For years, when it came to stealth games, the Metal Gear series ruled the roost, with legions of players salivating over every new opportunity to hide in the shadows and fight villains with names like Revolver Ocelot, Raven Manitou, and Howitzer Wombat. (I may have made that last one up.) The gameplay may have gotten more complex over the years, but the patented combination of wonky gadgets, rock-solid mechanics, and left-field weirdness remained an addictive constant. No matter how preachy, intense, or long-winded the narrative might be, you could always count on carrying around a goofy-assed cardboard box to hide in.
In the last few years, however, a serious contender to the throne has emerged in the form of the Splinter Cell series. As with the other titles released under the Tom Clancy imprimatur (Ghost Recon, Rainbow Six), developer Ubisoft’s entry into the stealth genre takes its military ops seriously, with an emphasis on realism. Speaking as a newcomer to the franchise, I kind of miss Revolver Ocelot.
Splinter Cell: Double Agent continues this grim and gritty approach, with variable results. As with the previous installments, the player takes on the persona of NSA neck-breaker extraordinaire Sam Fisher (again voiced by B-movie vet Michael Ironside, who’s never sounded more pissed off). After suffering a personal tragedy, Fisher accepts a mission to infiltrate a down-home, nuke-wielding militia. To give props where they’re due, this turncoat plot is often genuinely compelling, with an intriguingly sliding morality scale that lends itself well to replays. (Kill too many people and get the good guys on your case. Conversely, going too soft means making the good ol’ boys suspicious.) Combine with a few stellar examples of level design (including a particularly nice prison-break set piece), and all the signs point to a game destined to keep a player glued until the wee hours.
Where it breaks down, sadly, is in the actual moment-to-moment gameplay, which straddles the line of being enjoyably stressful and just out-and-out cheap. Chief among the debits is the actual stealth mechanic itself, which proves to be infuriatingly twitchy. Throughout, some bad guys seemingly couldn’t spot you if you were naked, aflame, and playing air guitar, while others can apparently zero in on the slightest muscle twitch in full darkness. While this variable competence of the enemy may be neat in theory, in practice it makes the playing experience less a case of increasing your skill, and more one of mere trial and error, reload and repeat. Such bugginess, it must be said, doesn’t wholly blot out the game’s accomplishments. (For all my kvetching, I find it tough to be too hard on a game that allows you to do the splits between rafters, wait motionless for an unsuspecting enemy to wander underneath, and then swiftly Van Damme him into submission.) Still, for such a promising concept, the fun/frustration ratio seems to be way out of whack. Until the kinks are better worked out, I’m sticking with what’s in the (cardboard) box, Monty.