Splinter Cell: Conviction Review
When I first played through the main story a few months ago, the brevity of the game left me with a little bit of a sour taste in my mouth. But having not played the co-op campaign until recently, I couldn’t help feel like I hadn’t give the package as a whole a fair shake. Hence this late review.
The fifth Splinter Cell game in the series follows super-spy Sam Fisher as he breaks away from his longtime employers, the shadowy Third Echelon, in a bid to find answers about the events surrounding his daughter’s death. Along the way, Sam gets re-entangled with the U.S. government to investigate Tom Reed, Third Echelon’s new head, and all-around bad egg with sinister intentions.
Taking you from Malta all the way to the doors of the White House, Conviction plays out like any decent Hollywood block-buster, with enough plot and intregue to keep you occupied for its entire run. But it does so at the expense of funneling players hastily through each of the linear set-pieces to keep up the pacing.
Fisher, then, loses a lot of his athleticism and patience from previous Splinter Cell games in favor of action oriented gun-play–the game never really punishing you for being careless or spotted. In fact, there’s now no way to hide bodies, or even complete a level using nothing but stealth.
The justification for Fisher’s new-found boldness? According to developer videos put out prior to the game’s release in April, Ubisoft Montreal were selling Conviction’s Fisher as the ultimate predator: highly trained and finally off the leash; becoming more livid with each new revelation of his daughters fate.
Unfortunately, there are only a few scenes where Fisher’s rage is successfully portrayed, and it’s usually restricted to the brutal, interactive interrogation sequences when he grabs someone by their throat and starts smacking answers out of them.
Outside of these sequences, each level essentially equates to a chain of challenge rooms, filled with about five or six guys, set-up in such a way as to capitalize on the new “Last Known Position” and “Mark and Execute” mechanics.
“Last Known Position” encourages teasing your foes into thinking they have you cornered, displaying a white silhouette of Fisher where you were spotted so you can plan a trap for the investigating goons accordingly–usually ending with a hand-to-hand takedown.
Taking out an enemy in close-combat will also net you a Mark and Execute token, giving you the ability to select up to four other baddies to be eliminated in rapid succession with a simple press of the Y button. It makes for quite satisfying gameplay sequences, but requires very little planning ahead of time to use effectively.
The mechanics work well–but perhaps a little too well: the game becomes a cakewalk once you figure out you can mark everyone before you gain the ability to Mark and Execute. And the problem is only compounded further later in the game when Fisher finally receives Splinter Cell’s mandatory pair of high-tech goggles (I think it’s in Ubisoft’s contract at this point). The sonar goggles allow him to sit atop a shadowy perch and see virtually everything around him–even through walls. After marking everyone you can, it’s then a case of running out of the shadows, taking some poor sap’s life in a single elaborate move, then hitting Y to dispatch the onlooking peanut gallery.
That’s not to say Conviction is a bad game or a horrible departure for there franchise: it’s fun and exciting for the most part. I am just talking as someone used to whistling from the shadows to lure a guard out, traversing a pipe around said guard, hitting a switch and slinking out of there without his knowledge.
Finding a willing victim to take control of the second agent in the game’s two player co-operative missions while simultaneously tolerating my inept skills was a challenge in itself. But in the end, oOCylonOo of Diary of a Gamer Girl was willing to put herself through torment and see it through to the end.
The co-op missions tell the prelude to the main story of Conviction, as an American agent and his Russian counterpart track the EMP warheads that ultimately end up in Washington, D.C. It’s also where the game mechanics come into their own. It almost feels like it was intended to be the main product–not Sam Fisher’s story. All the gadgets from the main story are there; the cutscenes; all with the added challenge of having to watch your team mate’s back.
There is actually very little interaction between the two agents aside from dialog. Unless you are willing to use headsets and form a proper plan of attack, the only real advantages are having an extra pair of eyes and the ability to revive each other or save your partner from a choke hold, but that can be quite messy if you are not working together closely in the first place.
In addition to the story, there are a few extra modes to play, either online or solo. In the Hunter game type you and a friend must clear a level as quickly and cleanly as possible. Being spotted in this mode actually has severe consequences, especially if you are already half way through a map, as reinforcements will arrive at various locations to complicate matters, and must be eliminated before you can proceed.
Last Stand asks you to defend an EMP warhead against 20 waves of increasingly well armed opponents, but Face off pits you against your deadliest enemy: your fellow spy. In a map surrounded by AI baddies, the two spies compete to reach the score limit before the timer ends. You receive 1 point for eliminating an AI henchman, but 5 for taking out your opponent. It was surprisingly easy to get the drop on your rival, even with the sonar goggles, but for every time I surprised oOCylonOo, she’d sneak up behind me a couple of minutes later and break my neck in revenge.
The game isn’t perfect by any means, and despite the main story being disappointingly short and sometimes being too easy due to the redesigned gameplay, the co-op modes balance out the issue with more story and play time, as well as providing a lot of challenge and entertainment.
