Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell Double Agent

Part of the trouble with establishing a franchise is keeping it fresh. Splinter Cell Double Agent is the fourth addition to the series in just as many years; that is a hectic production schedule if I have ever heard of one. Obviously, this leaves little room for expansion and/or innovation. Regardless, Sam Fisher has managed to remain young at heart with incremental fine tuning of gameplay and, most notably, the addition of online multiplayer. For Double Agent, Ubisoft has attempted to liven-up the single player experience by placing Sam in the role of a (you guessed it!) double agent and thus introduce a trust/morality gameplay dynamic. However, despite the new thematic and gameplay additions, as well as a massively updated and fleshed out multiplayer portion, Sam Fisher is starting to show his age.

The plot is simple: Sam Fisher’s daughter gets smoked by a car and killed. Apparently, this development was necessary in order to justify why Sam would go undercover. Why? I am not quite sure; he was a badass super-spy/assassin to begin with. At any rate, the developers are pushing a darker Sam Fisher who has nothing left to lose, someone who would not mind the ethical dilemmas inherent in infiltrating and maintaining cover in a homegrown American terrorist cell.

At its heart, this is the same Splinter Cell that we have come to appreciate. Gameplay flows in the typical fashion for this series: observe, plan, and execute. There has always been a lot of observing, sticking to the shadows, taking in the environment and AI whilst planning your method of attack or infiltration, and there is still plenty of that here. What is “winning” about it all is the massive amount of choice given to you in any particular scenario. You have the environment, first and foremost, that allows for multiple paths and approaches. You also have a ridiculous amount of gadgetry at your disposal: wall mines, sticky cameras, tazer projectiles, grenades, flash grenades, snake cams, night vision, heat vision, and on and on. Then there are Sam’s physical skills, such as scaling heights and silently choking out enemies. Simply put, the player has a remarkable amount of room to play as they’d like. It’s all here in Double Agent and just as addictive as it’s always been.

What is most notable is the new trust system. As a double agent, Sam must serve two masters: the JBA and, his real boss, the NSA. There are objectives to fill throughout any given mission, some pertaining to the goals of JBA and others pertaining to the goals of the NSA. Some of those objectives will, of course, conflict with others. Choosing one objective over another doesn’t end a mission outright, but your decisions with regard to those objectives will either earn or cost you the trust of the JBA or NSA (conveniently displayed like a health bar). Completely losing the trust of one will end a mission, so the key is maintaining a sort of balance. Mind you, you can play the game with a preference towards one side or the other, but the more extreme your preference, the greater the risk of the game suddenly ending.

This trust system is manifested in another clever fashion: the use of real time scripted events where you are asked to make a critical decision that will test your loyalty to one of the two organizations. These moments can be quite intense. For instance, you may be handed a gun and asked to execute an innocent hostage. Will you do it? The pressure is on and you know that your decision can alter the course of the game (albeit, I have found that these moments do not actually alter the outcome of the game, they just do a really good job of creating an intense atmosphere). Moments like these serve to deepen the illusion that you are truly an undercover agent trying to carefully balance upon the edge of a razor blade.

There are a few minor additions to gameplay as well. For example, there are exciting and challenging sequences where Sam, who is swimming beneath a layer of ice, must locate a weak spot, break the ice and pull an enemy agent to his death. Sam has also been taken out of the dark and can now find himself sneaking around in broad daylight as well (which provides its own set of challenges). There are also a few exciting scripted events, such as the scene where a parachuting Sam Fisher must quickly deploy his secondary chute or fall to his death. Finally, on top of these, single player objectives are now linked to an overall reward structure where certain objectives now grant Sam access to a number of helpful gadgets.

It would seem as though a good deal of thought and effort went into spicing up the Splinter Cell formula. Unfortunately, even the sum of these additions is mostly inconsequential. The trust system comes away as more of a thematic gimmick with no real consequences to gameplay. The premise of going under cover and losing yourself in an alternate identity is an intriguing one, but the game prevents you from really going to any ethical extreme with its heavy-handed demand for a balanced approach. This illusion of choice is epitomized in one particularly event where, no matter what action you take, the result is always the same: you will always wind up on the side of the NSA. This is disappointing since the game seemed to promise play that is more open-ended.

There is another problem as well: while the core classic gameplay has more than its fair share of merits, it is starting to get old with the original kinks deepening into wrinkles. For all intents and purposes, the gameplay (be it bad or good) has been completely recycled from the previous versions. One persistent issue is the frequent reliance upon trial and error gameplay that is immediately evident from the very first mission. Certainly the patient player is well rewarded in Splinter Cell if time is spent in thoughtful observation/consideration before taking action, but you’ll frequently find yourself in situations where stumbling upon the solution seems like the only real strategy. There is also the fact that the sometimes-clunky control scheme is completely unchanged; to say that the controls act as a hindrance in tight situations is an understatement. Moreover, when it comes to placing Sam out in the open in daylight missions, I am afraid to admit I am on the fence; I cannot make up my mind whether this is a fine change or more like taking a fish out of water.

While the longstanding single player fundamentals need some work, it is apparent that a lot of work went into fully realizing the potential of Double Agent’s online multiplayer mode, making it immediately accessible and a lot of fun for newbs. Adversarial multiplayer is quite simple: you play either as spies (with a third person perspective) or as mercenaries (with a first person perspective). Spies have one objective: download files from computers and deliver them safely back to your start point. Mercenaries also have one objective: kill the spies. It is a simple premise, but provides deep gameplay with a steep learning curve (especially when playing as spies).

Online multiplayer also features a robust co-op mode. This mode places you in the role of a spy along with two teammates, connected via Live, fulfilling the objectives of 18 missions and outsmarting computer-controlled mercenaries. The missions are set in the same eight maps shared by adversarial multiplayer, and the objectives are variations on the core adversarial multiplayer gameplay. The co-op, while a proper game mode unto itself, acts as a lengthy tutorial of sorts for adversarial multiplayer, with the missions starting out quite easy and progressively ramping up in difficulty. Co-op is indicative of a concerted effort by Ubisoft to make online multiplayer much more accessible than it has been in the past. Even in the adversarial multiplayer mode, the game initially restricts players to only three of the eight maps (as you progress and get better, new maps are unlocked). By initially restricting players to only a few maps, the game focuses their attention and implants skills that carry over to all the other maps. Even during your first set of sessions in either mode, the game will highlight points of entry and navigable objects with explicit indicators on the map. Taken all together, this handholding goes a long way towards making online multiplayer a thoroughly enjoyable and intuitive experience.

Structured around both the co-op and multiplayer adversarial modes is a wealth of unlockable content from concept art work to new costumes and mini-videos. There is even a robust statistics system that keeps track of your skills as either a mercenary or spy. Suffice to say that the multiplayer portion feels as though it could have been packaged as a game all on its own. For those gamers looking for a great online experience, Double Agent’s multiplayer may alone justify a purchase, never mind the single player campaign.

Double Agent has also been given a graphical boost with generally impressive results. In particular, character models have a remarkable amount of detail. Sam Fisher’s buzzed head has never looked better. Certain levels also display an impressive amount of next-gen flair by showing off fantastic draw distances, lighting and environmental special effects. Having said all this, the game can look, at times, simply like a higher resolution carry-over from the previous generation consoles, especially while zoomed out. Telling is the fact that Double Agent uses Unreal Engine 2 as its graphics platform, when Unreal Engine 3 is just coming into use as the first proper next-gen graphics platform. Moreover, the animation does not seem to have been upgraded at all.