Final Thoughts on Splinter Cell: Double Agent

I’m kind of an idiot for only now finishing this game. It really is the best stealth-action series going, and Double Agent only solidifies that title. It’s a very tense and rewarding experience, and while all you’re really doing is sneaking up on enemies in the same manner over and over, the execution of every aspect of the gameplay is damn near perfect. My body tensed in unison with Sam Fisher’s as I got closer and closer to an enemy, and perfectly taking out someone without alerting other guards is, quite simply, fucking awesome. There are a variety of moves at your disposal in this regard, and they’re all contextual to the positioning of both you and the enemy. If you successfully get the drop on someone while their back is turned, you can choose to grab and choke them out, snap their neck, or give them a fierce elbow to the base of the skull. If you decide to grab them, sometimes you can interrogate them for information, and one of my favorite things to do was let them get about half their sentence out of their mouth, and then mid-sentence choke them out. It usually goes something like this: “Honest, man, that’s all I know! There’s trip wires all over the – aack, blurghhh, uhhhhh.” What's that? I didn't quite catch that last bit.

Aside from the enemy encounters, each level is unique and exciting to explore and stealth around until you find the right way to approach the given situation. During the course of the game, you’ll find yourself slinking along in a lot of suitably varied locales, and the missions never become boring or repetitive. In between missions, you’ll be tasked with bugging and generally spying on the JBA at their headquarters, and while I didn’t really like it at first, each progressive mission got better and better. The final headquarters mission is possibly one of my favorite endings in any game, or at least any game in the past few years. One thing I noted in my first impression of the game was the mechanic of balancing missions for the JBA and NSA. I thought it might be kind of shitty, but as it turns out, it was quite the opposite. While on a mission, there are multiple objectives for both sides. Some are primary, while others are totally optional and don’t affect the completion of the mission. Both sides have goals for you to accomplish, but if you aren’t able to do everything for everyone, it’s not a deal breaker. I found it really fun to try and do everything I could, but I simply couldn’t do them all. I know the ending changes in some regard based on the decisions you make, but I’m a bad ass and got the best ending possible, so suck on that. And I played it on hard, natch. Anyways, the story, while simple, hit all the right notes for this particular genre, and its culmination was insanely awesome and a blast to play through. Speaking of story, I much preferred Double Agent’s tale to the arguably more popular stealth-action game, Metal Gear. Obviously, it wasn’t anywhere near as complicated or dramatic (read: melodramatic) as Kojima’s series, but it did exactly what I wanted it to do. It gave me a plausible set up, logical progressions in the unfolding chain of events, and a fucking great ending. For a game like this, what else could you ask for? Nothing, as it turns out. Where Metal Gear tried forcing its false sense of deepness and worldly relevance on me, Double Agent was more concerned with letting me, you know, play the fucking thing. It’s quite nice to actually use stealth mechanics for more than ten minutes at a time before having to sit through a soap opera about a gay vampire and a formerly gay cyborg ninja. Honestly, who likes that shit? A lot of people, apparently. But whatever, it’s pretty damn awful in my opinion.

The last few missions of the game also reminded me of Metal Gear Solid 4. Being that this game came out first, that’s an interesting fact. The setting is like the first act of MGS 4, but with one big difference. In MGS 4, if you fired just one bullet, suddenly everyone on the battlefield was trained on you, and you alone. Not so in Double Agent. As you move along the level, you’ll encounter plenty of enemy soldiers who, upon seeing you, usually start shooting. But a lot of the time they cut their assaults short because they had to turn around and continue the fight they were already in. The whole thing felt like a real battlefield, because I wasn’t the prime target for anyone. I was simply moving through an ongoing conflict, and if they could take me out, great. If not, they have bigger things to worry about than some dude hiding behind a truck 30 yards away. It’s things like that I really appreciated, and it made the experience that much more memorable.

Of course, now I’m really interested in how Ubisoft is approaching Splinter Cell: Conviction. The game was given a hefty delay, and I really hope it turns out as good as I want it to be. Double Agent took the existing formula of past games in the series, shook up the story, and made the (basically) same mechanics feel fresh and new again. From what little I know about Conviction, I think it might do the same thing again. It seems the series is actually maturing and evolving with the times, instead of being stuck constantly remaking the same game. It’s a great thing, really, and I can’t wait to get my hands on the next iteration Ubisoft comes up with.