Not so Sneaky Saturday| Splinter Cell: Conviction

 

Image Credit: Steam

Welcome back for a not so sneaky Saturday as we dive into Splinter Cell: Conviction the black sheep of Splinter Cell and best unofficial John Wick video game. This game is viewed by many Splinter Cell fans as the death of the series but I feel like it was more an experiment and a prototype. Look a few years forward to 2014 when Watch_Dogs released it has very similar combat that feels to me like a slightly more refined version of Conviction's fast paced gunplay. So I have played through this game once many years ago in a pseudo stealth playthrough but this time I played through on the realistic difficulty in a bit more of a John Wick style. Let's dive in! (Reviewed on Xbox Series X backwards compatibility with HDR)

Spoilers Below!

The story of Conviction feels like a big missed opportunity to tie off loose ends from Double Agent. The story starts three years after the end of Double Agent and meets Sam in Malta a waiter hands him a cell phone and a familiar voice greets. Anna Grimsdottir alerts Sam the many armed men have entered the market nearby the café he is at and she assists Sam by clearing out the civilians and isolating the thugs. Here Sam interrogates the leader of the Thugs and finds out about Kobin the man who killed Sarah. Sam goes there and dispatches his goons and begins to interrogate Kobin when all of the sudden all the skylights bust out and Sam stands surrounded by several new Splinter Cells wearing red goggles rifles raised. Grim tells Sam to obey them and Sam is brought to an airfield run by a PMC where we meet Reed the very clear antagonist as you can tell by his long coat and pale complexion. From here Grim tells Sam the president is aware of a plot that Reed is at the head of but she needs to stay undercover with Echelon but an outsider can truly figure it out before it s too late. From here Sam goes on a rampage across Washington DC figuring out Reeds plan and eventually foiling it in the White House at the end of the game.

The gameplay is a huge change from previous titles as it now a third person shoot with stealth elements instead of a pure stealth game with third person shooting. This game is also the first splinter cell game that doesn't tie Sam to only the Sc-20k Rifle and FN Five Seven pistol now Sam can use any weapon now and can pick up weapons off dispatched foes. Another change is now Sam has Sonar goggles instead of multimode nigh vision, EMF, and thermal. The sonar goggles are strong and can see enemies through walls but will disrupt if you move and only updates every few seconds when it sends out a pulse. Finally almost all of the old gadgets are gone and just replaced with a variety of grenades that Sam can throw. Overall the combat feels like a prototype of later Ubisoft titles like the aforementioned Watch_Dogs. The game feels clunky at times but once you get used to it feels it begins to feel good.

Finally the sound if you enjoy modern action cinema with punchy gunshots and pulsing electronic soundtracks this game will make you happy. Now it is not quite the John wick soundtrack with gunshots timed to the beat or anything like that but it was a departure from the more classical score of the previous game with only suppressed gunshots. The soundtrack while different is not the best but not the worst it definitely shows the time the game was made.

To wrap up this review I will say as a Splinter Cell game this is a 2/5 but as a third person shooter played like you are John Wick I would give it a 4/5 so I'll average those scores to 3/5. This game has a solid core to it but just fails to deliver the gameplay that many fans of the series had come to expect. This game is also very short if you blast through it on realistic it took me around 6 hours playing in a different style than expected it would've been less if it didn't crash every 5 deaths or every two - three missions. What games absolutely changed from their predecessor do you guys like or hate? let me know below! Thank you for reading!