Splinter Cell Review

An early candidate for game of the year or just an over hyped piece of worthless crap? I'm pretty sure it's the former, but you'd better read and watch the reviews to be sure.

Is it hypocritical to say after decades of pontification on how graphics aren't everything and the height of gameplay came with Bionic Commando that graphics are pretty much everything here? Not when the graphics are directly related to play, believability, immersion, suspense, and wonder.

This may be a singleplayer game, but the light of Splinter Cell is the second most important character aside from Sam Fisher. The lighting of each level gives it its personality and shapes the challenges that you're going to face. The one overwhelming instinct you'll have early on is the desire for darkness and quiet. The game becomes more difficult because it becomes tougher to find, create, and maintain the darkness you desire as you face less hospitable places and more characters looking for you.

If you didn't know already (that paragraph above can be misleading to the blind), Splinter Cell has some of the most impressive lighting effects which make for some of the most impressive characters and impressive environments around.

The lighting in Splinter Cell, as we said, isn't just some effect where you have a lamp in a room but that room itself is actually lit by some mysterious, inalterable off camera source. Ubi Soft Montreal has simulated the behavior of light to the point where everything is self-shadowing, and the only way you're able to see what's going on in the game is because of a light giving device in the current scene. Whether it's overhead halogens, a bank of monitors, or the glow of a brilliant full moon, you'll always know where light is shining from and so you'll be able to anticipate where and how shadows will fall and which ones need to be shot out. The developers even simulated the different shines you get from banks of several halogens versus the harsh lighting from a single exposed light bulb in a dingy hallway. Light shines through trees, latticework and even chain-link fences and falls on whatever may be on the other side. So when Sam is facing a giant glowing billboard whilst hanging from a chain-link fence, the fence will cast a network of shadows on him with the glow of the billboard lighting the negative spaces, provided your video card can muster such things.

Shooting out lights is nothing new in videogames, but it's still rarely done and, aside from Thief and Aliens vs. Predator (assuming you weren't a marine) has never been as functional as it is in Splinter Cell. Shooting out every light in a hallway will create total darkness to the point that your monitor will have nothing on it beyond the HUD (which I still wish had a transparency slider option, for I find it to be a bit too obstructing) and the slight green glow of Sam's goggles and secure radio.

In such scenarios, enemies will be completely blind and will walk with their hands out in front of them as they search for either a light switch (which they strangely go out of their way to do even if the darkened room is not in their general patrol route) or Sam, if they've been alarmed. Nightvision goggles will give you a huge advantage in the dark, but as you continue through a level and encounter new areas that aren't in total darkness, the lack of color in the nighvision display (everything is a shade of pea-green and then a strange shade of gray as the game progresses) can suddenly work against you if you're not keeping one eye on your stealth meter. Again, the realities of the "tradecraft," at least as we imagine it, are well represented, except for the practically useless thermal display that has poor range and an even poorer ability of seeing through anything worth seeing through, like a damn wall or door. Hell yeah you can see through curtains, though.

In later levels the subtleties of orange lights in the Georgian Presidential Palace or bright neon signs on far off buildings around the Chinese Embassy in Myanmar cast just enough light on Sam to barely make him visible, except for the giant, inconspicuous green bulbs on his goggles and back that no one seems capable of recognizing. This is compared to the abandoned dummy high-tech company, where the skeleton staff means the majority of the building is dark. But there's all kinds of light in certain areas where workers are still buzzing about. You have to pay attention to the lighting situation at all times so you can come up with your on-the-fly plan of attack. To increase difficulty as you proceed from mission to mission, the game simply makes some situations more annoying than others (those orange lights are no fun), but you always have the tools you'll need to get by. It's really up to you to figure out your own way through the game, which means go slow and keep your eyes open.

In Splinter Cell, you're more or less dropped into a situation with a specific set of equipment and given an initial objective. Other than this, you have to learn to use your noodle to figure out what's expected of you. You're given a limited amount of ammunition and other goodies like grenades, sticky cameras and smoke bombs. However, you're never given clues or prompts as to when or where you're supposed to use these items. Unlike EA's recent James Bond games, there's no flashing icon or obvious camera zoom during a mission fly-by to point out what you need to do. And this is what masks Splinter Cell's linearity and makes moving on that straight line I mentioned earlier so enjoyable. It's the puzzle game for the smart man. There is no directional pointer and aside from a few blatant, "you can do this, too" situations, progress is entirely left up to the player, but directed in such a way that unless you overlook the obvious, you'll proceed.

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Game Details

Published by: Ubisoft
Developed by: Ubisoft Montreal
Genre: Third-Person Adventure
Release Date:
United States: February 18, 2003
MSRP: 24.99 USD
T for Teen : Blood and Gore, Violence
Also Available On: GBA, Mac, PS2, PS3, Cell, GCN, Xbox
Also known as: Splinter Cell