Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory
Finally, a good fucking Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell game.
In an interview with Nintendo Power (Issue 190, April 2005), Ubisoft Creative Director Chris Hocking (the same guy who would later coin the term ludonarrative dissonance) explained that the subtitle ‘Chaos Theory’ referred to how Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory presents the player with small, but consequential actions. Picking a lock is slow, but breaking it is fast but loud. The noise might attract the notice of a guard, which can daisy-chain through the game’s myriad of other local systems, radically changing how an individual’s experience plays out.
When Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory’s level designers lean into this ethos, the game becomes an absolutely engrossing experience - Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory expands beyond the previous two game’s ‘corridor stealther’ level design into a more open-ended ‘spaghetti and meatball’ approach. Enemy bivouacs and office spaces make up medium-sized stealth playgrounds (the ‘meatballs’), connected by corridor sections (the ‘spaghetti’) that serve as hidden loading screens between said meatballs. This is actually really nice - the previous games would include intra-mission loading screens, so you never really knew how long a given level was (and some of them were really much too long). Now, the game gives you a map of the whole area upfront, letting you know exactly how far through its spaces you are. There’s also some real nonlinearity, like with the bank level - it starts in a central meatball, and you’re tasked with completing objectives in other, connected, meatballs in any order.
Populating these levels is the real star of the show: the guard AI. While not smart, they’re far from oblivious - the devs very clearly put a lot of time and effort into their behaviors. They’ll notice if you leave a door open, they’ll chuck glowsticks into areas of darkness if they think something is weird, if they’re talking to someone and you take out their conversation partner, they’ll notice that, too. If you try the tried-and-true Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow technique of whistling a guard into a dark corner, said guard will instead opt to open fire in the general direction of the whistling.
To help counter the improved intelligence of his foe, Sam now has a sound meter in addition to his light meter, which removes a lot of the guesswork around questions like ‘how loud is a tile floor, anyway?’ when you’re sneaking up behind someone. It also tracks how loud ambient noise is, so if the guards are listening to the radio you can ‘hide’ in the sound and move around much faster.
Sam also carries a knife, which can be used to cut through tent fabric or Japanese paper walls. It’s also now Sam’s default melee option - where he would once give guards a friendly bop on the head, he now efficiently cuts their throats. Brutal, effective, and also probably the thing that caused Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory to be rated ‘M for Mature’ rather than the previous, solidly ‘T for Teen’, games. That said, Sam remains the affable protagonist, and the game’s tone stays relatively light - during one bit, Sam references Terry Gilliam’s Brazil as an interrogation tactic. I hate Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. If you want me to talk, bring this film up. This game is filled with fun dialogues throughout, which make for a flavorful reward for grabbing guards and knocking them out as opposed to, like, shooting them. The slick writing also extends to the radio banter - early on, Sam has to sneak through a ship that’s equipped with an alarm system - “Let me guess - three alarms and the mission ‘s over, right?”, to which Lambert responds “This is no video game, Fisher!”, which is both a nod to Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow’s most infuriating system, and a message that it’s not present here in Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory.
On the subject of absent infuriation, this is the first Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell that I’ve not had to finagle with to get it working properly, and it didn’t crash on me once. The game also sounds crisp and clear, and the soundtrack, composed by Amon Tobin, was the first Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell soundtrack to actually get a physical release. Polish is high across the board: Sam has fully redone movement animations where, if you suddenly stop moving (say, because a guard has just entered the dark room you were moving through), he’ll freeze in place, remaining motionless until you decide it’s safe to proceed. This is just for flavor (guards can’t see movement any better than they can see still objects, after all), but it feels right. Another cool detail is that your infrared goggles, like in real life, can’t see through windows anymore, since IR bounces off of glass. The fact that they could in the previous two games bugged me, and probably only me. Technically, windows should function like mirrors for anyone wearing IR goggles, but mirrors are computationally expensive in video games, so I’ll settle for them being opaque.
The plot of Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory is the strongest out of any game in the series thus far. Since Sam isn’t really the type to hang around and chat, characterizing its antagonists has always been a problem for Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell, which Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory solves by having them be your chums until the last third of the game, when it turns out that Douglas Shetland (from Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow) has been using Phillip Masse’s computer programs (from Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell) to make a fortune by orchestrating a war between North and South Korea.
The worst part of this war is that it gives us Seoul, the game’s third-to-last level and by far its most frustrating. Seoul is a real return to form for Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell, in that it's a linear obstacle course of gimmicky bullshit, where one must guess the level designer’s chosen path and then follow it without fail. The need to characterize Douglas Shetland also gives us a sequence in the subsequent level where he monologues at Sam while we run about a room, getting shot at and having to disarm bombs. Since each bomb is tied to a specific part of the monologue, they can only be disarmed in a certain, arbitrary order. This sequence is awful and incredibly unfun. They should have just made this a cutscene. Though, perhaps that wasn’t an option, because the cutscenes in Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory are all weirdly edited, with really abrupt cuts and rushed pacing. I’d guess that this is more an artifact that video takes up a lot of disk space, so they needed to cut them down in length, but the experience of watching the game’s pre-rendered cutscenes is honestly kind of jarring and unpleasant.
The Bottom Line
A couple missteps on the back nine aside, Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory is the first Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell game that I would call a ‘pretty damn good video game’.