Jason Bock

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Splinter Cell: Conviction

I’ve been a big fan of the “Splinter Cell” video game series. I’ve played all 4 games and I’ve enjoyed every single one. I like the change of pace it has: you don’t go in and kill everything in sight; you need to use stealth to succeed. Recently, “Conviction” came out, and I made sure I had it in my hands as soon as it came out. I finished it last night, and my overall reaction is … it’s not bad.

It’s not great, though.

If you’ve played “Splinter Cell” games before, you’ll get pretty much what you’ve had before. The graphics are good, Sam’s a badass (Michael Ironside does the voice again and that really enhances the character), etc. But this is not about stealth. Sam is pissed off and alienated, and there’s not a lot of sneaking around. The violence is really amped up - the headshots are pretty brutal. You also don’t have to hide bodies in most situations.

What didn’t I like?

• It’s too short - I’m already done with the game.
• I played it at the medium difficulty setting, and frankly, the opponents are really stupid. I had one scene where I stood at the top of the stairs and I kept plunking the bad guys in the head as they would walk into the pile of bodies and just stand there, wondering how the hell that happened. C’mon, that’s just too easy. Maybe at the hard level it’s much smarter - I may try that out, but I wouldn’t expect the AI to be that weak at a medium level.
• I rarely used anything other than the standard pistol. You never run out of ammo, which floored me. Occasionally I’d use another gun and some mines and grenades, but most of the time using a gun that I could just keep shooting was the weapon of choice.
• The storyline … meh. Honestly, I didn’t really care for it. Don’t want to spoil it too much, but it started feeling like a plot line that started to turn me off from “24”.

BTW Zero Punctuation reviewed the game and did a great job on covered the bad parts of the game (NSFW):

I give the creators credit for trying some things that were different. But I hope that with the next game (whenever that happens, if it does) Sam goes back to being the invisible kick-ass agent that he’s been known for.

Published: 05.11.2010 10:05:14 AM CST

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