![]() It seems a bit too simplistic with green for “safe”, yellow for “not safe” and red for “you’re getting shot”. To optimise the movie style of the game, the HUD has been mostly scrapped and you need to rely on the previously mentioned concealment indicator strapped to Sam’s back. Although it has been there since Chaos Theory, I still love the way that Sam moves his body weight away from an enemy when he’s sneaking, it really make the game more believable and tense. Even a couple of years on, the graphics still really stand up to scrutiny. ![]() The graphics are superb – I especially like the unevenly shaved heads of the characters that do look realistically buzz-cut. Other than this, though the game is mostly identical to the previous game in the series, Chaos Theory (which itself had only moved on a little from Pandora Tomorrow), and seems to use an awful lot of that game’s animation, but with a nice crisp textures layer over them. Most people like the night time sneakiness, so the day-time snow level (the weakest in my eyes, especially as Sam is bizarrely wearing his super hi-tech suit – and also the only mission in any of the games that I haven’t got 100% stealth in!) and the glary African war zone (where your vision enhancer is actually a pair of sunglasses) seem a little out of place. It doesn’t seem like enough of a consequence.Īnother minor annoyance for me is how I could imagine the developers saying “How can we shake up the game? People buy it for the sneaking around the dark, so we need to shake it up a bit”. My problem with this is that if your trust drops, you simply get a scrolling message that says “We don’t trust you any more. While this particular act doesn’t have far reaching consequences, later in the game they become more important. I imagine that if you don’t maintain trust with both parties, you will be railroaded into certain decisions in order to keep playing as there are points where you are given two conflicting objectives – for example, the NSA say don’t kill a hostage, while the JBA put the gun in your hand and tell you to do it. As I am a bit of a completist, I will do every side mission offered by a game, so this mechanic made no difference to me. The mechanic that doesn’t really work too well is the “trust” system whereby certain acts will raise or lower your trust level with either the JBA or NSA. No doubt some people will hate these levels as they break up the action, but when viewed as an espionage thriller with the levels acting as the action set-pieces, I feel that the pace is tremendous. This adds some superb tension as Sam won’t run in the base. Ignoring what amounts to a massive leap in logic (I said I loved them no matter how contrived!), the game boils down to the same mission structure as before with “interval” levels where you have 30 minutes in the JBA base to perform a set amount of tasks – for example, you will be told by the JBA guy to complete an obstacle course and practice on the firing range, while Lambert will tell you to bug their antennae. Following this, he performs missions for the terrorist group JBA (John Brown’s Army) and the NSA (armed with his specially modified secret service SC2K rifle (Logic jump – ignore!) and his FN 5.7mm pistol (not an entirely common weapon, by the way…). So he gets planted in prison (with his OPSAT on his wrist and concealment indicator strapped to his back (Ignore the logic jump!)) in order to meet up with a domestic terrorist leader whom he befriends to infiltrate the group. This mission is presumably so dangerous because Sam’s history appears to be military in nature with the emphasis on wetwork and action, rather than undercover infiltration. The main difference here is that this time around, Sam Fisher has decided to take on the most dangerous mission he can following the death of his daughter. While I’m pretty sure they’ve probably never met and do all their work in separate booths on different days, the two actors have fantastic chemistry that really adds the winning edge to the series. Unusual in that it is the only non-squad based game and actually has characters with personalities, due mostly to the superb voice work of all involved, but especially Michael Ironside (Sam Fisher) and Don Jordan (Irving Lambert) who from the first game have provided what felt like a properly believable long standing relationship that has stood up through all the games and becomes very important especially in the closing level of this game. ![]() But right now, we’re focussing on the stealth baby. I don’t know why, but I am a huge fan of the Tom Clancy games on console – not so much on the PC – but the Ghost Recons, Rainbow Sixes and Splinter Cells really do it for me, no matter how hard or frustrating or contrived they are. ![]()
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