PC / Mac

Splinter Cell

Stealth done (Mostly) right.

What Is It

Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell is a stealth video game, developed by Ubisoft Montreal and built on the Unreal Engine 2. It is the first Splinter Cell game in the series. Endorsed (but not created) by author Tom Clancy, it follows the activities of NSA Black Ops agent Sam Fisher. The character of Fisher is voiced by actor Michael Ironside. His commanding officer, Irving Lambert, is voiced by actor Don Jordan.

The game is available for Xbox, Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 2, GameCube, and Mac OS X. 2D versions of the game were released for the Game Boy Advance and N-Gage (the latter as Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Team Stealth Action), as well as the mobile phones version developed by Gameloft. A remastered “high definition” version of Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell was released on the PlayStation 3 in September 2011. The success of the game series spawned a series of novels written under the pseudonym David Michaels.

What I Think

Considering the age of this game I was expecting far worse when I re-played this old classic. It’s a game I played a few times as a child and never touched again. I deemed it too hard and moved on, as you do at that age.

Going back now though I’m actually impressed. The game does it’s stuff well and is actually fun to play.

The plot is complex and slightly stupid and not everything makes perfect sense. But I’m sure that’s normal for a spy game. The Bond games were usually quite odd as well.
The stealth mechanics work mostly well. The game has a light and sound detection mechanic so if you’re in the dark and not moving you’re a lot harder to detect. Doesn’t mean they won’t, if they get close to you then you’re screwed but that’s pretty fair.
The system isn’t brilliant sometimes you think you’re in a dark enough place and you aren’t but good enough.

The graphics are pretty typical for 2002. Decent and acceptable with more emphasis on making the game run well than on making it look real. For example the fire effects are laughable by modern standards but back then you ignored it. Remember that time when games were games and you glossed over anything that revealed it such as flames being the same 3 second clip looped.

The weapons are nice. It’s unreal how much I’ve missed the EMP tool on the pistol. I’ll never understand why it got removed in later games. It was a fun and re-usable feature. And it saves ammo. Ammo being something very very important in this game. You can’t get more ammo as you go along so you really do have to pick your shots. it doesn’t help that at any real distance you have a great chance of missing. Realistic but annoying.

The sound is quite nice. One thing the sound in this game did very well with is silencers. In the real world they’re used to make the noise bearable without ear protection NOT to totally kill the sound of a gun. Splinter Cell accepts and adopts this fact. Guards can and will hear gunshots.

The AI is relatively dumb but again, 2002. So you can expect set paths and predictability. It blends well with the concept of patrol routes though so well done Ubisoft.

 

Overall this game is well made and a well respected start to the series. Well worth a replay. It could do with more checkpoints though. Modern games have ruined me!!!

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