My two cents on Splinter Cell: Conviction

I've finished playing through Sam Fishers fall into chaos through his newest game and here are my thoughts on it.

Firstly: THIS IS NOT SPLINTER CELL.

Splinter cell is perhaps the epitome of sneaking games, giving you, not only, a large arsenal of weapons and gadgets with which to slip past your foes, but also challenging you to try and find other methods of liquidation besides plainly shooting. Besides the crappy Double Agent (which I haven't even been able to play) the sneaking has always been priority, failure to swear to the shadows would result in sharp reprimands from your commander and possibly a nuclear war.

This changed in Conviction where you do not even have the possibility of hiding bodies of your (very chatty and very ugly by the way) enemies and your arsenal of ranged combat weaponry is limited to bullets, thereby removing the whole non-lethal part of the game. yes, there is sneaking but it is very hard to do since the developers have jumped on the train of this fashion that is having no GUI, something I really do not understand the taboo of having, which means no real sneak meter (other than the screen turning black and white when you seem to be in shadows although you are in plain sight to the player) and no health bar.

But what this game is, is an incredibly satisfying shooter. Yes, this game is fun, make no mistake of that. Besides becoming more a deliver-your-brain-at-the-entrance shooter this game has not lost all charm and hope. The developers have undoubtedly tried to implement some graphical changes and they are in fact not completely lost on me. It is beautiful, yes, with many of the levels being colourful and with civilians for a change. the effect when you go into hiding does seem slick, especially since some objects, including blood, is still coloured and seem to amplify the atmosphere. your objectives are now displayed via text projected on objects throughout the game which also seem to be the best way to do so instead of outright displaying an objectives screen. Actually, except the blatant changes from the "original formula of Splinter Cell", my only complaint is the new sonar vision gear which seems completely useless compared to our original vision gear (it's even become the friggin' logo of the game people!) and the auto-save system where there is usually too far between checkpoints and a strange way of implementing extra difficulty into a game (I got frustrated having to do the same task over and over because the game didn't feel like saving).

In conclusion: besides changing a fucking perfect game (here I still mean the first three (or at least the first and chaos theory) and not the crappy double agent) this game is still a fun, albeit a bit short, shooting game with beautiful visuals that really is a nice break from the gritty and grey games we see everywhere right now.

/Skt_Thomas

Addendum: I forgot the most awesome thing in the game: YOU SMASH A MANS FACE INTO AN URINAL!