Splinter Cell: Blacklist (2013) by Ubisoft

Ubisoft quietly releases the best Splinter Cell game in years

Splinter Cell Blacklist is the best entry in the series since Chaos Theory, and one of the best pure stealth games I've played in years.

Traversal is a dream. Sam moves fluidly and intuitively. You feel like a cat prowling around these levels, stalking enemies, and darting quickly to and fro outside their paths of patrol. Sam Fisher's hand to hand takedowns are superbly satisfying, particularly the deadly variants with his karambit knife. The choreography there is spectacular, and unlike some stealth games such as Human Revolution, the takedowns never get old. The game is also designed in a way that rewards you for your playstyle, no matter how decide to play. Want to play ghostly, never touching enemies, and never leaving a trace? Me, too! You get a lot points for that, which you can use to unlock better gear and weapons. Want to take down every single enemy you come across, alternating between fighting, popping off a couple of shots, then throwing down a smoke grenade and disappearing into the shadows? They give you quite a few points for that, too. Want to just go balls out and play the game like you're John Rambo, throwing incendiary grenades and fire an unsilenced heavy gun? Totally viable way to play the game, and, yup: They give you a boatload of points for that, too. This game has succeeded in allowing the player to drift between full stealth and action shooting in a way that many stealth games have tried over the past couple of decades, but few have succeeded in doing. It does exceptionally well at allowing you to play the game the way you want, and seamlessly transitioning between different styles. I's an amazing accomplishment, and it's the biggest reason why this is such a good game.

Yup, it's a Splinter Cell game.

The replayability I touched on is another asset of the game. Sam Fisher is so customizable that this game could also be described as having RPG features. You can customize all of his gear and weapons to help him better perform either at stealth or combat. You receive money for accomplishing things like takedowns or disappearing after alerting enemies, and then use the money to purchase pants, better goggles, better guns, and more. It does more to allow you to play the game the way you like, and that's something I can always get behind, especially from a company as typically reprehensible to consumers as Ubisoft generally is. It also creates a ton of replayability and does a lot to keep you coming around. Just look at my stats: I've put 60+ hours into this game and have replayed it several times. That's more than I've put into any Splinter Cell game since Chaos Theory.

A big part of the success here is how bad-ass you feel while playing the game. I mentioned how strong the hand-to-hand takedowns are, which is a big part of it. Another is the mark and execute feature that's been carried over from Conviction, which I absolutely adore. It functions in this game as an excellent "Oh, shit" tool to use if you're about to be spotted by an enemy. Check out the surroundings, mark the enemies, and commence sneaking. Take a wrong turn and get spotted? Hit the button and Sam instantly takes out anybody within range that you've marked, bailing your dumb ass out and giving you another shot to keep sneaking. It's a great way to incorporate a kind of undo button into a genre as unforgiving as stealth. I'm not sure whether the developers purposely intended for the feature to be used in this fashion, but it works great, especially considering that you can now use mark and execute at extremely long range when equipped with sniper rifles, which is a neat feature.

I've played several Ubisoft games the past few years, and none have run very well aside from the Far Cry series. This game, happily, runs like a dream. It looks great, too. Textures are excellent, and motion capture for the actors is terrific. I do think the game loses quite a bit without Michael Ironside, though, and I question why Ubi even deigned to put Sam Fisher in the game to begin with. The justification was that they needed a younger actor to do the motion capture, which is understandable. But Sam has to be in his late 50s by this point. Why not just reboot with another character altogether, and relegate Sam to the Lambert role of the older games? Ironside is an excellent voice actor, and the series is worse off without him.

Anybody who has read my reviews in the past knows that I have a big problem with checkpointing in stealth games. There's nothing more frustrating than sneaking through nine tenths of an area, getting caught at the very end, and dying, only to be put right back where you started and having to follow everything you just accomplished again. It's unbelievably frustrating, and it has no place in modern video games that could easily provide a free save feature. If you don't like save scumming, then don't do it. I don't. But not having free saves is a terrible design choice and it harms people who play the game on the hardest difficulty, which I frequently choose when playing stealth games. This game, sadly, does feature checkpointing, which is one of my few complaints about the game. However, the checkpoints are frequently very manageable, which does some mitigating to the repetitiveness caused by their presence. They are still annoying, though, and I have no idea why game designers continue to use them.

The story is another weak point with this game. It's your typical Call of Duty-esque American military story, with the gruff hero saving the world from the sneering villain. I thought Conviction actually had a really great story, but unfortunately this game doesn't continue what they shot for with that one. Gone is pretty much all of the Tom Clancy flavor out of the series that was present in the first three games. This is all Hollywood action movie, which is disappointing, but doesn't matter much in the long run since the game plays so fantastically.

I also found the music wanting. Chaos Theory had what I consider to be the best soundtrack in any video game, ever, and this game lacks Amon Tobin's stunningly beautiful score that that game featured. Tobin did such a great job with Conviction, despite having only two songs present in the game, that I would linger on that game's menu just to listen to the excellent menu track that he composed (see below video). The fabulous sound design in Conviction does not return, either, but it's manageable here. Seriously, Ubisoft, Amon Tobin is a god. Bring him back, please. We miss him.

Another complaint I've got are the stupid first person shooting segments of the game. I can see the value of using them to break up the pacing and add something different, but come on, people who buy Splinter Cell games buy them for stealth gameplay. If I wanted a shooter, I'd play Battlefield. I'd rather Splinter Cell sticks with its strengths.

The multiplayer and co-op features in this game are some of the strongest since Chaos Theory as well, and I'd be doing a disservice to the game if I didn't mention them. I don't play much competitively, but I had a blast with the co-operative segment of the game. I only wish it were a bit more meaty -- It's easy to blow through all of the co-operative levels in just a few hours.

Overall, you could do way worse than Splinter Cell Blacklist. If you're looking for a pure stealth experience, this is your game. It looks great, it runs great, and it plays great. It's got great replayability. The minor nitpicks I have with it do nothing to really damage the experience. This is a great game, and it's a promising return to form for the Splinter Cell franchise. If you're a fan of the stealth genre, you'll adore it. If you're not, it's still worth playing, as it's a solid game even when played just as a third person shooter with some stealth features.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes (2014) by Kojima Productions

Kojima's latest effort is an ill-advised cash grab that's not worth the cost of entry

We'll start off with what's obvious from the get-go: This is a drop dead gorgeous game. It's beautiful. There are some really neat lighting effects and water looks great. Solid textures and some nice depth of field effects as well. It also runs terrifically on my setup. It's probably the single best PC port I've played since Splinter Cell Blacklist. It's a refreshing change in an industry that's given us duds like Assassin's Creed Unity that are hardly playable at high settings even on a strong setup like mine.

That being said, I have a number of complaints about the game. I finished in 4 hours. It's absurdly short, more a demo than anything.

In a lot of ways this franchise hasn't changed much since the second game, which is admittedly fine in some areas. I consider myself a longtime fan of the franchise -- Metal Gear Solid is probably one of my single favorite games of all-time. Fans of the series love the exclamation points, the cardboard boxes, and the weird, preachy stories. I'm no different. I love all that stuff, I eat it up. And it's important that the series doesn't lose its identity for the sake of progress. But there are some features of the series in this game that just plain haven't aged well, and that's where most of my complaints come from.

My biggest issue with the game comes from the foolish way checkpointing is laid out. Imagine you carefully and meticulously move halfway across an open yard of tents, taking care not to be spotted, only to slip up near the end due to hitting the wrong button. Now your last checkpoint forces to restart a football field (about 100 meters for our European friends) away and retrace your own steps. You also get to hear the same introductory codec message every single time, too. Not good.

Ground Zeroes runs exceptionally and has a drop-dead gorgeous lighting engine

Checkpointing is a holdover from older games that really does a lot to damage the experience here. There's no reason a semi-open world stealth title shouldn't have a save anywhere feature. Hell, the option to save via a codec message isn't even present in this game, so why even have checkpoints at all? It doesn't make sense to use them over a manual save function. This isn't even a question of save scumming, it's just a matter of modern convenience that Kojima seems to have forgotten. I have the same issue with the Far Cry series. It's 2014. There's no excuse for these games to use checkpointing when they'd be far better served by utilizing a dynamic save system. Bad checkpoints are some of the most frustrating things in gaming, and it puzzles me that developers still use them when there are obviously better systems available. Seriously, checkpoints are down there with escort missions. Game developers: Kill them immediately. Please. I despise them in games, especially in stealth games.

I had some serious issues with the camera as well. There are times when you've got a roof or some kind of structure far over your head, and the camera needlessly zooms straight into the back of Big Boss's head. Why? It's nowhere near the ceiling. It doesn't work well with cover, either. It was frequently a pain to me when I would be creeping between small spaces, such a between cargo boxes or tents. I'd stop at a corner, move up into cover, and try to get a peek around the corner to see if a soldier was there. And more often than not, the camera would refuse to comply, just sitting closely behind Boss's head. They obviously knew that this was an issue because they included a shoulder switching camera mechanic, which rarely seems to do much. I was detected a few times simply because I was frustrated with the camera and decided I was sick of fooling with it, so I moved out. It's ridiculous to me that the camera is an issue in a game these days. I can't remember the last time I even had camera issues in a game at all. A poorly controlled camera is an issue that belongs 20 years ago in the N64 era. Not in a modern, next generation game. It's inexcusable.

Another holdover from the old games that seriously bothered me was the control scheme. There are menus within menus within menus when you've got a guard grabbed or when you want to customize weapons. You're holding a bumper, or flicking a stick, or pressing some random arbitrary button that just doesn't feel natural. The worst part about these menus is that there frequently is just no need for them. Games like Blacklist have featured the same types of things but made them vastly more simplified and intuitive. I find myself having to check the controls screen multiple times per session because I can't remember how to do something. That's a sign of having an unintuitive, overly complex, poorly designed control scheme. Movement, furthermore, is hampered by having a weird crawl/crouch/stand system, including a weird button to dive to the ground, which I didn't really understand or ever feel any need to use. Then there are a bunch more controls for when you're crawling. You can roll to the left. You can roll to the right. Hold a button to crawl more quickly. It's all just needlessly complex, and it feels tacked on when it's not really necessary.

There's no free climbing in this game like there is in other stealth games of the past few years -- And I'm not saying that it needs it. But movement in open-world or semi-open world stealth games like Blacklist, Dishonored, or Assassin's Creed, for example, has way more dimensions than it does in Ground Zeroes due to the distinct verticality in the form of climbing (or blinking, in Dishonored's case) up to platforms or roofs. It's nearly always present no matter where you are, and you know so intrinsically how to accomplish it that you don't have to think about it. Dishonored teaches you to blink once, and you've got it down. Assassin's Creed teaches you to free run once, and you remember. In Ground Zeroes, you can only really move up or down when there's a ladder present. Otherwise, you're moving simply on the ground, back and forth, to and fro. It doesn't have the verticality of those games. So why are the controls so damned complex and involved? It's how it's always been in the series, but with the advent of newer games with great traversal systems, Ground Zeroes' controls feature so many aspects that just seem totally unnecessary, and it only serves to muck everything up. I can't help but feel a simpler approach would have been far more successful here. Having an intuitive understanding of movement and being able to act without thinking is absolutely paramount in stealth games where being seen can lead to a very quick death, and I never feel like I have that down when I play this game. It's something that would come with practice, sure, but why should I have to practice at something that I can intrinsically pick up and do in pretty much every other game in the genre?

Look, I don't want Metal Gear to become Splinter Cell. I'm not saying that at all. But the step forward that Guns of the Patriots made in 2008 was excellent, and it breathed new life into the gameplay of the series and really saved it from becoming too dated. Gunplay was far better in that game. It was always wonky and unintuitive in the older games, with its weird go-to-first-person-and-then-aim thing. It never felt natural. You always felt like a bumbling idiot when you were trying to shoot somebody, and Solid Snake was supposed to be an expert with a firearm. Guns of the Patriots completely fixed that. They updated their gunplay to a more modern, third person shooter type system, and it worked fantastically. That is the type of step Kojima needs to take with things like movement and checkpointing. Ground Zeroes, unfortunately, doesn't take that step. It just feels like a way prettier Guns of the Patriots. Which is certainly not a bad thing, and don't get me wrong: This is not a terrible game.

If you're a Metal Gear fan, buy it. You'll like it. But if you're just looking for a stealth experience, I'd heartily recommend Splinter Cell Blacklist over this game.

⭐⭐