Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Conviction
You might notice that the fourth Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell game, Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Double Agent, is missing from this list. I did not play Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Double Agent because I didn’t want to. For one, the Steam reviews warn that the PC port runs terribly, if at all, and I was somewhat unwilling to submit myself to another bout of troubleshooting. Granted, Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Double Agent, straddling two console generations, also came out for Xbox, Xbox 360, Playstation 2, Playstation 3, Gamecube, and the Wii. To accomplish this feat, there are actually two, parallel versions of Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Double Agent - the ‘main’ version for the later gen (developed by the Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow team) and the ‘secondary’ version for the previous gen (developed by the Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell and Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory team), each with unique level layouts, assets, and plots that diverge significantly. Being a producer on this project must’ve been a nightmare.
In any event, the gist plot-wise is that Sam’s daughter is killed by a drunk driver. This sends him into a deep depression, so Lambert decides that the most sensible course of action is not therapy but to send Sam to infiltrate a terrorist organization under deep cover. This idea is obviously terrible, and along the way Sam must constantly wrestle with doing bad things to impress his new terrorist friends or to do good things, like, not blow up a cruise ship. Also Sam has to kill Lambert to prove his loyalty to the terrorists, but! the player can opt to not kill Lambert instead, because Sam’s struggle between Paragon and Renegade is baked into the plot in a ludic fashion. That’s pretty neat, but only one set of actions can be canon and the canon action is that Sam kills Lambert in Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Double Agent for the sake of the mission. This leaves a bad taste in my mouth, so you’ll excuse me if I didn’t crawl through the technical mud to experience it.
Anyhoo.
Released in 2010 for seventh generation consoles (and only seventh generation consoles, plus the PC port), Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Conviction shows us a Sam Fisher who has gone off the grid and is attempting to work through his trauma accrued during the events of Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Double Agent. It’s manly trauma, mind you, so that just means he’s angry all the time. Grimm, now working under the President (ersatz Hillary Clinton), finds Sam and gives him the shocking revelation that his daughter, Sarah, is not dead and that the whole ‘drunk driver’ thing was actually a ruse. She’s kind of a mysterious asshole about it, though, which is a pretty radical change from her previous characterization as a professional NSA analyst. Also, Grimm’s character model has an unreasonable amount of boob jiggle. Like, we’re not at Dead or Alive Beach Volleyball-levels here, but she’s wearing a tight biker suit - they should stay put, but the devs have them flopping all over the place. It’s distracting, and strange.
Overenthusiastic application of soft-body dynamics simulation aside, Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Conviction arrived at the height of both prestige TV (with Breaking Bad debuting two years earlier), as well as the ‘Are Games Art’ discourse, what with Roger Ebert posing his ‘Video Games Can Never Be Art’ article five days after Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Conviction’s release. Not to imply that Roger Ebert played Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Conviction and immediately declared video games to not be art - while that would have been very funny, it’s clear that Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Conviction wishes to not only be regarded as art (the game turns black-and-white whenever Sam is in the shadows (this effect is actually really annoying because you always want to be in the shadows and the game has a strong color scheme that you no longer get to see), menu buttons make musical noises when flipped between, and Sam’s internal thoughts now show up as projected text on various surfaces - usually this is his next objective, but can also be emotionally relevant, like with the text in the header picture), but also desires to be regarded in the same breath as a gritty, top-flight HBO show, laden with the same cinematographic language that Roger Ebert certainly would have found, at the very least, familiar and analyzable with his existing toolset.
Since that seventh-generation console technology added the ability to render humans in a manner no longer resembling a potato, and game budgets were starting to get seriously large, it was time for fully motion-captured, real-time rendered cutscenes with virtual camera work (a la James Cameron’s Avatar), dramatic lighting, and readable facial expressions to appear in seemingly every AAA release (Heavy Rain! L.A. Noire! Red Dead Redemption! Resident Evil 5!) - with Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Conviction being no exception. Previously, Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell cutscenes were short, clumsly-directed affairs with fixed camera angles. Now, the shaky, ‘hand-held’ camera traverses the game’s tense story sequences - each of which are modeled, textured, and lighted with an obsessive eye towards quality. Elias Toufexis, the guy who played Adam Jensen in Deus Ex: Human Revolution is here, and in one of the new ‘cinematic’ interactive interrogation sequences you kick him through a glass balcony. In another, Sam puts a man’s head through a urinal, shattering it. This moment is, quite possibly, the most lovingly, painstakingly, crafted virtual rendering of a man smashing another man’s head through a urinal ever created by human civilization. In previous iterations of Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell, interrogations involved grabbing someone from behind, dragging them into the shadows, getting a fun conversation with Sam referencing Terry Gilliam’s Brazil or whatnot, and then bopping them over the head. These served as a reward for skillful play, as well as giving a player extra intel and flavor about a level. Now, interrogations occur at scripted intervals, are beautifully lit and animated, and feel like something straight out of 24 in their kinetic brutality. It’s how Sam processes his manly trauma.
So, what does Sam do when he sneaks up behind an enemy, now? The answer is that he kills them, without hesitation, and with any one of a great number of motion-captured, context-sensitive takedown animations. It’s at this point that we should talk about Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Conviction’s gameplay, which eschews the meticulous, procedural stealth of the previous games and replaces it with a form of gameplay I can only call an ‘arena stealth-shooter’. You are placed into a succession of labs/office spaces/museum exhibits with a large number of hostiles, and the only way to proceed is to murder your foes. Sam dies if he gets shot more than a few times, so slipping around and above, evading hostile gunfire as their automatic weapons explode the myriad of bottles or office detritus in a way reminiscent of the best John Woo sequences, then attacking the enemy from unexpected angles, is thrilling to play. This new MO for gameplay is very clearly patterned after the very successful Batman: Arkham Asylum, which is also a game about an angry middle-aged man picking off goons from unexpected angles inside enclosed arenas. Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Conviction adds the innovation of cover-based stealth, with Sam slipping and rolling from desk, to cubicle wall, to silently offing a man, to potted plant - a gameplay style that would later be appropriated by Deus Ex: Human Revolution, which is also a game about an angry middle-aged man picking off goons from unexpected angles inside enclosed arenas. When the player is doing well, the shootouts in Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Conviction resemble the krav-maga-filled gunfight choreography of a Bourne film, which the developers certainly watched all of for inspiration. I’d bemoan the death of the old, slow paced gameplay where movement speed was bound to the scroll wheel, but I can’t deny that Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Conviction’s combat is just so fun.
Though, one might wonder how Sam Fisher, born in 1957 and who would previously avoid gunfights unless strictly necessary, has become an agile, insanely lethal combat monster in his mid-fifties. The answer, of course, is ‘manly trauma’. The character of Angry Sam fits well into the new gameplay style - it’s hard to imagine the affable professional remorselessly killing, like, fifty dudes in under an hour and still feeling up to smashing a man’s head through a urinal. Previous games would have sixteen dudes spread out over a whole complex and would encourage you to sneak by/bop them over the head instead of opening fire. To help the players not feel bad about Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Conviction’s wanton, spectacular killings, Ubisoft was sure to make the bad men as wildly misanthropic as possible. All your enemies in this game delight in shouting into the darkness about how much they’ll enjoy killing you and how you can’t possibly stop their evil plans, etc etc.
Speaking of evil plans, the evil plan in this one is to kill the president, and this plan is being orchestrated by a shadowy, mysterious organization who you learn nothing about in this game, or the next game, or ever again. Tom Clancy’s books, and, to an extent, Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell games previous to this one, have had a real fascination for the details of the intelligence community and its operations, with Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell specifically focused on the nature of information warfare, since Sam technically worked for the NSA for the first three games. Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Conviction, conversely, is laser-focused on delivering a high-octane, summer blockbuster-style plot, bereft of any subtlety or depth. To its credit, the plot is cohesive and tonally consistent, and this tone is perfectly captured by the gameplay - this isn’t something many games can pull off! It’s just that every person you encounter is either a foaming-at-the-mouth PMC goon or a hapless scientist in a white lab coat who is being forced to work on the EMP for the evil plan to kill the president. In previous games during a mission you might run into, like, the janitorial staff working late, but not here - such details are unimportant next to the need to render a man’s head being smashed through a urinal.
The Bottom Line
Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Conviction is short and actually pretty easy, even on the hardest difficulty, which is okay, because hard gameplay would get in the way of the spectacular gunfights and I don’t really like hanging around with Angry Sam and his manly trauma for long periods, anyway. If Ubisoft released another Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell game that was, say, three times as long and Sam spent the whole game still being angry, then that might annoy me.