Been looking forward to this one for quite a while. I was a little wary of this one because it was stated quite early on that it would not feature Michael Ironside as the voice of Sam Fisher, which was a large part of the characters charm. It was very jarring when first starting the game to have Sam talk and hearing a different voice, but you eventually get used to it. But you get used to it in the way that you start to think of him as a different character and not Sam Fisher which is kind of sad.
Gameplay wise, it keeps a lot of Conviction's new moves like jumping between cover and executions and being able to climb around like a monkey. But you can do executions on the move now and easily switch between lethal and non lethal takedowns and sprint through areas if necessary.
You must also now pay to get equipment and weapon upgrades rather than just have them handed to you which means you can tailor your load-outs to how you want to play. You gain money based on how well you perform in each of 3 areas: Ghost (never be detected), Panther (stealthily kill people) and Assault (flatout murder). Some people complain that the new Splinter Cells drift too far away from the sneaking and stealth and too much towards action. I would disagree with this. You can still go full stealth if you want to. But you also now have the option to be aggressive and go on the attack if you want/need to which would almost always result in instant death if you tried it in the older games in the series. The game is still geared towards preferring stealth but it is good to now have the option to attack if things go wrong. One problem with this however is that there are now sections where you have little choice to go full out attack. And these can easily go very wrong because a few shots will still kill you. And there are now more heavily armoured enemies that can not just be headshotted.
There were also quite a few multiple choice moments where I usually picked the murder option. But I'm not sure what the alternative pathways did so I will have to look into these.
All in all another very enjoyable entry in the Splinter Cell series (only slightly hurt by a lack of Michael Ironside) which is always very extremely satisfying when you get a good rhythm going of sneak, kill, sneak, win. But why was Victor Coste in it at all....
Side note: I heard there were a lot of technical issues, long load times and not great visuals on the console versions of this game. To those people, I issue the following advice: play it on a PC in DirectX 11. It looks eyeball-scorchingly gorgeous and the longest loading screen you'll see are the licensing ones (like Unreal Engine, Nvidia, etc) you see when booting the game.
Another side note: This game brings my backlog down to 50. So close....
Thoughts in the comments below!
