Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow
Released about a year and a half after Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell, Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow dares to ask the question: what if there was more Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell?
Boasting eight new missions as well as some some genuinely impressive 2004 lighting effects that surpass the previous installments’, such as frequent instances of godrays filtering through shack slats and the like. Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow also features a number of UI/UX improvements - your optic cable now appears under the ‘open door’ option, rather than being in the gadget menu, for example. In the first game, the devs filled their levels with realistic-sized light bulbs, which were a pain to shoot out with your pistol. Now, they’ve given you a toggleable laser sight that makes the weapon perfectly accurate (provided you can time the sway) but can be seen by guards. Also Ubisoft made lightbulbs somewhat larger. I appreciate this.
Sam also has some new moves, such as the ability to shoot upside-down while hanging (which is cool, but inaccurate, so I never used it ever) and the half-split jump (which is cool, but is dependent on the level designer giving you opportunities to use it, so I never used it ever). As well as Sam gaining the ability to whistle to attract guards, which is super powerful and honestly how I handled most of the enemies in this game. Whistle from the shadows, guard walks into shadows, bop the guard over the head. They really need to stop falling for that.
Another iterative improvement is that the level layouts are better-ish! Now that the designers all know what a Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell area is supposed to look like, these obstacle courses are relatively consistent in tone and quality and never sink down to the absolute dregs of the last game’s Oil Rig nightmare. They also flirt with nonlinearity, with the game sometimes giving you a choice between two different parallel challenges, or hiding an optimal path so that only observant players will see it.
That’s not to say the level design is good, however. Sometimes the developers will have a cool idea - you must sneak next to some train tracks, trains pass regularly that illuminate the surroundings, time your movements to not be caught out - but it’ll only last for one hallway. Other times they’ll have a bad idea - level filled with tall grass, the tall grass is filled with things that explode like the world’s worst Pokemon route - and that idea will stick around way too long. There’s also a weird variability in level length. The longest of these levels (the fourth one) really overstayed its welcome - the in-game timer said it took me 50 minutes, but that wasn’t counting reloads, so the actual time was closer to two hours. Right before this is a level where you have to sneak the length of a french commuter train, which is the game’s strongest section, but tragically also its shortest.
I should offer a correction here: when I was giving my ranked list of every Hitman level earlier this year, I said that the Splinter Cell french commuter train level was from Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory. This is incorrect - it’s actually from Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow. A linear train doesn’t really work for Hitman, but it’s perfect for Splinter Cell’s obstacle course design - each train car is its own self-contained challenge, though the whole experience is over in twenty minutes, which is a real bummer.
The worst new addition that caused me not-insignificant psychic damage is that alarms now have added mechanics: at one alarm, enemies put on flak jackets. At two, they put on helmets. At three, you fail the mission. The first two are kinda fun (Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain would flesh this system out into something weird, complex, and neat, but that game also wouldn’t come out for another 11 years), but the mission failstate at three alarms is frustrating. The way in which this transcends to infuriating, however, is that the game will trip an alarm if you don’t hide all the bodies when you cross an invisible script trigger, which are placed at the whims of the level designers. I get why this is here - in the first game, if you knew there wasn’t anyone patrolling/cameras behind you on the obstacle course-level, you could just leave knocked out dudes/corpses wherever, but the implementation is really annoying and arbitrary.
For example: in the second level there is a bit where you are, without warning, forced to take out two enemies within a tight time limit inside a brightly-lit room that also contains a mission-critical computer (they’re shooting all those computers, and you can’t have that). When you access the critical computer after taking out the enemies, Grimm discovers that there’s a bomb down the hall, and it’s going to go off in sixty seconds. Here’s the rub: if you sprint down the hallway to diffuse the bomb without hiding the bodies in the brightly-lit room, it will trigger an alarm. If you entered this section with two alarms, that’s an instant game over. The bomb is guarded by two more dudes, who you’ll need to take out. After you disarm the bomb, you might be inclined to check out the door at the end of the hallway with your optic cable. If you do this without hiding the bodies of the second pair of dudes, it will trigger another alarm, because there’s a script trigger in front of the door. The whole experience is like this - you need to be aggressively proactive with hiding bodies, and frankly it makes this game a chore to play at points.
You might notice that Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow is not on Steam. I can only conclude that this is because the PC port is real rough. There’s a litany of fixes you need to do beforehand to make the thing playable (like, literally playable - there’s a server side DRM lockout even if you have the disk), but thankfully the pirated version I obtained via a Steam guide’s Google Drive link had the fixes pre-applied. Abandonware!
For the first three levels everything was going great from a technical standpoint, though there was a weird issue with the sound for guard lines, in that they sounded terrible. I think it’s trying to do some sort of spatial processing - the audio settings allude to an ancient sound card of yore that I obviously don’t have, and maybe if I did all these guards wouldn’t sound like they’re talking through an underwater boombox, but I’ll probably never know. Actually, a lot of the sound design here, not just the engineering, is kinda rubbish. They replaced the distinctive, stomach-dropping piano key that lets you know when a guard is suspicious with a more generic sound that’s a bit easy to miss. Nothing really sounds good. I do not enjoy having this game piped into my ears.
Also, the game was built around a checkpoint system for consoles, but the PC version lets you save at whim. This will break NPC scripting! All of the time! Certain sections became hilariously incoherent because of this! For example, this bug causes the main villain to take the same phone call repeatedly, and you need to wait for him to leave so you can noodle with his machine. This is hard, because, again, he keeps repeatedly taking the same phone call like a Monty Python sketch. I did manage to get him to look away from me long enough for me to use the computer via distraction cameras, though for a solid twenty minutes I was worried I had softlocked myself.
You might ask me how I know the game was built around a checkpoint system, and the answer to that is when loading level four the game hard-crashed me to the desktop. This occurred every time. Googling the error yielded nothing, only a handful of Reddit comments (and no fixes) from relatively recently, which makes me suspect that this is an issue with newer graphics drivers. I was distraught - my effort to play through all of the Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell games was in danger. In the depths of my despair, I downloaded the ROM for Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow for Game Boy Advance, and played through the first two levels. It was… actually pretty decent. Really smooth animations for Sam, and the devs did a fine job translating the stealth mechanics to two dimensions. I probably would have really liked this as an 11 year old.
No, no, I was being ridiculous. Instead, I dug out my PS2 BIOS, installed PCSX2, and downloaded an .iso for Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow for Playstation 2. I should admit that I told a slight fib in my review of Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell - my friend and I actually did get to play as Sam during our weeklong stay at his grandparent’s house in New Hampshire. See, my friend had a recently-divorced uncle who lived in the basement, owned both an Xbox and a PS2, was out all week, and had a copy of Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow. Staying up much too late, we sat in that dirty-laundry-scented basement and managed to get through the first three levels before our week in New Hampshire concluded (finishing his copy of Halo: Combat Evolved took priority, you must understand). As I fired up the emulator, I regretted that I didn’t have a basement, or piles of month-old laundry, to properly recreate the experience.
PCSX2 does have a CRT TV filter, so that did get me some of the way there. Though re-experiencing non-HD TV was… jarring and took awhile to get used to. The PC version (or, at least, the upgraded pirated version I obtained) has no problem running and displaying these polygons in crisp 1080p and I had forgotten how hard it was to just see shit on a standard definition tube TV. Eventually my brain adjusted, and I noticed that the PS2 version’s lighting is significantly less advanced than the PC version, which I assume is based on the XBOX edition. For example, the first hallway has a swinging lamp with an attached light-cone on PC, but is missing in the PS2 version. Sorry PS2 fanboys from the year 2004 - XBOX does have better graphics (Thinking back, I remember my friend talking about how much more beautiful the ice caves were in Rhen Var: Harbor on Star Wars: Battlefront for XBOX as opposed to PS2, so I should have expected this).
Beyond graphical differences, the game is also just… easier on PS2? The enemies have a harder time hearing your footsteps and the game gives you significantly more items like sticky-shockers and airfoil rounds. I am much worse at aiming with a controller, so this did help supplant the fact that I lost my ability to be an unstoppable headshot machine. Also the guard lines still sound terrible, so I guess that question from a few paragraphs ago did get answered. I replayed the game through level four, at which point I downloaded a 100% save for PC and just continued from there. Nostalgia is nice, but 1080p is nicer.
The plot of Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow is better, in that the first seven levels logically flow from one to the other, and the main villain, Sadano, has both motivations (hates America and American imperialism, but is also a pretty boi revolutionary. Essentially off-brand Che Guevara) and a plan that is somewhat sensical (plant smallpox bombs across America that go off if he misses a phone call. The American soldiers know this, and so they have to run away whenever Sadano takes to the battlefield, giving him near-mythical status). Not to say that it’s good, or that it doesn’t have problems. Level four (the one that always crashes on load for PC) has you hanging out with a local informant. You keep her safe as she guides you to the bad guy’s smallpox warehouse. It’s a long level, and frankly you probably spend more screen time with this character than anyone else in the Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell series. Then, as you get onto the elevator leading to the evil smallpox warehouse, Lambert orders you to kill her. “Don’t ask questions, just do it now!” he says. You do so, and the elevator descends, leaving the unarmed woman’s corpse on the ground, moving out of view. It’s an affecting moment, and in a game with a good story this would be a pivotal scene with significant ramifications. It’s not, though. Why we murdered the lady who just risked life and limb for us is never explained or really ever brought up again, and it feels like it’s there more for the shock value than anything. Like a ‘No Russian’ sequence, circa 2004.
The final level is where things veer into nonsense. The main villain was defeated in mission 7, but an American named Soth has the last smallpox bomb, and plans to detonate it in LAX. Don’t ask why he’s doing this, because the game won’t tell you, or even really characterize this guy in any interesting way. Also the police can’t help here - we need to sneak by them and if anyone sees us it’s game over. Don’t ask why the cops can’t know about the smallpox bomb, because the game won’t tell you. In the end, Sam finds the device with ten minutes to spare - but that’s not enough time to get it off site, apparently. Sam has a plan, however - in the game’s closing cutscene, he takes the smallpox bomb into the crowded ticketing area and leaves it there. The police notice the timer-covered device with eight minutes left and summon the bomb squad, who are able to get there in that crazy-short timeframe and make the correct play of using a drone to put a metal dome over the thing before it explodes. Don’t ask why Sam opted for this obviously insane option, because the game won’t tell you.
The Bottom Line
In most ways, Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow is a better game than its predecessor. That said,even without the litany of technical hurdles and the teeth-grindingly frustrating alarm system, however, I can’t recommend this one, or even call it a fun video game.