Splinter Cell Conviction Micro Kinda-Review

I'm not done playing Splinter Cell Conviction yet, but I'm probably a bit over three quarters through with the single-player campaign. The Splinter Cell series has always occupied sort of a strange space for me: I've bought and played every single one that's been on Xbox/360 (this is the fifth in the series, excluding handheld spinoffs and cellphone de-makes) and enjoyed them all to one degree or another, but it's never been a series that I've felt an abiding passion for to the point where I would consciously identify them as some of my favorites. This is despite the fact that a strong case exists for Splinter Cell Chaos Theory as being one of the most finely crafted games of the previous generation.

Conviction changes up the formula quite a bit: it strips Sam Fisher (the player character) of his government affiliation and gear and puts him in the middle of a revenge tale. The gameplay is a lot different as well; the emphasis is still very much on stealth, but whereas in previous games, killing patrolling enemies was a risk/reward proposition that encouraged you to try to find a way to sneak through undetected, in Conviction you're more or less expected, and often times forced, to shoot most of the bad guys. To the credit of the developers, this doesn't feel like as much of a radical change as it initially sounds - since you're always outgunned and relatively vulnerable, the game isn't structured like a Gears of War/Call of Duty straight-up shooter (with the exception of the fourth level, which is structured exactly like this, and the less about which is said, the better) but rather forces a more tactically aggressive bent while allowing you a fair degree of experimentation.

The centerpiece of this approach is the "mark and execute" system, which allows you to designate between 2-4 hostile targets, depending on your loadout, and hit a button to autotarget and kill them. The catch is that you can only do this after pulling off a hand to hand takedown of another target, so you're forced to use stealth up to get the ability. Since you can mark targets at any time, this creates some really cool scenarios where you can, say, stalk a trio of patrolling enemies from a second-floor vantage point, mark two of them, jump down to take out the third, and immediately nail his companions. The system really allows you to pull off these type of maneuvers in a way that maintains the sense of control while enabling things that wouldn't be possible with previous iterations of the control scheme.

Actually, the controls in Conviction overall deserve high marks. The overhauled system provides some of the most fluid third-person control I've experienced in an action game, with the possible exception of Gears of War, and Conviction is giving you a lot more complexity than does Gears. There are a few snags here and there (I always find myself having trouble getting out of a crouch when I want to run, which requires that you hit RB after leaving cover) but the improvement over previous entries is clear, and obvious care has been taken to make sure that the control scheme fits the new, more aggressive gameplay style.

So I like Conviction quite a bit, which paradoxically makes its flaws and shortcomings more frustrating. The first issue I have with the game is probably more an artifact of my past experience with the franchise, but some of the changes really are at odds with things that were at the core of prior Splinter Cell games, such as the fact that you can't hide bodies anymore and you wind up in situations where you have to shoot your way out with no stealth option. Even the "mark and execute" system, which I think is actually pretty consistent with the Splinter Cell ethos, comes off to me as something that would feel more at home in Max Payne 3 than in a Sam Fisher adventure (note to people making Max Payne 3: steal this idea!)

The second issue I have is with the design choice to make the enemy AI yell at you constantly (nicely skewed in this Penny Arcade strip from last week, which doesn't exaggerate the situation by much). I'm sure there's a solid gameplay rationale for this, because it does improve your ability to track the enemies as they stalk you, but to have supposedly elite combat troops give away their position every five seconds while engaged in a cat-and-mouse battle of tactics really does break the illusion more than is desirable. Finally, despite the promise of a grittier and more emotionally driven narrative, Conviction turns into a boilerplate Tom Clancy improbable-and-poorly-explained conspiracy tales surprisingly quickly, and the dialogue and voice acting, with the exception of the always-great Michael Ironside as Sam Fisher, could use a lot of improvement. Even by the hallowed standards of video games stories, Conviction's plot doesn't make a lot of sense, and the antagonists pretty quickly cross the line into cartoonish supervillainy (word to Waylon Smithers).

I don't know if I'd mark Conviction as a must-buy for people who aren't series stalwarts such as myself, but it's an interesting experiment that does a lot of things rights. I'm really interested to try the co-op mode (the trailer for which I've embedded below), which is a completely different story and set of environments from the single-player and has been highlighted for special praise in a lot of the professional reviews. I could really see how the balance between careful planning and improvisation that the game encourages could be a lot of fun to navigate with another player, and the nature of the gameplay is such that a lot more actual cooperation between players would be necessary as compared to your average shooter. Also, one of the co-op characters is named Archer, which conjures the hilarious FX animated show by the same name. If I get the chance to check this out, maybe my estimation of Conviction will improve.