Make no mistake, though Sam was very much a much more emotive and driven figure than he ever had been before, this was still the Sam Fisher that we’ve always loved, with a decidedly acerbic sense of humour and a mountain of dry quips to be used at a moment’s notice. Indeed, the very idea that your friends and loved ones can be whisked away from your grasp underscores the notion that our world is sadly a lot less safe than we assume it to be. Vitally, no longer was Sam Fisher a blank slate upon which his myriad of handlers would impose their will for him to carry out their plans here, he actually felt like a proper, layered human being, appearing as a flawed creature of love, rage, despondence and sensitivity that the series never allowed him to show before now.Īs someone who hasn’t got any little ones of my own – but who knows the very real pain of losing a loved one to powers beyond my control – Conviction’s narrative had me glancing at current events on the news a lot more intently than I otherwise would. Rather, it was brought right to Sam’s doorstep in very personal terms that he couldn’t ignore. No longer was the war in some far-off Eastern European country suffering under the yoke of an evil despot. Set three years after the events detailed in Splinter Cell: Double Agent – and cast from the agency – Sam Fisher finds himself in Malta investigating the mysterious circumstances behind the hit-and-run death of his daughter, Sarah. Quite unlike the other games in the series, Splinter Cell: Conviction had a deeply personal narrative that resonated with me far more than the territorial disputes and hacker tales which made some of the earlier Splinter Cell titles about as exciting as counting tombstones in a graveyard. A deeply personal conflict with stakes that matteredĪway from all the reworked stealthy and action bits, another area where S plinter Cell: Conviction sought to distance itself from its predecessors was that it actually had a proper story and, more crucially, one that I actually cared about. It’s perhaps fitting that after the disastrous Rogue Agent threatened to derail the series entirely, its successor has the suffix of Conviction, if only because the bods at Ubisoft must have had a whacking great dollop of the stuff to implement and execute many of the design decisions that made Splinter Cell: Conviction a divisive, though ultimately accomplished, effort which showed that you really can teach an old dog new tricks. As it turns out, Splinter Cell: Conviction was just what the doctor ordered. Whether it was the freewheeling ingenuity of the stealth sandboxes encompassed within the Hitman series, or the overwrought marathon narratives of that franchise that had the gruff chap wearing the bandana, it’s fair to say that while I didn’t know it at that time, I was looking for something a little different – and a touch easier on the nerves. Welcome to the party, palĪs someone for whom the dreaded 30s would soon be a reality (they haven’t been *that* bad, to be fair), the epiphany hit me like a Brock Lesnar made entirely of hammers: I no longer didn’t have the saint-like poise and patience to be perfectly stealth all the time. Of course, what I didn’t realise right away was that I was burned out on the stealth genre as a whole, and actually had been for a while. Showcasing a seemingly carefree counter-terrorist operative Samuel Fisher spitting out slo-mo bullets like he was trying out for a role in 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand, it’s more than fair to proffer that I wasn’t overly enthused by how the fifth core entry in the Splinter Cell franchise was shaping up. Of course, the early trailers for Splinter Cell: Conviction didn’t help matters much. Simply, I just didn’t find Splinter Cell exciting anymore, which not only made me a little sad but also caused me to reflect on the question: just how do you make stealth games exciting? In terms of the latter, and thanks in no small part to the roundly disappointing Splinter Cell: Double Agent – a game which had an irreconcilably schizophrenic design, and one that made me sure the soul of the series had departed with the third game in the series – it’s fair to say I had little hope that its successor, Splinter Cell: Conviction, would fare any better. The year was 2010 and I had, at that point anyway, sworn myself off two things: chugging down Tesco Value Cider by the litre, and Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell series of games.
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