Freelance Review: Splinter Cell Double Agent
Today's Freelance Review comes to us courtesy of Jay "Solid Squall" Kuskopf. Please listen quitley and maybe you'll get milk and cookies afterward if you're good.
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Overview
Splinter Cell: Double Agent for Xbox 360 is the latest stealth/action game in Ubisoft’s Splinter Cell franchise. For those people who have never played a Splinter Cell game before, here’s the rundown. You play as Sam Fisher, super spy extraordinaire, working for the National Security Agency’s most secret department, Third Echelon. As a 40 year old veteran of the spy business, Sam is the guy that gets the toughest and most important missions around. Usually tasked with either stealing documents and information, or assassinating high priority targets, this latest game sees Sam taking on the job of infiltrating a terrorist organisation know as John Brown’s Army, to gather intel and sabotage their operations from the inside. Over the course of about 10 hours, you and Sam will embark on an adventure full of shooting, stabbing, choking, maiming and stealing. Good stuff. Also included in the game is a highly enjoyable multiplayer mode, but more on that later.
Shininess
Double Agent is, on the 360 at least, an extremely good looking game. As you would expect for a stealth game based on hiding in the darkness, the lighting is very well done, and the textures are as a whole very good as well. The sound in the game in is similarly of a high quality, though nothing to write home about. The voice acting is especially well done, at least for the main characters, with some of the enemies sounding occasionally odd. This isn’t so much because the voices of these enemies are bad, but more a symptom of the some of the lines that were given to read. I can’t speak for anybody else, but when an angry man is holding a large knife against my throat, I know I sure wouldn’t be making any sarcastic remarks. The main area that Splinter Cell: Double Agent excels in is the animation. A large step up from most other games out there, the variety of animations for Sam’s (and the multiplayer characters’) movements is impressive to say the least. Where most other games would be content to have default climbing or jumping animations, your character always seems to have a special animation for any type of situation, whether it’s hoisting himself onto ledges from a variety of angles, to punching through thin ice to drag enemies to their watery graves. As a result of the overall high quality of the graphics and animation, it causes small problems to stand out a little more than they normally would. While maintaining a steady 30 fps, the frame rate occasionally dips slightly under. The strange part is that on the rare occasions that it did dip, there were no enemies or moving objects around, and when there were it handled them without a problem. Infrequent clipping shows up, and there are occasional oddities when an enemy should be able to easily see you, but because the area is flagged as a dark or shadowed area by the programming, they can’t. These things don’t really detract from the game experience though- the frame rate only dipped twice during the entire game, the clipping is only slight even when it does appear; and the one time an enemy should have been able to see me but couldn’t, it at least made for an amusing sight, a terrorist standing two feet in front of me, staring right at me muttering “I thought I heard something! Oh well, there’s nothing there”. The single most jarring graphical aspect in the game is actually something most people have come to take for granted- water. When you’re under the surface, everything looks fine, but coming to the top leads to a real ‘WTF’ moment. When swimming on the surface, it appears as if Sam is swimming in a large blue shapeless blob. Sam’s presence has no effect on the water, except that a large glob forms around him. Throwing enemy bodies into the water similarly has no effect, they simply disappear though a completely flat surface of unmoving blue. It may sound as though I’m blowing this out of proportion, but in such a high quality, polished game, as part of what is now a long running franchise, it was extremely disappointing to see such an obvious mistake from an experienced dev team.
Funness
As usual, the controls for the latest Splinter Cell game are responsive and well mapped to the controller. Sam has all the moves you would expect of a super spy, and then some. Strangely, Sam has so many moves that you won’t even use some of them. In the entire game, I found no places where you needed to do a split jump, or even could do a split jump, and a few other moves were limited to only being usable in one or two places in the game. The game play is a mix of classic Splinter Cell style levels [in which Fisher has to work his way through a multipathed (but ultimately linear) areas, stealthily killing enemies and completing objectives] and new HQ missions, in which Sam has to sneak around the terrorist HQ, performing objectives for the NSA while not getting caught and blowing his cover. The classic style levels are fun, with clear objectives and a helpful, if a little complicated, 3D map which can be accessed to show you where to go next. The HQ missions are a different story. While the novelty keeps it fun during the first HQ level, uploading trojans to terrorist computers and planting bugs, the enjoyment has dried up by the third mission, and you find yourself wishing you could just blow your cover, kill all of the terrorists and be done with it. Each mission takes place in the same area, with a little more of the building becoming available to you each time you return there. The layout of the base is a little confusing at first, and the 3D map isn’t as much help here as in the regular missions. Another new addition to the franchise is the inclusion of directed moments. These are almost cut scene like in nature, and involve making simple moral choices, or completing a very simple minigame. While the moral choices add an interesting element which is sure to be improved upon in future games, the minigames were pointless. I won’t spoil it for you, but in one case, as Sam is in a dire emergency you simply rotate your left thumbstick in a circle until the controller vibrates and press ‘A’, which is a rip-off of the already existing lock picking minigame. These moments could have been effective if they had required you to really work to handle tough situations, but instead they feel tacked on and a little annoying. Fortunately, these are minor annoyances which appear rarely, and the single player campaign retains plenty of replay value thanks to multiple ways to handle levels, a storyline which branches depending on your moral choices, and 3 different endings. Accompanying the fun yet shortish single player game is an excellent multiplayer game, which has been redone from its previous incarnation in the third Splinter Cell game, Chaos Theory. The multiplayer pits 3 spies against 3 mercenaries. The spies, played from the same third person view as the single player, need to capture files by hacking the information from any of the four computer terminals located on the map. The mercenaries are played from a first person perspective, as an FPS, and are tasked with stopping the spies from obtaining the files. As a new player it may seem as though the spies have a huge advantage, since they can run faster, climb buildings and generally stay one step ahead of the mercenaries, and initially, mercenaries aren’t much fun to play, since it can seem hard to locate spies. However, once you have played the game for a couple of hours and learned the map layouts, the game suddenly becomes very different, with the mercenaries hunting the spies with much more efficiency. The spies find themselves usually only able to hack a little before having to run desperately from hails of gunfire, grenades and exploding flying robots. In fact, after some experience is gained; the game actually tilts a little in the mercenaries’ favour, requiring the spies to stay on their toes, as you would expect they should have been doing in the first place. While previous versions of the multiplayer were much more complicated, and loved by people who were experts at them, they had such a steep learning curve that many new players simply decided not to play because constantly getting killed by the hardcore players was no fun. This new version manages to be enjoyable for more experienced players, while still being accessible for people who are new to it all. Unfortunately, the multiplayer suffers from infrequent glitches, including lag spikes and even occasionally the complete freezing of the game and console. This glitches are the exception however, and not the rule, and are worth putting up with occasionally for the fun to be had.
Worthiness
As a whole package, Splinter Cell: Double Agent is a fantastic and highly recommendable game. If you have Xbox Live, this game is an easy purchase, and well worth your money. Anybody who doesn’t have Xbox Live but enjoyed any of the previous Splinter Cell games should also pick this game up, since the single player game is just as good as, if not better than, previous instalments and the multiplayer can be played over system link or with bots. As for everybody else, even those without Xbox Live or those playing on other consoles who’ve never played a Splinter Cell game before would still do well to pick Double Agent up as a rental, for a weekend of solid, stealth/action fun.
What say you?!