics added a fun twist to stealth action, and the lack of verbosity was a welcome respite to Solid Snake’s endless monologues. But while Metal Gear Solid managed to evolve and grow with the HD era, Splinter Cell began to feel lost. Double Agent and Conviction felt like solid entries, but there was no clear direction to them. Sam Fisher would always encounter a threat, expediently deal with it, and then brood over or bond with his daughter.

So, does Blacklist bring something new to the Splinter Cell formula? In a word, no, but that does not mean the game itself is not worth checking out. The game still uses a rote terrorist plot against America to set Sam’s globetrotting journey in motion. You will avoid and/or engage with many faceless bad guys, but the game smartly builds on the stealth sandbox that the series is known for. Blacklist incentivizes players to go through levels in three possible ways; the stealthy, minimal conflict Ghost style, the lethal, stalking Panther style, and the guns blazing Assault style. The ability to directly engage enemies and “go loud” may be at odds with the deliberate pace of the series’ stealth, but it in fact allows for more experimentation. With the option to pull out an assault rifle and blast enemies I was keen to actively mess around with the levels. More often than not this experimentation was rewarded as I was able to use gadgets and level design in interesting ways to deal with the challenges presented. On the off-times that the experimentation led to my cover being blown, I was able to roll with it and treat the game like a competent third person shooter. Splinter Cell die- hards can still entertain their spy fantasies with the Ghost and Panther styles, and there is even a Perfectionist difficulty that essentially returns to the punishing stealth of the original game.

Playing through Blacklist, I kept thinking about what possible future the series could have. I very much enjoyed the moment-to-moment action and appreciated how, like in Conviction, you are empowered to feel like the unstoppable badass that Sam Fisher is. The Mark and Execute mechanic, where a single button press at the appropriate time can wipe out several enemies instantly, remains immensely satisfying, even if it is just an “I win” button. The game is not particularly hard on normal difficulty, but that allows to game to move quickly and prevents you from thinking about the insane plot too deeply. It’s interesting to think that Blacklist may have been the last Ubisoft game to not feature the open world tower climb formula that has become ubiquitous.

The days of a solid 8-10 hour action campaign seems to be coming to a close this generation, and sadly it seems Splinter Cell has suffered from that trend. Can the series stage a comeback? I’m honestly not sure, as the budget to make a proper follow-up would likely not be justified to what the game would sell. Of course, the excellent Wolfenstein: The New Order showed that you can make a modern game with top-notch production and a short campaign, but I doubt that Ubisoft is taking that single success as a blueprint to follow. Hopefully they figure it out, because I don’t want to live in a world where Sam doesn’t get to exercise the Fifth Freedom.