First I have to say that because of this game I am now hooked on the Splinter Cell series. In the series one guides Sam Fisher a covert NSA agent, and former US Navy Seal. Different from many FPS games Sam Fisher has his own personality, and interacts with his superiors via headset radio freely during the game, and is automatic during the cut scenes, he player is only guiding the character during the missions. What is different from other games is that one has to use stealth to their advantage. Running and gunning will only cause your character Sam to die a painfull death or cause the mission to fail if too many alarms are triggered. Sam will be given a set of primary objectives which have to be completed to end the mission. During the mission secondary and opportunity objectives may be added to Sam's list of objectives. There also can be some hidden objectives that will not show up on the lists, so look out for them when playing. To get through the game unscathed is by using all of Sams high tech gear, including nightvision, thermal imaging, electric disablers, hacking devices, silenced weapons with less than lethal attachments to knock unconsicous enemies from a distance. A great thing about using stealth is that one can also listen to the guards talking, about all kinds of humorus subjects, that can also clue you in on certain objectives. One can also sneak up to guards, and interrogate before dispatching them, by either rendering them unconscious or snapping their spine for a kill. The AI is quite good, since the guards will notice open doors, sounds, bodies, and lights turned off in a room. When they actually see Sam they will either dive behind cover to fire on him or call for reinforcements. The better trained mercenaries also have some unique feature such as using thermal vision, and have better coordination between units. Graphics are quite good in this game, even though most of the missions are take place in darkened areas,with little light, one can still see that the designers carefully created very detailed maps. The characters act and move convicingly. The cut scenes the animation is very well done, with convincing movements and speech. I especially like Sam Fishers sharp witterd dialogueis a bit turse and sarcatistc at times. He is also teased by his coleges as over the hill ,with some senior jokes. I did have some minor issues with this game. At times I found the enemy AI, to be less than ideal since guards where not able see Sam even if he standing right in front of them. The game is also very linear, with either one or two paths to get to a an objective. Which made the missions repeative. Many maps look very similar to each other and none are explorable. I also found the 3-D map used as a guide too confusing. There where also a few minor glitches that caused Sam to get stuck on walls, or stairs. Another issue was that the story was not well thought out, and in the end it had too many plot holes to be effectivly convincing. They should have just used real world situations instead of using a fictional storyline that made little sense.
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