Does Splinter Cell: Blacklist Deserve To Be Called Splinter Cell

Anyone who owned the original Xbox will remember the glory days of Sam Fisher, sneaking around in the darkness, shooting out the lights and quietly disposing of guards, it was a thing of beauty.  The first three games and up to a point even Double Agent are some of the best stealth games to date, Chaos Theory being the best out of the four due to its excellent level design and perfect movement of Sam Fisher.

Check out some gameplay of Chaos Theory below:

In April 2010 Ubisoft released the long awaited Conviction and here is where it started to go downhill, don’t get me wrong it’s a great game but not a good Splinter Cell one. At its core the series is renowned for its stealth mechanics, without them you are left with a game that has no character or anything to distinguish it apart from other third person action games. This was Conviction’s problem, it was focused on becoming a fast paced action game whilst forgetting its core mechanics. Admittedly you could use stealth but it didn’t work the same and there were no consequences to being spotted, in fact it worked to your advantage.

Check out the gameplay of Conviction below to see if you agree:

2011 comes and there are rumours of a new Splinter Cell being created, of a long term fan of the series I was hoping it would return to its roots and prove why it was once king of the stealth genre. I guess though Capcom weren’t the only ones influenced by other action titles as the newly announced Blacklist is full on action.

The area the demo was played in was fully lit with sunlight, explosions going off and guns being fired from every direction. Do any of these sound like something you would come to expect from a Splinter Cell game? Didn’t think so.

The team really wanted to emphasize the term of  “Killing in Motion” creating a faster pace movement in how Sam kills, for example he can mark several enemies at once and then he can fluidly kill all of them in just a few seconds. This severely takes out the stealth aspect and because of that, it’s lost its identity as a Splinter Cell game.

Eric Johnson is the new voice of Sam Fisher replacing Michael Ironside and he is not a convincing Sam Fisher. The great thing about Michael Ironside’s Sam Fisher is that he shares a key characteristic of Kevin Conroy’s Batman, in the way that he just has to speak normally for it to be intimidating. Eric Johnson does not share this characteristic, therefore he just remains a weak character.

Say what you will about the Call of Duty franchise, but at least it sticks to its roots, we know what to expect from a Call of Duty game and we get what we are promised.

Check out the E3 demo of Blacklist below and give us your thoughts on it in the comments below.