Previews// Splinter Cell: Blacklist

I’ll start this preview by saying that I’m definitely not any kind of Splinter Cell veteran – I’m far from it. That doesn’t mean to say that I haven’t played a Splinter Cell game before though. Do you remember when you were a kid? You got stuck on a game, tried twice more and just gave up and went to do some ‘sick tricks’ on your skateboard (or was that just me?).

Anyway, that’s the extent of my pre-existing Splinter Cell knowledge. I’m no stranger to third person shooters though, so I loaded up Blacklist and selected ‘Realistic’ difficulty (one below the hardest). Now, usually, the difficulty down from the hardest offers fair challenges, but at the core, it’s never a ridiculously tough job.

… That’s what I thought, until I got stuck into Blacklist.

When Ubisoft designed Realistic difficulty, they certainly named it right – you’ll die in a matter of hits, struggle to sneak around people undetected and, well, unless you’re an experienced SC player, you’re going to have a bad time.

So, I proceeded to knock the difficulty down a peg and continue playing. Jumping into the boots of Sam Fisher, I quickly learned that (predictably) there’s a terrorist group that (predictably) dislikes Americans. The terrorist group is known as ‘The Engineers’, and it's working on Operation Blacklist.

Now, America has its troops in this country, that country, this other country and this country over here, and The Engineers aren’t very happy about it. Their demands are for America to remove their troops from this country, that country and that other country, or a high profile target will be killed every week.

Your job, as Sam, is to figure out where the attacks are going to happen, who is going to be killed, and prevent it from happening.

Before each mission, you find yourself in the Paladin, your flying headquarters. You’re able to interact with your team who offer different perks for the next mission, stats and other useful info. On top of that, you’re able to customise your loadout in depth to match your play style.

For example, different pieces of your suit provide different stats – some are designed with extra armour, some will increase your stealth. That goes for weapons too – you’re able to choose any attachments/enhancements to match your play style. You may want a silenced weapon with stronger bullets, but sacrifice your clip size for quick & quiet kills. Or, you may just slap the biggest clip and the largest recoil reduction on your MG and run in all guns blazing – it’s entirely your choice.

You’ll be rewarded for it, too!

See, there are three play-styles, and you’ll earn points for matching set requirements. In the simplest terms the play styles are; silently slip past all enemies, don’t kill anyone, don’t cause any fuss at all, basically ('Ghost'). Or: quietly take enemies down, hide bodies, avoid detection ('Panther'). Finally, of course, there's guns-blazing blowy-uppy loudness ('Assault').

At the end of each mission, you’ll receive your points (currency), which you can then spend on the upgrades that I mentioned earlier.

As far as gameplay goes in Blacklist, it doesn’t stray too far from the Splinter Cell path – you’ll find yourself hiding in cover, hanging over ledges, clambering along ceiling pipes… just about anything to remain undetected by the enemy (unless of course you’ve opted for the blowy-uppy loudness technique).

Now I have one major problem with Blacklist; it’s not you, it’s me. Or is it not me, it’s you? I just can’t tell. I opted to play a balanced game – I’d try to take down enemies silently, hide bodies, all that malarkey. But, in the end, I found myself gunning most folk down while gripping the smallest piece of cover in the level as I’d been accidentally detected.

What I’m trying to say here, is that I can’t tell if I’m just really quite bad at Splinter Cell, or if the game is taking the piss out of me.

The worst part is when you spend a good 20-30 minutes on a mission section, everything is going well, you’ve taken down most of the enemies, scaled the building, made brilliant use of your night vision – you actually start to feel all spy-like. Then, you’re at the final stretch. You scout the area below you (as you’re currently hanging from a ceiling pipe) – there’s nobody about! Now you can slyly make your escape through the window on the left. You drop from the pipe and boom, there’s a dog appeared from what seems to be nowhere.

Now, this isn’t any real loss to you, you’ve already taken down all the enemies, but, it does leave a feeling of ‘meh, what was the point, I might as well have gone loud’. Don’t get me wrong here, should you manage to complete a full mission section (or even a full mission) exactly as you planned it to go, you’ll be rewarded with a feeling of ‘yeah, have that fuckers’ (of course, you whispered that just in case of any unknown baddies).

From the five-six hours of Blacklist I’ve played, it has the strong potential to be one of those games you’ll finish before taking the disc from your disc tray. That’s if you don’t get too infuriated by the unbalanced difficulty settings, or the fact that you can’t quite get everything to go the way you’d like.