Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell

2024-06-19
This game played in 2024 on an Xbox does NOT hold up. AT all. The good? It is gorgeous. I mean genuinely the lighting and shadows still look so good to this day and it looks especially good in 4k on the Series X. The stealth mechanics with the light and dark are still fantastic. They were ground breaking then and they still feel really good. The bad? The controls. They're so clunky and dated. Jumping feels bad and slow. Jumping off walls feels very random. Menus within menus to select commonly used items. The AI is random as hell. Sometimes you load a save an an enemy follows one path that's easy to sneak around sometimes another that's impossible to sneak around. The health system that means if you have a save after you've taken a lot of damage you just won't be able to get through a section if you take even one hit of damage. Levels that force you to play completely stealthily and don't allow you to kill enemies. Levels that give you a limited number of times you can set off the alarm. Again based on when you save you can put yourself in a situation that gives you almost no leeway to make mistakes. And the crown jewel of why this game is a piece of shit in 2024: the save system. The original game on Xbox has fixed save points that are, at times, spaced SO far apart. It is genuinely horrific at times. I spent hours on a couple sections of the game that require such meticulous precision to get through. One mistake and you have to start the whole thing over. Chinese Embassy 2 made me want to bang my head against a wall till I lost consciousness.

I will say in the levels that had reasonable save locations and let me go guns blazing without all the tedium of alarm limits and no-kill requirements I actually had a ton of fun. But those were by and far the minority of a game that I found entirely too tedious. I am excited for the sequels because I remember Chaos Theory being phenomenal and I'm sure none of them have the absolute SHIT-ASS save system of the original.