If sneaking around taking out enemies one by one is your kind of game then you’ll love Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Blacklist. Even if you prefer the all guns blazin’ approach, you’ll still bloody-well love it.
It’s no surprise that the Splinter Cell franchise is one of Ubisoft’s flagship series, along with Assassin’s Creed, as they’ve created yet another gaming gem with Splinter Cell: Blacklist.
This time around Sam Fisher is re-joined by Anna ‘Grim’ Grímsdóttir while we get to see two new characters in the form of a nerdy hacker called Charlie Cole (who provides some comic-relief from time to time) and Fisher’s new ‘right-hand-man’, Isaac Briggs.
The story is simple enough and you’ll also pick up the game fairly handy if you haven’t played a Splinter Cell game in a few years.
Okay, so basically, a group of terrorists called ‘The Engineers’ are planning to use weapons of mass destruction in a series of attacks on US soil and it is these attacks that are called ‘The Blacklist’. It’s up to Sam, with the help of Briggs, Charlie and Grim, to stop the Blacklist attacks and find out who the Engineers are.
So what did we think? Well, Splinter Cell: Blacklist is a seriously good game but it’s a bit daunting at first. You start off in your new HQ called the Paladin, which is a big customisable cargo plane and from here you use the SMI (Strategic Mission Interface, pictured below) to interact with missions.
You can choose to play the main mission or you can play a series of side missions that all tie in to the main story in one way or another. These side-missions can be played on solo but it’s easier to play them in co-op, which can be done via split-screen or you can search for a player 2 online.
Now, this is here where you might get a bit lost… literally. With the main mission and the side missions all laid out on the SMI it looks like there are twenty missions for you to do, but no time to do them in. So it’s best to just do one or two main missions and then play around with the others once you’ve settled in.
There are also some meta-missions called ‘Gone Dark’ that require the player to search around the map on the SMI for certain locations within a 24-hour period. The Gone Dark missions are more brain-teasers than they are ‘missions’, but the cool little feature here is the fact that one of them takes place in Ireland! We won’t ruin exactly what happens, but you can pretty much guess the IRA is involved.
The only problem that you might find with Splinter Cell: Blacklist is that the main story is a tad short, but thankfully the side missions and online gameplay more than makes up for this. Out of five, we’d give it a solid four and half.
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