Stealth Action Re-Re-Redefined

If you're not into violent computer games, this opinion is not for you.

UPDATE 2005-07-24: I've been meaning to update this for a while, but just got around to it. Updated SC-20K info--see the "weapons" section.

UPDATE 2005-05-31: CDs are better than DVDs. See the "what it's missing" section for details.

UPDATE 2005-05-29: After my recent less-than-pleasant experience on Epinions I finally got around to finishing my updates based on the full version of the game. There were actually several things I was going to add, but when I read through it again I found out I had already included many of them the first time around. ;) Most of the added content is in the Controls & Gameplay section.

UPDATE 2005-04-19: Well, it took them long enough. The game is far better than the demo because it has more options, a cooperative mode, and a multiplayer mode. No big surprises there.

On another note, don't ever use the "dirt cheap shipping" option if you buy from GoGamer.com. With dirt cheap shipping it took almost two weeks for me to get what normally takes 2-3 days with the normal shipping option.

UPDATE 2005-04-07: My copy of SCCT is in the mail! Check back in a week or so to find out whether I liked the full game as much as I liked the demo.

In case you've been living in a cave... ;)
You are Sam Fisher, an elite member of a secret government agency, Third Echelon, that carries out covert counterintelligence and antiterrorist missions across the globe. Your trademark "Fifth Freedom" allows you to protect the national security interests of the United States of America by whatever means necessary. You are a shadow's fleeting shadow, a swift and invisible predator. You don't even go bump in the night. For all intensive purposes, you don't exist. You do your job and nobody even knows there was a job that needed to be done. But when the world wakes up the following morning, the world is a better place because of what you've done.

Now let's get onto the good stuff!
When I played the original Splinter Cell on PC, I was floored. Never before had I seen such a tactically-advanced third-person shooter, especially one that was single-player only. I had the opportunity to became Sam Fisher, lurking in the shadows, carefully eliminating terrorist threats and shaping history through my covert missions.

Splinter Cell 2: Pandora Tomorrow then came along a while later. While it added a couple of athletic moves and some new toys, it was largely a remake of the first game. Frankly, even though it was fun, I was a little disappointed and felt like the game could have simply been an expansion pack to the first game. Splinter Cell 2 also added a multiplayer mode, but it was in reality a whole separate game, spies vs. mercenaries. Unfortunately, it ran slow even on my relatively fast Dell Inspiron 8600 with a Mobility Radeon 9600 PRO Turbo graphics card.

What it's got
Then one day I read that the third installment in the series was now available. Splinter Cell 3: Chaos Theory adds more advanced lighting, smoother movements, and even more eye candy to an already good-looking game. For example, now when you do a split jump it looks more like how a real person would do a split jump. Your movements aren't jerky and your body doesn't move like a simple wireframe stick figure's body would. Every motion you make is fluid yet precise.

Light is blocked by solid objects, filtered through sheets or translucent objects, and reflected off of surfaces. Shadows have always played an integral role in the Splinter Cell environments, but now they are more detailed than ever. Lamps swinging in the wind cast variable light on nearby objects, and any object in the light's path casts a shadow onto whatever is beyond the object.

The usual sounds and communications are also still there. You see cut scenes with news bulletins and tickers between missions. During your missions your buddies back at base communicate with you and provide you intel updates via your voice link, and sometimes they even help you out remotely by hacking into computer systems for you or by deciphering data that you have obtained in the field.

Chaos Theory also brings a new level of positional and environmental sounds to the table. You hear echoes in caves, and voices and sounds are occluded when you are trying to listen from behind a wall. I remember the previous SC games having sound, but nothing like this.

Often if you sneak up on enemies you can eavesdrop on some interesting conversations. It's always fun throwing a flashbang at an enemy right after he admits to being scared of thunder and lightning because of an experience he had as a child.

The enemies have varying levels of intelligence, and they are very collaborative. If one enemy spots something out of place and several of his buddies are nearby, he'll ask them for help investigating whatever didn't look quite right. I even found that in some cases, an enemy will notice if you nabbed his buddy out from behind him as they were both walking down a hallway. Ahhh, good times....

The music of the game, like in the previous installments in the series, is moody and dynamic, changing as the threat of immediate detection changes. It's almost a little like cheating to have the music turned on, because if you walk into a room you'll immediately know whether there are bad guys in there because the music will quicken and become more tense. You'll also know when you have eliminated all the enemies within the immediate vicinity because the music will again slow back down and drift off into the background. I'll bet some of our real guys in the field would LOVE to have this threat detection soundtrack playing all the time! Then they could concentrate on more important things, like the up-to-the-minute score of the big game back home.

Hand-to-hand/interactions
Sam finally gets a knife. WELL, IT'S ABOUT FREAKING TIME!!!!! You have no idea how annoyed I was that this badass elite covert operative had to punch a guy twice in the face to knock him out. Finally you can throw a flashbang to stun two guys, run up, and off them both before they come back to their senses. Depending on how you approach them, you will either slit their necks (crouched) or thrust the knife into their torsos. I'm sure the media will have a heyday with this game's up-close-and-personal violence. If you're not the knifing type, you can also give them one good punch in the face to incapacitate them. The best thing about all this is that you don't have to manually equip your knife. When an item is not equipped and you are near an enemy, one mouse button knifes him and the other button punches him.

Remember trying to drop a guy off a ledge so his buddies wouldn't find him? Remember how he didn't fall if just one corner of his body wasn't over the edge? In SC3, the unconscious and dead guys finally obey the laws of physics. If most of the dead guy's body is hanging over the edge, he'll slide right off and tumble down to the bottom.

Another cool new feature is that you can automatically pick a guy up after you incapacitate him. Let's say you grab a guy from behind and you're done interrogating him. Just click and hold one of the attack buttons, and you'll not only incapacitate him, but as he's falling you'll crouch and slide him onto your shoulder. When you carry him to his final resting place, you no longer spread him neatly and straight; you just set him on his feet, clinging his shirt, then let go and let gravity do the rest.

Speaking of gravity, it's worth mentioning that SC3 now adds gravity as another weapon in your arsenal. You start by dropping off the side of a platform and waiting for an enemy to walk by. If he walks by close enough without seeing you, you can grab him and pull him over the ledge. "It's a long way down, buddy...have a nice fall!"

More of the objects in the world can now be manipulated. You can cut through a tent to make your own door, puncture gas generators with your knife to drain the fuel and silently but permanently disable them and you can blow out candles.

Sometimes you know what needs to be done and there's no reason to be subtle about it. That's when you bash the door in and let loose a hailstorm of bullets until nobody on the other side is standing. If you're lucky, an enemy will be standing directly on the other side of the door and will be knocked out when you bash it in. In other words, in the previous games, you could open a door or peek through it. In SC3, you can open the door, open it stealthily (slowly, just a little bit at a time in any increments you choose), or you can BASH that sucker open and put some skid marks in those terrorists' underpants!

Of course, no write-up about SCCT would be complete without mentioning the new inverted neck-snap. Unfortunately, you rarely get to use it, but the idea is that you hang from a pipe on the ceiling, wait for a guy to pass beneath you, and--you guessed it--while hanging by your legs, grab the guy by the head and play chiropractor on him. Let's just say Sam won't be getting his license anytime soon--he certainly fixes the neck pain, but his patients sort of never recover from his "treatment."

Weapons
I already mentioned the knife, but did I mention how fun it is to use??? Oh...I guess maybe I did....

Another thing that always bugged me about SC2 was that I was stuck always using the pistol while in a split-jump. If I'm already up there and stable with both hands free, why can't I pull out the big guns? Well, now I can!

The SC-20K now works differently than in the previous games. You can use either the sniper rifle attachment, shotgun attachment, or the stock "foregrip" attachment. You may carry up to two attachments during a mission, and to switch between them you simply press the "Alt" key. The attachments you get will depend on which mode you choose for the mission: stealth, assault, or Redding's recommendation.

Unlike in previous games, the sniper attachment uses separate ammo from the assault rifle itself. The sniper rifle is not silenced, but it's still as deadly and as accurate as before, with 1.5x and 3.5x zoom factors. If you want a silenced shot and don't need the range of the sniper rifle, you can use the SC-20K assault rifle's normal zoom scope at 1.5x magnification. Just remember to switch to a different attachment first, otherwise you'll still be using the sniper attachment when you try to use the scope. Unfortunately, the assault rifle is less accurate, so if the guy's head isn't twice as big as the crosshairs in the scope, you might not get him on the first shot.

DOOM's trademark weapon of choice, the shotgun, just might have been my new Splinter Cell weapon of choice, if they hadn't also added the combat knife. When you blast a guy with this from point-blank up to about 5 or 10 feet, he'll fly backward, just as you would expect.

If you want to use your sticky shockers, airfoil rounds, sticky cams, and other toys, you'll have to slap on the standard foregrip attachment.

The SC-20K rifle itself is now automatic so you don't have to remember to switch between single-shot and full-auto mode, and the automatic mode doesn't waste your ammo quite as badly. Just hold the trigger for an additional split-second if you think it's going to take more than one bullet to put down your enemy.

Gadgets & Gizmos
Now, in addition to your night vision and thermal vision, you also get EM vision, which makes electrical wires and electronic devices light up like Christmas trees. In practice it really only seems to be useful when thermal vision is rendered useless by fires burning all over the place.

Your pistol now also sports an alternate fire that disables electric and electronic devices, so you no longer have to waste ammunition in order to darken a path for yourself. Although it has infinite charges, it takes a few seconds to recharge after each use.

Environment
In Chaos Theory, the environmental sounds can drown out the sounds you make. So, for instance, if you're in a room with chugging generators, you can probably sprint at full speed without anyone hearing you. As expected, the ambient noise registers on your stealth monitor in the lower left corner, and the noises you make (including weapons discharge) register with an additional indicator on the same meter, so you'll always know whether the ambient noise is louder than you.

What it's missing
It seems like at least one move have been eliminated; namely the ability to jump up and kick off a wall to jump higher. In all truth you no longer need this move, but it's kind of disappointing that it just plain doesn't work any more.

Now, one thing that I listed as a con might strike you as a surprise: I would much rather have a game on CD than on DVD. The reason is not because some computers don't have DVD drives. By now most newer home PCs should come with at least a DVD-ROM drive, if not a dual-format DVD burner. I've had a DVD drive since 1998, and back then I was annoyed that so few software packages came on DVD. I still think more software should come on DVD, but not games.

For the past 4 or 5 years, I have ripped my game CDs onto my hard drive and used a nifty program to load them into a virtual CD/DVD-ROM drive. Not only are load times drastically decreased when running off a virtual drive, but switching games and keeping track of discs are more convenient. I can switch games with either 0 or 4 mouse clicks, depending on whether the other game I want to play is already loaded into one of my other virtual drives--no hunting, ejecting, swapping, and re-inserting necessary! I can keep my original game discs safe on a shelf at home while I take my laptop everywhere with me and play games directly off the hard drive.

With most of the recent multi-CD games, only one disc is required to actually play the game, and I only have to sacrifice at most about 700 MB of hard drive space per game disc. However, if I want to rip a DVD game like SCCT to my hard drive, I have to set aside more than 4 GB of additional space--that's the same amount of space that would otherwise store at least 6 CD-ROM games! No, instead I'm stuck either carrying around the Chaos Theory DVD or not playing it, so I guess that means I'm stuck carrying around the DVD and hoping it doesn't have any unfortunate accidents.

Controls & Gameplay
The controls have changed slightly, so you might fumble for sniper mode on your SC-20K. Hint: equip the zoom scope like the binocs. ;) Overall, though, I think the controls are slightly improved over the previous games' default controls.

SC3 now has easy, normal, and hard difficulty levels; whereas the older games only had normal and hard.

The AI is very good at the hard level, and is often able to see you even when you think you are being sneaky. In later missions, the AI characters (particularly the elite mercenaries) become less stupid, and they won't fall for your traps.

If you're not careful to leave things as they were, they'll realize something is terribly wrong when they see a light is off (or on) or a door is open. Many of the enemies have flashlights or flares and will not hesitate to light them up and actively search for you if you leave something out of place. Unfortunately, there were several instances in which I left things as they were, but the enemy guards or mercenaries thought I had turned off a light. It was a bit annoying; but if you heard Sam Fisher was in town, wouldn't you be a little paranoid, too?

In the first two games, the only way to see what was on the other side of something was to either go around and look, or use the fiber optics kit to peek under a door. Even then, you couldn't actually take someone out unless you had a clear line-of-sight route from the muzzle of your gun to their head. In Chaos Theory, all that changes, because now you can now see and shoot through some things. For instance, if an enemy is on the other side of a tent, you can see him with your thermal vision and shoot him through the tent with either your pistol or SC-20K. I've also found that you can shoot enemies through metal doors and wooden crates. For the most part, if you can see him with your thermal vision, your bullet won't have any problem finding him, either. You can also see through doors with your thermal vision, so you'll always know whether it's really a good idea to bash that door open. In fact, the thermal vision almost makes your fiber optics kit obsolete.

At the beginning of each mission, you choose what style of fighting you want to use: Stealth, Assault, or Redding's Recommendation (a balance of the two). The style of fighting just affects what equipment you start the mission with. For example, you might have 30 SC-20K rounds, 20 pistol rounds, 5 sticky cams, 3 sticky shockers, and 3 Ring airfoil rounds if you choose Stealth. Assault might up your SC-20K to 60 rounds and add a frag grenade, but leave you with only 2 sticky cams, 2 shockers, and 2 airfoils. Redding's recommendation might instead give you 30 rounds SC-20K and a frag grenade but only 3 sticky cams, 2 shockers, and 2 airfoils. I prefer Stealth for most missions, and actually completed some missions without firing a shot.

At the end of each mission, you get to see a scoreboard with all your statistics. This includes time spent, objectives completed, the number of enemies killed, enemies knocked out, civilians killed, and number of times identified as an intruder, as well as a couple other statistics. All this information is plugged into a formula that spits out your success ratio as a percentage. If you are a perfectionist you can replay the mission until you get 100%, but if you're like me and you already saved-and-replayed all the really fun parts, you won't care to spend any more time on the old mission.

A couple of things have changed with regard to security systems. For instance, now Sam can hack almost any electronic system that would otherwise restrict his access to certain parts of a building or certain information. Usually you can find a guard whose face you can shove into a retinal scanner, but if you accidentally shoot the guy with the magic eyes, the mission isn't immediately over as it would have been in SC or SC2.

Of course, all this hacking ability doesn't come free. Every time you hack a system, you have to play a mini-game where you just watch numbers light up for a few seconds and remember which ones light up. Simple, right? Wait until you have cameras trained on the workstations or guards walking toward your position. Every second you wait for the right numbers to light up is another second that brings you closer to your detection. Strangely, all the hacking seems to be based around figuring out IP addresses. Once you get to the later missions, the mercenaries will be able to detect whether you have hacked a door lock or a computer, so try to find the passcodes the old-fashioned way if at all possible!

Gameplay is just downright awesome! The developers have added a lot more attention to detail and have succeeded in making their latest installment into much more than a simple rehash of the same old game. Whereas the first two games only had 8 missions each, Chaos Theory adds a couple more, for a total of 10 rounds of fast-paced, heart-pounding action. All the new updates breathe some much-needed life back into the Splinter Cell series. Not only that, but they add an extra shot of epinephrine to get your heart racing again.

Finally, a little history on this opinion (optional reading)
I originally wrote this based on the fully-playable demo which included the entire first mission and posted it a full 18 days before the final shipping product was on store shelves. Since then I have updated it to represent the full, final version of the game. Truth be told, the only thing that really needed updating was the information about the different SC-20K attachments, but learning about the attachments only improved my opinion of the game. Everything else that really came to mind was already accurate.

Unfortunately, it was not very well received by the Epinions gaming community at first. Yes, I can certainly understand why people who write nonsense and gibberish about games before their final release date would not be very well respected here, but there's a very clear line between those types of people and longtime Epinions members like myself who write few opinions but spend countless hours putting every last ounce of truth and sincerity into their writings, with every intention of correcting potential mistakes. Epinions, after all, asks me if I would "recommend [the product] to a friend." I certainly wouldn't recommend something to my friend, later find out it was total crap, and continue to recommend the product. The minute I found out the product was no good, I'd stop recommending it and explain to my friend why I had the change of heart.

I still think some people's cut-and-dried policy of beating up on early reviewers is silly. After a tiresome debate I had two votes of confidence, as well as a few pats on the back that said, "Nice try but come back when you've updated it." That was enough to convince me there are still some people here on Epinions who are more interested in providing constructive criticism than in beating down anyone who dares challenge the status quo.

As I mentioned earlier, I do understand why some early reviews are garbage and should treated as such, but I think mine was one of the exceptions and I hope at least a few more people will think twice before stamping an early review "Not Helpful" if it has had considerable effort put into it. (No rating at all would be more appropriate than a NH.) Many thanks go to dr_devience, B_Campbell, yarrick, phungus, and underdawg for showing me that it was only the minority who stick strictly to the "early review=NH" policy.