Splinter Cell Conviction

Leave your Clancy at the Door

Tom Clancy’s Tom Clancy, no that’s not right. Tom Clancy’s yet another videogame franchise riding on the brand of Tom Clancy, Splinter Cell Conviction is the fifth iteration of this well established stealth-action thriller. Those familiar with the series will be much enamoured of it’s protagonist Sam Fisher former agent of Third Echelon. Third Echelon is of course a fictional clandestine agency that seems to completely lack the bureaucratic turmoil and infighting depicted in the Bourne films. However though that makes for great story it apparently doesn’t translate well into game-play so Sam is a hands-on shoot you in the back of the head kindof guy. The myriad of gadgets are gone as is the really sneaky aspects of the franchise the light and sound meters have been thrown out the window. Splinter Cell has been stripped down to the bone, Fisher now actively hunts the patrolling guards and security details as opposed to doing his utmost to avoid them. It’s a shame that great game-play mechanics are wasted on rather shallow content.

Even the trailer is dull

I came to this game completely new to the series so I didn’t really know or care about Sam Fisher’s dead daughter, his former colleague Anna Grimsdottir or the fact that I apparently offed my best friend in the last game. However the game does a pretty good job of bringing me up to speed even if I lacked the necessary emotional investment to really give a shit. The game opens with Sam looking for leads in Malta as to who might’ve killed his daughter before being pulled into a conspiracy by Grimsdottir to once again get involved with his old employers. What follows story wise unsurprisingly could’ve ripped straight from a Tom Clancy novel, a really, really bad one. The short version is your old agency is in bed with a mysterious organisation with the ridiculous name of Megito, or in the American Mageeedo. Their plan, to set off big fuck off EMP’s in Washington so they have cover to kill the President and then install the VP as their puppet. It’s utterly ridiculous stuff ridden with secret agency clichés, yet it’s told in quite a compelling manner. Rather than interrupt the game with too many cinematics flashbacks are projected onto the walls of the environment. Unfortunately they also saw fit to project words onto the walls, like ANGER, LIES, BURDEN, CONFUSION as though we couldn’t have guessed what old and grizzled Sam might’ve been thinking.

Marcus Fenix?

However deciding to use this system to display objectives is a master-stroke in immersion as you never need to load a menu-screen or look at a mini-map to know what you have to do. This might have something to do with the fact that the environments are rather linear and samey, a forgettable plethora of exterior industrial environments and swanky office buildings. Thankfully however their pretty enough that the useful spots of cover don’t look too much like they’re there just to give you somewhere to crouch behind. OHP objectives and plot exposition aren’t the only innovation to the series as Sam now has the ability to “mark and execute” foes. If your crafty enough to get the drop on a guard and perform an instant hand to kill you then earn the ability to perform executions. Mark the targets with the left bumper then press Y to efficiently take’em out with a series of headshots. It’s a satisfying and rewarding system that doesn’t ever seem overpowered or underwhelming. It works best when playing in the Co-op campaign that provides a prequel to Sam Fisher’s story. Though utterly un-engaging as a narrative taking out rooms full of guards with a friend makes you feel like awesome black-op agents.

We need a dull chat punctuated with violence

Quite a few of your objectives  in both single-player and co-op campaigns involve getting to an individual and interrogating them. Admittedly the first time you grab a man by the throat, wander over to a piece of the environment and proceed to watch as Sam smashes his head into a cubicle is rather fun. However these scenes quickly become repetitive and you find yourself just seeing what bit of sideboard does what rather than actually listening to what your victim has to say. It doesn’t help the pattern of questioning is pretty predictable: question, back-chat, violence, answer.

 Having completed the singe-player and feeling short-changed it was good to see there was some extra content. Since Gears of War and Halo: ODST opened the floodgates for player vs. A.I you can now play standalone levels that have you completing objectives, or just taking out enemies. Though fun with a friend on an interesting map it lacks the addictive quality of Horde or Firefight mode and it’s easy to see why this game was going for £6.50 on Amazon less than a year after release.

Just a subtle reminder

This is a game with some great touches and solid game-play that usually makes you feel life a deadly assassin who runs rings round his enemies before throttling them himself. However tonally it feels like it’s aiming toward a more incongruous action feel. Many of the weapons including a shot-gun, Skorpion machine pistol and AK-47 cannot be suppressed making you feel like this should be a third person shooter than a stealth game. Nor does the revenge plot and some sequences in particular don’t lend themselves to stealth game-play, one involving “avoiding” a helicopter gunship and a level set in Iraq involving no stealth at all which was just plain awful. Ubisoft Montreal, no doubt with a little help from their experiences with Assassin’s Creed, have certainly revolutionised the stealth genre for the high octane FPS generation. Unfortunately their somewhat unfortunate relationship with the Tom Clancy licence and their uneasy relationship with action elements means that this Splinter Cell lacks conviction. Badum Tisssh. My feelings toward this game were not much improved when halfway through the campaign my save was corrupted forcing me to repeat a particularly tedious set of missions. Perhaps it was the game’s way of increasing its longevity but being broken is not the way to go about it! Suffice to say that this was a passable time-filler but only just worth the pittance paid for it.

Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare

DLC with some braaaiiiiins

Much of the downloadable content currently released for Redded has been extra fluff for the multiplayer, which for those who are grinding it out on the internet is great. The redded multiplayer experience however isn’t all that engaging, so I was wondering when they were finally give us a fresh crack at the single-player whip. After completing this little foray into John Marston’s own zompocalypse why no-one has really blended the Western and Zombie genre together before now is utterly perplexing. From the atmospheric setting to the weapons the two compliment each marvellously and Undead Nightmare proved a humorous and entertaining distraction over the Halloween period.

Stepping back into the spurred boots of reformed Gunslinger John Marston the game opens with suitably camp B-Movie overtones. From the sonorous voice-over to voyeuristic camera shots and knowing dialogue the game injects some much needed flippancy to the sometimes nihilistic proceedings of the original game. Though a somewhat unlovable protagonist, John Marston is your typical Rockstar hero possessed of a sardonic wit and prone to caustic one-liners.  The story missions provide most of the humour in a game that simultaneously satirises and pays homage to the genre.Though it isn’t required of you to have played the original, it adds another level of depth to revisit old friends and see how they come to terms with the sudden return of the recently deceased, “I’d like to say he died doing what he loved. But pa never was one for chewing on dead folks.” Interactions with fellow survivors are lathered with typical Rockstar satire as everyone from British Homosexual Catholics, Federal Government and the Mexicans are blamed for the plague.

Much like how Danny Boyle re-imagined our favourite flesh-eaters as things that run with the speed of Linford Christie rather than shuffle at the pace of a pensioner so has Valve creators of Left 4 Dead canonised the concept of Zombie sub-species. Their various iterations of zombie sub-types, charging fatsoes to skinny spitting things have been somewhat shamelessly been adapted by Rockstar. However they make a welcome addition to the hordes of shopkeepers, whores, miners and cowboys that stumble moronically around the prairie. Dollars have been replaced with bullets in this world gone mad, and they initially come few and far between making the first few hours suitably tense and difficult as you try and pull off difficult headshots. This atmosphere is re-enforced with a haunting re-tooling of the beautiful original score. The environment too reflects the nature of the game as the landscape is swathed with an omnipresent fog until the areas become cleansed of the infestation. The often cute mammal and birdlife has been replaced with flittering bats and savage undead versions of wolves, bears and cougar. These aesthetic and game-play touches though minor nevertheless manage to make the experience feel fresh without the need to make unnecessary overhauls.

Unfortunately the difficult curve is somewhat unbalanced as the initial challenge of fighting off even five zombies gives way as outlandish and powerful weapons such as dynamite and blunderbuss become available. However for those of you after a challenge, or those finding a level too difficult this can be tailored simply by changing the aiming options from casual to expert. Casual instantly locking you onto a zombie cranium while expert will have you wishing that you hadn’t wasted bullets helping out someone else! Unfortunately as before once you finish the game you can no longer play as John Marston, his replacement being less pleasing on the eye and ear. In RDR Redemption it was his whiny son jack whose Johnny Depp style bum-fluff left a lot to be desired, whereas hereyou return as a zombie Marston which after the intial thrill gets a little tiresome. Still a small personal gripe.

From missions involving wiping out the last Sasquatch to lassoing the burning Horse of the Apocalypse, War Undead Nightmare is full of charmingly spooky moments. The experience was a redded vet like myself, but nevertheless the price of 800 Microsoft points or £7 will hardly break the bank. Thought it would make for a shallow single-player experience, Undead Nightmare makes for great DLC.