Splinter Cell Conviction is a good and slightly woobly step foward in a new direction.
There are no loading screens in this game your pulled from one scene to the next seamlessly and Ubisoft has even managed to keep the game almost completely hud-less rather then showing objectives on your screen their projected onto the environment which is really cool. Not only that, but even back-story and even Sam's thoughts are projected onto the environment which is again is really cool and unique.
As I mentioned earlier the stealth is much faster and involves Sam being more of a predator. Also rather then the usual noise and detection meters Sam's environment is turned into black and white when he's in the shadows and undetected. You'll still be spending some time in the shadows, but in a more progressive way you're constantly moving around shooting targets from the shadows and moving in for a hand to hand take down. Hand to hand takedowns are simply badass in this game they're brutal and awesome to look at and reward you with an infinetly more badass Mark and Execute token (M&E) with M&E you can paint several targets and with the press of the Y button, Sam shoots all the painted enemies in a headshot and ends with a satisfying slow-mo effect.
The M&E is really what makes the predator style of stealth really work it's satisfying to paint a few targets and then punch in the back of the head and then clear a whole room of thugs before they even knew what hit them. The stealth in the game though feels a little stripped and basic which is a shame because the past Splinter Cells spent so much time trying to build up the stealth. The more action and predator focused stealth is great, but could it really have hurt Ubisoft to borrow some of the things that made past Splinter Cells stealth feel great?
In Conviction you either stay in the shadow and out of sight or shoot lights to create darkness you can't throw objects to distract enemies, you can't crawl into ducts, you can't hide bodies so your pretty much doomed to put the guards on alert and there's no EMP attachment to your pistols to make lights go out silently, you can't hack terminals and levels are a little overly linear so there's only about one set way to sneak through a level.
Specifically in the campaign you're forced in to too many firefights this wouldn't be such a problem if this game had some better gunplay truth of the matter is gunplay sucks. The guns are annoyingly weak inaccurate and they have horrible range it's especially annoying that the enemies love to dance around when getting hit by bullets make you're your gun even more inaccurate or when your trying to a shoot distant target in the head but miss or the target survives because your guns are so underpowered.
Now where the game especially shines is in the coop you get to play with a buddy either online or on the couch as you go through the coop campaign and through the various multiplayer maps. The campaign is quite fun, but could have used some more coop interactions, then again doing coordinating an M&E with a buddy is a sight to be hold. Last Stand though is leaves much to be desired it's pretty much a misplaced horde mode that involves you and your buddy defending an EMP generator. But, it's boring and takes way too long to complete even with a friend and made all the worse with the bad gunplay.
In a nutshell Splinter Cell Conviction is a good entry into the Splinter Cell series and while it's new predator style of stealth is a breath of fresh air in the series but still has a few kinks that need to be worked out. I'm definetly excited though to see what they do with the series from this point forward.