Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Blacklist
Released August 20th, 2013, Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Blacklist (Not to be confused with NBC’s The Blacklist, released September 23, 2013) is a content-laden romp that is three times as long as Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Conviction and Sam Fisher is angry for all of it. It’s fine for a ninety-minute film to be humorless and gritty, and Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Conviction’s seven hour runtime (combined with brisk pacing) kept matters tolerable, but Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Blacklist’s twenty-plus hours of gameplay becomes a real drag with this tone. I watched an episode of NBC’s The Blacklist (episode 3, specifically) for research purposes, and I must say that the only thing I enjoyed about it was James Spader’s character - an affable and dangerous professional in the intelligence community. Kind of reminds me of pre-Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Double Agent Sam Fisher. If James Spader had spent the entirety of episode 3 of NBC’s The Blacklist sounding like he was on the edge of screaming at his coworkers the show would have been rendered entirely unwatchable, which is terrible news for anyone who sits down to play Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Blacklist.
Not to say that the game is bereft of comic relief - there’s a new, nieve, curly-haired, twentysomething hacker nerd who wears a hoodie and a puppy-dog attitude named Charlie. The guy feels like he was pulled whole-cloth out of NBC’s 2007 spy fiction comedy/drama Chuck. My high school friend group really liked Chuck, probably because it pandered aggressively to our demographic of 15-year-old white nerd boys. While I enjoyed hanging out with my friends, I didn’t really care for Chuck or its main character, Chuck, and I can assure you that Charlie does not fare any better with regards to my opinion of him. Maybe I just take issue with fictional depictions of curly-haired, unprofessional nerd boys with aquiline noses. It’s like looking into a mirror that enhances my most annoying qualities.
Several years previous to those (frustratingly-frequent) Chuck watch parties, this same friend group and I were designing a logo for our Lego League team - a robotic shark. I, having seen the promotional materials for Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow, which featured Sam’s goggles throwing off a sickass lens-flare, thought our shark’s eyes should have a similar effect. The term ‘lens flare’, however, had not yet entered my 12-year-old self’s vocabulary and I struggled to communicate the concept, at best managing to say that the shark’s eyes should be ‘shiny’. The team did not know what I was talking about and a sickass lens flare was not added to the shark’s eyes, much to my disappointment.
In Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Blacklist, Sam Fisher’s sickass goggle lens-flare has escaped the promotional materials and now manifest as a post-processing effect whenever Sam is in the shadows, an effect which is aesthetically much cooler than Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Conviction’s previous solution of ‘turn the whole screen black and white’ whenever the game needs to communicate that you’re hidden in the darkness. The lighting effects in general are superb, with enemy flashlights reflecting off of hardwood floors, and wet stone having just the right amount of slick shine, making for a title that still looks great during gameplay sequences ten years on. These technical achievements, infuriatingly, are drowned out by Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Blacklist’s PC port instability, which seems to have some sort of weird, DRM-enforced crash if you boot the game. The thing runs fine for about thirty minutes, and then dumps you back onto the desktop without warning, probably when you were midway through a mission. The solution is to create a shortcut to the game’s .exe file, adding ‘ -offline -offline_mode’ to the target path. I don’t know how you figured this out, Steam user ウサギ, but I thank you. Also the final cutscene bugged out on my playthrough so I had to watch it on YouTube. That was cool.
The core gameplay in Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Blacklist is largely identical to Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Conviction, but Sam now has a significantly expanded toolkit to facilitate actual stealth and non-lethal gameplay, with the game also rewarding you for slipping through areas without any guards even realizing you were there in the first place. Angry Sam is still a ridiculously proficient killing machine, but now has to contend with new enemy types, such as dogs and ‘men who wear helmets’, which makes the game a proper challenge, unlike Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Conviction’s entertaining, but easy, combat encounters - often times the best option now is to not deal with the dudes in heavy armor it at all and to just slip on by.
Ubisoft, unfortunately, seem to be worried that players will get bored of their fun video game and so have opted to pepper the experience with near-inexplicable set pieces. Examples include an unfun FPS section starring one of the side characters, a pure combat section set aboard a train with very little cover, and a Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare ‘Death From Above’-style section in which you, uh, blow up eleven (I counted) Iranian military vehicles on the streets of Tehran via a UAV.
Working hard to avoid causing an international incident was always a big focus of the first three Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell games, and at least in Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Conviction the incidents were confined to ‘Sam Fisher has a very weird day in D.C.’. The plot of Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Blacklist, however, is now not only in service of making up a rough excuse for the player to be sneaking through these far-flung locales, but also in service of making stuff explode. We didn’t even need to be in Tehran - it turns out the Iranians weren’t involved with the Blacklist, and the worst that happens is that we get a stern talking-to by the president, despite the fact that we just created the mother of all headaches for the State Department, and killed a bunch of people. If you start asking questions about the story of Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Blacklist you will quickly find that there is really very little here that makes sense. Rather, the story is principally concerned with character moments involving characters I don’t enjoy hanging out with or over-the-top scripted sequences that are frequently kind of annoying to play through. This is very much Michael Bay’s Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Blacklist.
Everything always appears and sounds very impressive in the moment - a character says something important sounding and the music does a bass drop as the other characters gawk, and this technique was intense and engaging the first time it happened but jeez every line of dialogue is like this with the damn soundtrack. NBC’s The Blacklist also has a dramatic soundtrack that incessantly cues between dialogue lines to let you, the viewer (an idiot), know that important, serious things are happening on screen, but at least the episode I watched had, like, a story that made sense. Maybe the overarching story of NBC’s The Blacklist is dumb nonsense, but determining that will be an exercise for never.
Some final notes:
Michael Ironside not returning to voice Sam is really disorienting, but he was also fighting cancer at the time, so I understand (he’s still alive as of my writing this, don’t worry). I do wish they had found someone who could somewhat-replicate Ironside’s smooth growl, though.
At one point Sam sneaks through the convention center in the middle of Navy Pier. In 2014 I slipped through the crowds and under a rope at Navy Pier and explored that same convention center while it was empty, which was very neat, and was pleasantly surprised to re-encounter this location once more in a sneaky context.
The guy who provided the voice and motion capture for Charlie also played Glen Coco in Mean Girls.
The Bottom Line
In the first sentence of my review of Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell, I refer to myself as being a fan of the franchise. It’s at this point, having played through the entire Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell series, with the exception of Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Double Agent, that I must ask myself if that is actually the case. I wish I could praise the original trilogy for showing relative restraint to its successors, but I’m betting the lack of explosions and over-the-top sequences was more due to technical limitations - the end of the French Commuter Train level that I praised so highly in my review of Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow ends with Sam running along the top of it while a helicopter opens fire on him, for example. The latter two games were highly playable, fast, and fun, but really exist as the epitome of popcorn entertainment. Of all the games in the Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell series, Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory is the only one I feel I can call ‘great’.
Whether or not I like Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell is probably a moot point, anyway - Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory sold two-and-a-half million copies in the first month of release. Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Conviction almost certainly cost far more to make, what with all of its fancy, cinematic motion-captured cutscenes, and sold two million copies in the first quarter of its release. Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Blacklist, being three times as long, very probably had an even larger budget. It also sold two million copies in the first quarter of its release. Ubisoft, uninterested in continuing to produce additional titles in a series whose development costs appeared uncorrelated with an increase in sales, shelved the franchise, and there has not been a Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell game in the decade since.
Perhaps that’s okay. The peak of my enjoyment with Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell was in the form of childhood fantasies derived from the game’s ad copy and preview articles in magazines. I was fascinated by the concept of Sam Fisher, his world, and his work, in a way all but one of these titles were unable to live up to.