Looking ahead to "Splinter Cell: Blacklist"
"Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell" is one of my favourite video game franchises. Despite having more or less nothing to do with Tom Clancy, it does have the melodramatic feel that he’s known for, along with cool gadgets and lots of army stuff. Like, you know... Guns and acronyms.
But the most recent game, Splinter Cell: Conviction, was a heck of a letdown. It stripped a lot of the stealth aspects and replaced them with fast pace, simple run and shoot mechanics. The Mark mechanic let you mark a target and press a button to shoot him. Essentially, letting the game do the fun stuff. This was obviously an attempt to make the franchise appeal to a wider audience, making things easier and quicker. But that alienated a lot of long time fans who all agree that Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory was the standard to aim for when creating more games in the franchise. The fans didn’t make a huge fuss, possibly because they’re used to hiding in the shadows and climbing pipes and all that. But they did make themselves heard. So, have they listened to them? Or has the lack of real complaining given Ubisoft the idea that they did it right? Well, we won’t really know until next year. But it’s a good idea to see how things progress so we can manage our excitement levels and know if we should be throwing cats in the air out of sheer, uncontrollable excitement or just relaxing with a magazine. Two demos of the same level have been shown. Sam Fisher has to make his way through a hot jungle level filled with mercs. The first one did not give me any hope. My hope was dead. And buried. And dug up and shot again. They’ve introduced a new mechanic called “Killing in motion” which pretty much just makes the game even faster and more automatic. Sure, it looks cool but it doesn’t fit the franchise. If it were part of another original game, I’m sure everyone would be excited. Add to that the fact that you can call in military assistance and you have a game that shaping up to be a clone of many other third person shooters. So, looks cool but shouldn’t be part of the franchise. In the first demo, Fisher jumps over tables and kills people all over the place. Looks cool but- Yeah, you get the idea. Not really Splinter Cell. You run off to a small ruined village where you use an electric sticky shocker to take down an enemy and you call in some of that sweet American Military assistance. BOOM goes a truck! But even though this is the action play through, you still see some elements of stealth. But then they show the new demo. The stealth demo. This one did give me a little hope for the game. The stealth isn’t as complex as Chaos Theory and will probably play more like Conviction again but it’s closer to the old style. Fisher avoids every enemy, making use of his environment to stay hidden and moving at every opportunity. While it’s still a little fast paced to be believable, it’s still looking pretty good. And then... Fisher killed somebody. And then he moved the body. This may not seem like much to those who haven’t played the original games but this is pretty important to fans like me. In Conviction you couldn’t hide bodies. Hiding bodies is an essential part of the franchise, allowing you to take a guy out and leave no trace. I can honestly say it’s nice to see that again. But the fact that they didn’t show a stealth demo first kind of suggests they’re not interested in pleasing loyal long time fans. The biggest let down, though is that Michael Ironside (Total Recall, Starship Troopers) will not be returning as the voice of Fisher. The reason Ubisoft has given for this is that they need an actor capable of doing both the motion capture and voice acting and since he’s 62, it’s not a great idea to be dressing him in tight motion capture suits. That would be a bit weird. Why they couldn’t have Ironside do the voiceover is beyond me. However, we do get Eric Johnson (Smallville, Flash Gordon series), an actor 30 years younger than Ironside. He’s a fairly decent an underrated actor but only time will tell if he’s good enough for the role. So, really, the game isn’t looking too bad. It looks better than Conviction at the very least! So Ubisoft is heading in the right direction. More or less. Although, Chaos Theory was pretty close to perfect so it’s unfortunate they had to go so far in the wrong direction in the first place... And now we have to wait until next year to find out if they messed up again! That's a lot of days, people!!! A lot of waiting. A lot of cats and magazines!!! |
|