Reviews// Splinter Cell: Conviction

However, you do still need to learn to creep about a lot and stay in cover as much as possible. If you don’t you will die. Very very quickly. So you learn to use window ledges and water pipes to your advantage as you creep up on another terrorist and quietly strangle him from behind, or drop down on him from above.

You soon know when and where your enemies cannot see you, as the colour in the level quickly drains into black and white. You also need to optimise potential sites for cover as you take down your prey, with a really good and intuitive cover system whereby you simply squeeze the left trigger and are automatically pulled out of view behind a nearby sofa, market stall or whatever else is close by to hide you.

The next thing you need to learn to do very early in the game is what is called a ‘hand-to-hand takedown’ whereby you kill one poor grunt with your bare hands (or a silenced pistol) and receive two extra assassination attempts in the game’s ‘mark and execute system’ – which lets you pop a red marker over one or two badasses’ heads from afar and take them out quickly, cleanly and quietly before all hell breaks loose. You'll most probably do it with a massive grin on your face throughout.

So you quickly get into the habit of using a stealth takedown on the first guy you take out and then ‘mark and execute’ on the next two. It is a sophisticated control system, but one which you quickly get used to and never tire of using. Gun nerds are also catered for in the game (obviously, this is Tom Clancy, after all) and some weapons have more marks than others, which for me was the only thing I looked out for. But then, I am not a gun nerd. Essentially, the more powerful the weapon, the fewer takedown marks it has.

For those nit-pickers that harp on about the brevity of the single-player game, Ubisoft has made sure to include a decent co-op option so you can continue to play the game with a mate after you’ve finished the single player story. You have to make sure that you both stay alive throughout, because if one of you dies then that’s the end of the mission. It’s a takes-no-prisoners approach that works well.

Splinter Cell: Conviction seemed to be stuck in development hell for an age, but whatever they were putting in the water at Ubisoft Montreal has clearly worked a treat. This, for me, is the best in the series to date. And I highly recommend it to anybody that enjoys a nice terrorist yarn and a good old sneak about!

The characterisation and the storytelling in particular really stand out, something that we can only hope other developers take note of and learn from. You care about Sam, because you find out about his daughter’s story. And you care about the bigger picture, that old ‘war on terror’ chestnut, because the story is told in such a way that it makes you care.

And it is only when you idly find yourself dreaming about pulling one of those cool slo-mo mark-and-execute manoeuvres on your boss at work as he moans on and on about your slack time-keeping that you realise that Splinter Cell: Conviction really is a game that has got inside your head.

SPOnG Score: 90%

Overall, Conviction is seriously hard to fault, unless you like really long and overly difficult games. Perhaps the biggest gripe would be the fact that the interrogations in the game were a bit of a let-down and could have been a bit less scripted and a tad more, y’know, interactive. But other than that this is a cracker.