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Splinter
Cell
for Xbox
developer: Red Storm Entertainment
publisher: Ubi Soft
reviewed
by Jane Pinckard and Justin Hall
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March
10 , 2003
| games
The
Freedom to Take Away Others’
There is something creepily naïve about a game which unproblematically
posits you, protagonist Sam Fisher, as a willing and deathly efficient
tool of an ultra-secret U.S. government organization in a setting
rife with contemporary geo-political machinations. In this game,
which touts “stealth redesigned”, your character has the
“fifth freedom”: the freedom to kill, or at least, to
go where he pleases and steal what he needs in order to protect
good Americans at home. It’s a Tom Clancy game, unmistakably
– boilerplate Eastern European spy thriller, where gravel-voiced
men are heroes in defiance of dull bureaucrats. (Interestingly,
there’s a trace of a Canadian accent in Sam’s Clint Eastwood-inflected
voice.) In practice, the missions must be explicitly stealthy, since
officially, your character doesn’t even have the clearance
to be there. You are a ghost, a shadow slipping in behind half-open
curtains to strategically remove key figures of opposition regimes.
Alas, if politics were only so simple!
The
Freedom to be Invisible
 As
it turns out, even super-agents like the slippery Sam Fisher have
problems infiltrating heavily guarded government sanctums. But that
is where the politics end and the play begins. As a CIA-endorsed
thief, Sam’s got the moves to run, jump, sneak, climb, shimmy,
glide, and crawl his way past guards and security cameras. They’ve
obviously spent an enormous amount of their attention making Sam
Fisher move and gesture appropriately. The controls respond beautifully
- they don’t feel sticky or awkward. He’s also got the
goods – the requisite silenced gun, a periscope for looking
under doors, lock picks, and goggles that render the screen in thermal
colors.
That said, the game is lovely to behold. It’s hard not to
react to the bold lighting effects with something like a swelling
sense of wonder and excitement. In one level where Sam is lit from
the side by a harsh, bright light, he casts a deep shadow on the
wall behind him, and it’s tempting to just pause in the mission
and try to make patterns of light and shadow on the wall. The sound
design is also well done. If you can play this game in surround
sound, you will hear voices and footsteps ahead, behind, or to either
side of you. The soundtrack changes to meet your risk level –
when you’re noticed, the beat speeds up, probably with your
heart rate.
The
Freedom to Kick Ass
So there they are: two guys stationed by that door. Eavesdropping
on their conversation, you learn that they work for the crooked
colonel you’re hunting. What do you do? You can sneak past
them, take them out with your silenced pistol, or grab one and use
him as a human shield. You may have to keep at least one of them
alive, so you can use his eyes to open the door locked by a retinal
scanner. You may also wish to interrogate them to learn the whereabouts
of the colonel. Splinter Cell is a slick refinement of game
concepts established by Thief and Metal Gear Solid.
The AI reactions are predictably programmed. Guards generally pace
in small loops. When you make too much noise, a guard will shout,
“Who’s there?” If you can’t shut up, the guard
will escalate to “Come out!” and might fire a shot or
two. If they spot you, it’s a full-on fire fight. But if you
stay silent and still after the initial “Who’s there?”,
the guard will pace around for a while and finally mutter, “coffee
is making me jittery” or some other assurance that your hiding
spot is undiscovered. You can also distract guards by tossing empty
bottles or cans down alleys - while they go investigate, you can
shimmy up the side of that building.
The
Freedom to Go Where They Tell You to Go
 But
for all the rich lighting effects, detailed textures, and immersive
sound design, the game is disappointingly linear. Though you may
be crawling around inside a Russian town, alleys and doorways are
blocked off if you are not supposed to enter them. You may be able
to crawl along pipes and ride down zip-wires, but those things will
only appear at certain junctions, when it’s appropriate that
you should climb or zip. You may be an incredible gymnastic badass,
but you can’t scale a wall if they didn’t mean for you
to.
Actions are somewhat prescribed as well. If you see a retinal scanner
by the door, you know you’re going to have to grab a guy and
get him to open it for you. The level of hand-holding at times reaches
absurd levels: when you knock out a guard on one level, he happens
to drop a note which reads “Dear Security – the wisteria
has become thick enough that I’m afraid it could support the
weight of a human being.” Gee, I wonder how Sam’s going
to get inside this building?
To give one agent all of these tools and physical abilities, and
then take away his ability to make his own solutions is frustrating.
Games like Deus Ex make you into a stealth super-agent and
then allow you to play your own game, letting you create your own
solutions to problems. Considering Deus Ex’s conspiracy
plot involving legions of diseased urban people, the middle-aged
spy culture of Splinter Cell seems content to be pleasurable
without being provocative.
bio:
Jane
Pinckard runs Game
Girl Advance and is a member of every blogger's favorite band,
Dealership. You can keep
up with her at umamitsunami.com.
Justin
Hall plays too many games but manages to write sometimes.
His subjects include diversion, participation, romance, failure,
Asia and California. Nearly everything he thinks publicly emanates
from links.net.
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