A solid storyline will keep you wanting to play this game, if the mess of bugs and game crashes don't get in the way.
The Splinter Cell storyline takes a particularly dark turn in this installment; Sam Fisher’s daughter, Sarah, is killed at the hands of a drunk driver while he is out on an assignment. He goes into a fury of rage and depression, but shortly after, he decides to take on his most dangerous assignment: going undercover into the heart of the terrorist cell called John Brown’s Army (JBA).
There are quite a few things that have been added to this game:
First, because you are acting as a Double Agent, you are given a trust meter, with the amount of trust that each of the organizations (the JBA or the National Security Agency (NSA)) has in you. If either of those meters runs out during the course of the game, it’s game over. Second, each mission will have a number of starred objectives. If these objectives are completed, you can unlock weapons and device upgrades, such as a shotgun attachment for your SC-20K assault rifle or a software upgrade for your hacking device.
Third, there have been additional combat movements that have been added to gameplay. For example, you can now take down a person as he is walking through a doorframe; in the Arctic environments, you can break through the ice that you’re swimming beneath and pull a guy down to silently kill him.
The gameplay itself feels very authentic; none of the situations feel forced in any way. The missions are linked together with a solid storyline, but every mission might bring about a different type of situation. In the end, there are multiple ways that you can go about completing your mission; you can be the “run-and-gun” type, engaging in an all-out firefight with the enemy, or you can be the silent type, acting as a Splinter Cell should: swift, invisible, and deadly if necessary.
I am simply amazed by how detailed the graphics were made for this game; everything was textured down to the very last detail. You can see the light gleam off of Sam’s clothing, the markings on the side of a gun, even the stubble of five o’clock shadow on Sam’s chin. Muzzle flash and explosions are also created very nicely; I’m also amazed at how realistic the smoke effect is. Such high-detail graphical elements are the key driving force in making this game as realistic as possible.
The voices in the game are excellent. Each person portrayed their character excellently through their voice acting, and the developers at Ubisoft managed to reflect the emotions of a person in every individual character’s body language. The one level that I was impressed where sound came into play, however, was during a mission in Kinshasa. You are thrown into the country while two military forces are vying for control. As you move out through the level, you see how the rebels are out and about in the streets, firing wildly at the opposition. There are explosions everywhere, with tanks bombarding the streets with fire. As you move along the second-story of a building, you will occasionally hear the sharp ricochet of a bullet; it made me instinctively duck the first time I heard it.
My only annoyance with Double Agent is the rather large number of bugs that remain in the game, even after two patches have come out. Many of these bugs are software-related; I had issues the first time around attempting to load the Shanghai level and the game kept crashing due to some module inside the Double Agent executable. After calling Ubisoft tech support, I still didn’t have a real solution to the problem. I just left it alone for a few days and luckily it magically started to work again. I don’t want to have to go through the trouble of finding a solution to a problem that could have been avoided had the developers thoroughly looked through their game for bugs first. I seriously think that this game, with its bug-ridden glory, caused many to turn away from future Ubisoft games.
Splinter Cell: Double Agent, as far as gameplay and content goes, can be considered as a wonderful piece of work that will keep people wanting to play more. As for the experience in order to reach the start of the game to the end of the game, with running into bugs and game crashes, that tends to get rather frustrating. With that in mind, this game does have its pros and cons, but it’s really up to you to decide if it’s worth picking up at your local video game shop.