Splinter Cell: Blacklist Review

Ubisoft has out done themselves with the release of Splinter Cell:Blacklist. Blacklist being the next chapter in the journey of elite operative Sam Fisher. Like many simple story lines, you are basically trying to stop a terrorist group from pulling off various attacks because well who cares. How you go about doing it leaves with

Photo By Ubisoft

you challenging and a various about of options. Dropping from ceilings, snapping necks, and occasionally using the silenced pistol offers all the fun you could imagine in true Splinter Cell fashion. Different from many Splinter Cell installments after you have gathered Intel you can choose to spare or kill your adversary.

The storyline of Blacklist is fairly simple and a bit distracting at time but I could honestly care less about the story when I’m executing creative ways to stealthy eliminate guards and complete my objective. Some cut scenes seem a bit drawn out despite the voice acting being great (yes, the acting is almost better than the story).

The environments Sam is inserted in are well designed and offer various places to explore, hide, and take out guards with ease. With the environments fairly big and there being more areas to explore, players have many options at their fingertips on how they go about playing this game (although I prefer stealthily laying to bed guards some players my enjoy popping all the rounds they can carry into enemies). Despite the number of upgrades that can be earned to make missions easier the game looks to always be interesting and challenging. Some animations in the game are glitched and often leave you exposed or detected when attempting to remain unseen (when grabbing a guard from cover, you may experience the animation hitting the wall you are behind, leave you and the disabled enemy in the open).

There are a few co-op modes and missions to experience like the return of spies vs. mercenaries. The co-op challenges and multiplayer modes offer another level of challenges and fun with a friend (choose your friend wisely because there is a better chance you will get caught if you don’t work together).

Splinter Cell: Blacklist creates a fun game were players can true explore environments and locate new ways to execute tasks (which is exactly what you would want in a stealth game like this). Tweaks to the animations could use some work as some things don’t work as flawlessly as they should. Overall, Blacklist gets an thumb and a half from me for being close to meeting my expectations.