Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Conviction Review

Conviction had me worried. Being a big fan of the stealth franchise, seeing the next game in the series turn into what looked like more of a third-person action game with an ‘I win’ mechanic when we first saw it at E3 last year made me have my doubts. Sure, it looked undoubtedly awesome, but it didn’t look like Splinter Cell. What Ubisoft Montreal have done, though, is successfully redefine the stealth genre by melding it with action (which is, funnily enough, what they were saying all along – stealth action) in such a way that veterans and fans of Sam Fisher feel right at home, and people new to the series, or those that steered clear of it before, can thoroughly enjoy themselves. Conviction, though, is not without its shortcomings. I made that plural, but really, it should just be left at ‘shortcoming’.

If you’ve been keeping track of Conviction since it’s second unveiling at E3 last year, then you’ll know that Sam is out of the game, and looking for the killer of his daughter. Seriously – I swear all of the trailers for that game, besides the co-op ones, had Sam saying the same “Who killed my daughter?” line. Anyway, as he tracks down a suspect or two related to the death of his daughter, he finds himself back in the web of Third Echelon, the all-seeing, all-knowing organisation that Sam used to work for – but he’s looking at them from a different perspective. Third Echelons leadership now consists of some rather nasty individuals, and they seem to have something nasty planned for America. Go figure. With both the quest of knowledge relating to his daughter, and fighting old colleagues, the Sam Fisher you may know isn’t here. He’s one angry, grief-ridden man – and he’s not afraid to do things a little louder than you may remember.

Who KILLED my DAUGHTER?

Despite the story in Conviction being quite predictable, it’s definitely a blast to play through, thanks to the good performances all around (especially the returning voice talent of Michael Ironside for Sam) and varying environments.  In typical Splinter Cell fashion, the missions are quite linear as you head from point A to point B, but there are different ways for you to navigate each of areas. In Conviction, I find each room full of armed enemies as a puzzle. Sure, I could go in pretty much guns blazing, or stick to shooting them from the shadows without them seeing or hearing me, but the real way I like to play this game, if possible, is the way in which a stealth game should be played. Each area usually presents you with a variety of different objects to climb up or around, which helps you set up traps for your enemies, if you need to. You don’t even have to engage anybody, but thanks to Convictions vast array of ways to take people out (or ‘neutralize’ people, as Tom Clancy game prefer to say), the need to ‘neutralize’ is too great. You can pull people out of windows, jump down from ledges to knock people out, even snap their necks – or just pop them with a single bullet to the head from behind cover. If you are spotted, the game draws Sam’s last known position in the form of a while silhouette. This actually adds a benefit to being spotted, and in many cases I have purposefully made it so the enemies can detect me, so I can exploit this. Once you’ve been detected and the last known position appears, you can lay a remote mine down, for example, to take out anybody who investigates that area shortly after – or just wait in the shadows nearby to nail them with an elbow to the face.

That ‘I win’ mechanic I mentioned? That is what Conviction calls ‘Mark and Execute’. Depending on the weapon you have (and depending whether you have upgraded it or not), you can tag a number of enemies (or ‘mark’, you might say) and with the press of a button, you kill them all one by one within seconds. Luckily, this is balanced, because you can only ‘execute’ people after marking them when you have performed a melee kill, and you can only store one execute at a time. That’s a good thing, because otherwise, you’d just end up clearing a room with melee attacks alone, then go through the rest of the mission using the executes that you’ve gathered to clear entire rooms. See why I thought it was an ‘I win’ mechanic? Like I said, though, it’s balanced to stop it from being just that, and there are some moments when you’ve rightfully executed this mechanic (see what I did there?) in which you can’t help but do a little victory jig in your chair afterwards.

Look up. Why do they never look up?

The game has a good selection of firearms and gadgets to choose from, though I have  to say, I barely found myself using any of them. The gadgets are handy once in a while, like the remote mine for setting traps, or the sticky camera for distracting enemies, but they’re very situational. The weapons, ranging from pistols, sub-machine guns, and assault rifles, aren’t anything special. Once i’d unlocked a particular pistol, I didn’t use anything else, and left all of the other guns except for one assault rifle without upgrades. Use of a silenced pistol alone can carry you through the story mode, and the other weapons do find a bit more value in the other game modes. Even there, though, they’re nothing spectacular.

Splinter Cell has an unlock system running through it that associates points with challenges, and both the singleplayer and multiplayer use this. For instance, complete a challenge for killing ten enemies with your pistol without reloading, and you will gain a set  amount of points. These points can be spent on weapon/gadget upgrades that both Sam and your character in multiplayer benefit from. They can also be used to upgrade the different armour you can customise in the multiplayer mode. These multiplayer modes consist of a co-op story, which serves as a prologue to the singleplayer story, as well as modes such as “Face-off” which sets you against your once-cooperative friend. Conviction removes the tried-and-tested Splinter Cell multiplayer mode of spies versus mercenaries, and though that may turn some people off, the multiplayer is still solid here, and great fun to play. Being shot by your friend who is dangling from a pipe on the ceiling certainly is disappointing, but you can’t help but appreciate how awesome that is. This works both online and split-screen, but as with most games, split-screen hinders the gameplay experience because your screen just isn’t big enough to take in what’s around you – and the obvious drawback of your opponent always knowing what you’re doing.

This image should make Conviction an instant buy for it's multiplayer.

An internally modified Unreal 2 engine (called LEAD) powers this stealthy delight, and though you may associate said-engine with games from the previous generation, Conviction certainly holds its own. Characters can look a bit nasty when you get close up, but besides that, the game looks very nice, and runs at a solid framerate. Animation is smooth, especially when you’re sliding from one piece of cover to the next. Like I said, Michael Ironside is back voicing Sam Fisher, and he doesn’t disappoint. Despite other people thinking he sounds drunk in parts, it’s still a solid performance, which further fuels the disappointment I will experience once he inevitably backs out of the role.

If you wanted an accessible Splinter Cell game, you got one. If you wanted another Splinter Cell game that is still Splinter Cell, you got one – it’s just not quite what you are expecting. But considering what you’ve just read, i’m pretty sure you understand that Conviction’s gameplay changes the series formula in the right places. The only real significant issue with this game is that there isn’t much replayability. The story mode took me just under five hours to complete, but apparently the average is around seven hours. The story co-op mode is fairly short, too, and the other multiplayer modes will only last so long. Regardless, Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Conviction is definately worth your time.