The single player portion of this game is short, sloppy, and disappointing.
User Rating: 7 | Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow PC
Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow, to me, still ranks as one of the Top 5 PC games in terms of graphics. It's a beautiful game that is loaded with detail in every area. Other than that, it is a disappointment. Every fault that was present in Splinter Cell was carried over into Pandora Tomorrow, and the game added a lot of new faults as well. The voice acting sucks, parts of the story don't make sense, the level design is still blatantly linear, and the game is short. Very short. 8-10 hours short, and for a stealth game, that's inexcusable. I loved the first Splinter Cell game. The polished gameplay and excellent presentation made for a great game, even though the level design was very linear. Pandora Tomorrow still has the linear levels, but they stand out more because the concept isn't new anymore, and because the rest of the game isn't as great. For starters, the voice acting and script writing took a huge step backwards. Lambert sounded great in the first game, but in Pandora Tomorrow, he sounds like he has a bad cold and he's doped up on codeine. All of the guards in the game have the exact same barks, and they all sound like they were recorded in a cave with cotton covering the microphone. Nothing breaks the immersion like hearing a guard speak in a Spanish-sounding accent one minute, and then hearing that same guard bark out a generic "Who was that!" in the exact same voice that you heard on the other side of the world. This game has the worst AI barks I have ever heard in a stealth game. The script writing is bad in some places. It's like the story was written one evening while eating dinner at Denny's. "We have a problem in East Timor"... Pause... "What kind of a problem?" Another pause... "A big one". oooooo, how dramatic. The worst part about the script though, is that Sam Fisher now utters an occasional Michael Moore-inspired America-bashing comment throughout the game. This wouldn't be so bad if it didn't look so stupid for being out of place. Criticizing America's role in world affairs may have its place in games, but not here. There are a few additions in the gameplay since the previous installment, but basically none of them are good. One of them is the three-stage alarm system. Theoretically, this sounds good, but it's implemented in such a silly manner that you can't help but laugh. The first alarm leads to the enemy radio bark of "Alarm stage 1. Flak jacket on!", which, by the way, always comes out in perfect English regardless of what part of the world you are in. However, nobody ever puts on a flak jacket or a helmet (stage 2), so this new addition is basically cosmetic. It just looks and sounds stupid to repeatedly hear "Flak jacket on" and never see anybody actually put on a flak jacket. This new gameplay mechanic appears to have been a half-hearted attempt to incrementally penalize the player for blowing his cover, instead of automatically failing the mission. What really happens is that it falls flat. The best part about the game is the graphics, and experiencing the game's variety of environments. There are some outdoor jungle areas that are truly breathtaking, as well as some weather/lightning effects that will leave you in awe. I can't say that this game doesn't look amazing, because it does. It's too bad that that is the only outstanding quality in the game. I didn't play the multiplayer here, but the single player portion of this game comes across as half-arsed shovelware thrown in the box so that the game would have a single player component to round it out. The first game was better, and so were Manhunt and Thief:Deadly Shadows. It's hard to recommend this game for the single player alone. 
