Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory Review

To let everyone involved know, I'm somewhat of a Splinter Cell virgin. Sure, I played the original on the PC a few years ago, but I never even finished it, and I only really got into it for about a week. I've never been really interested in stealth games, apart from No One Lives Forever. I've also never been a fan of Tom Clancy anything; the whole government operative idea typically just turns me off because I'm a dirty hippie. As a result, I was the obvious choice to be the one to review Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory for the Xbox. My "n00bism" knows few bounds here.

You show me yours and I'll show you mine.

If we stand by the fireplace, he won't be able to detect our body heat. Yeah, but we're visible, you moron!

That being said, the game is not very kind to any sort of beginner. There is no tutorial to speak of, so if you want to get into the series this is not the place to do it. While there are training videos, this doesn't really let the player experience it first hand, and get a real grip on it before heading out into the game. At the same time, normal difficulty isn't going to kick your ass if you're somewhat competent with a controller. I'm not having much trouble yet at all. I would recommend watching those videos though. I can't say that this lack of beginner mode is really a bad thing; it preserves the series in a big way from being dumbed-down. Just know that you might want to take it easy if you're new.

The game looks great all around, and for the most part, it plays very smooth too. Sam Fisher looks like a complete badass with his knife, slinking from shadow to shadow. As you might well surmise, the lighting for the game is absolutely excellent. It's not so dark as to make you unable to see, and unlike many, many other games, you'll crave darkness throughout it. Many games could take a hint from the Splinter Cell lighting. It adds the perfect atmosphere. The interface is as smooth as can be; even being new to the series, you'll get right in with what is going on.

The animation is also beautiful and brilliant. If Sam Fisher wasn't a Splinter Cell, he could be a Ballerina, he's so graceful. The animation is also really creative on top of that, if you're hanging on a ledge and a guard walks by, you can reach over and grab the poor bastard, and pull him to his death, the man screaming all the way to the bottom. The only problem is that some of the animations are designed to work with specific places, so if you try to sneak an optic cable under a door, and you're not quite at the right spot, you'll watch Sam slid over magically by a few inches.

The sound is also top-notch. The voice-overs never sound cheesy, all of the effects feel realistic, and the sound blends so well together. As much as you have to be careful of the light, you have to be careful of the sound; however there are times in which one sound will completely mask any you might make. For example, when a helicopter lands on a roof top, the guards aren't going to be hearing much of you. The music adds a great atmosphere as well.

The Xbox is really starting to show weakness though. I could tell when I had been caught by the guards by the few second freezes the game gave while the computer was changing all of the AI routines. The visible slow down is a real pain in the ass, although as I would almost immediately load a save game afterwards, I can't say it didn't do much apart from just warn me. There's also a nasty sound bug in which the audio starts to skip. Sam... Fish... Er... Starts to sound like that. The music also cuts in an out, along with the gentle whirring sound of the Xbox, and whatever ambient sounds are going on in the game. I found that simply quick saving will correct this, but it is a pain nonetheless.

The guards themselves come off as being really stupid. Maybe it is the AI, or maybe it is just the personalities that you're dealing with, but you get the feeling that you're dealing with eight year olds sometimes. When Sam is able to grab a guard and nearly convince the guard that the guard doesn't work at the bank, and Sam does, you sort of roll your eyes at how stupid they're making these guards out to be. It does relieve some of the tension that has built up to that point however.

Much of the dialog is like that though, either being somewhat sophomoric in its attempt to be funny (the jokes are just sort of really bad), or incredibly patriotic in the sense that America can do no wrong. There's a scene in which one of the guards is talking about Americans killing every man in his village by timing their gun fire to the thunder of an ongoing storm, and after most of his sentences, he concludes with, "Americans aren't butchers though." I wonder if all insurgents feel this way secretly.

The story itself basically is more of that, "There's a computer code (you could put anything here, from nuclear kitten to Rufus Wainwright album) that will destroy the entire planet! Secret government operatives to the rescue!" It moves the story along from place to place, but it never really grabbed me. As I said before though, I'm really not the person that likes these sorts of stories though. Tom Clancy has never been able to hold my attention very long with his stellar writing (although his dazzling good looks have on numerous occasions).

And while the story doesn't grab you, the gameplay is addictive as hell. I love sneaking in the shadows only to come up behind a guard and slit their throat from ear to ear with a knife. I love to descend from the rafters and break a man's neck. I love to subvert a multi-million dollar security system with a hacking mini-game. Splinter Cell is the closest I've seen in a long time to "action puzzle". The whole thing is more fun than I know what to do with.

The levels have been designed to be non-linear, but ultimately, they are linear in one way or another. Sure, there's the ability to complete objectives in different orders, and you can get around the map in different ways for the most part, but you're still going to be going from point A to point B in the end, it's not that non-linear. You still feel like you're running on an obviously planned out, and scripted path, but at the same time, you know that you can get around in slightly different ways, and that there might not be just one solution to whatever problem you're having. The game itself has to be linear, but they've made a solid effort to at least give you the impression, some of the time, that it isn't as rigid as it seems.