Great stealth action in a totally different type of game for me
I’ve always liked shooters. First person, squad based, over the shoulder, third person. You name it I’ll try it. But Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell Pandora Tomorrow is something completely different.
If you want to play a game that is quieter than say Rainbow Six 3, this will work for you. You play as Sam Fisher, an under cover agent for the NSA in a special group called Third Echelon. You have to sneak into various places, then steal something, capture someone, or otherwise retrieve some information and get out without being detected.
The fun begins when you have to take out a bad guy either by killing him or knocking him out. I’ll explain how in a second. After you do that you can’t just leave the body out in the open. You have to pick him up a carry him to some dark corner. Room too well lit? Shoot out some lights and that will take care of that.
When you sneak around you have to watch out for mines, motion detectors, security cameras, guard dogs, patrols, and of course well lit areas.
You have plenty of weapons and gadgets to get you through all this. You get a silenced assault rifle and pistol. Then there are the more clever gadgets: The sticky shocker (which shocks your assailant) and the ring airfoil projectile (which knocks out the guy when you hit him in the head). These are the most fun to use. If there is standing water, the shocker can be used against a couple of guys at once. One time I knocked a guy out with a ring airfoil, then his buddy came out of the dark to see what happened to him, then I was able to cold cock him with one as well! Nighty night!
On top of that you can use gas, chaff and flash bang grenades; also vision goggles with night and heat setting modes.
Game play is surprisingly fun and varied. Sam has all the moves for getting around like the well known split jump. Others are the half split jump, rolling, rappelling, hand over hand and the all new swat turn. Then there are all the shooting modes like hanging, upside down and back to wall shooting. It’s just real fun to play.
As is typical of Tom Clancy games, the audio is first rate on a 5.1 system. The graphics will absolutely take your breath away. From lighting to water effects, smoke, rag doll physics and attention to detail you can see why Ubisoft is in the vanguard of graphics design.
I normally don’t mention the multiplayer element in my reviews because I don’t have Xbox Live, but will make an exception in this case. Pandora Tomorrow has a SHADOWNET vs ARGUS team based multiplayer mode. From what I’ve seen of it (there is a short offline training mission) this is something totally different from other typical capture the flag and frag fests from other games.
This game was a complete surprise to me. It was highly rated but I didn’t think it would be my type of game. But it turned out to be one of my favorites. Give it a try, maybe it will become one of yours.