Very enjoyable game whose potential greatness is held back by some gameplay issues detrimental to a stealth game.
User Rating: 8.6 | Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow PC
Splinter Cell Pandora Tomorrow (SCPD) overall is a fun experience that exhibits some disappointment that somewhat limits how great of a game this could be. I'll briefly run through the basic categories of graphics, sound, and gameplay to explain why it had some issue's that prevented SCPD from being truly a great game. First off, the graphics are very, very good. Although they aren't up to the standards of Riddick or Doom 3, they still allow you to be immersed in the environments that you play through, and they perform very well with little performance hit on your PC. Shadows, light, and water all look great as do the character models. Some textures aren't top notch, but who cares because overall the graphics are well suited and the frame rate runs superb on all the highest settings with max resolution (sys specs: AMD 2700XP, 1gig 2700DDR, 6800GT). Sound, like the graphics are fine and serve the game well. Voice acting is good as are the ambient sounds. I do not listen to sound tracks in most games I play, so I have no comment on how that adds/detracts from the game experience. Gameplay is where the game reveals its shortcommings. This is a stealth game, and you are required to be stealthy and perform under cover all the time, which is a good thing. Unfortunately, sometimes if your actions aren't done in a linear, scripted fashion, the game will end your mission for some ridiculous excuse. For example, one of the earlier missions has you set on a train. I found an alternate route partway through the mission and was able to achieve all the objectives except the last one. The game would not allow me to finish this mission because I didn't complete objectives in a manner the script recognized. In other words, in between objectives, I didn't go from point A to point B the way the script wanted me too even though the end result was the same. It seems because you don't follow exactly the tightrope that the developer wants you to follow, the overall mission can't be completed? Bad, bad, bad. Especially in a stealth game. Also, lets say you are popping bullets into one of the bad guys chest with your assault rifle. As the guy is taking bullets to his chest, he manages to grab a walkie-talkie and radio off your presence. Yeah, right! There are others, but overall these examples reveal fairly substantial gameplay faults for a stealth game. Sometimes you can perform actions and techniques that work, and even though you perform an action exactly the same, sometimes you fail. In closing, the game is fun even with its faults. It is just a little disappoining because this game could be so great if the linearity was curtailed and detection methods were fair and uniform. 
