Splinter Cell Double Agent

As a life long Metal Gear Solid fan, the Splinter Cell series is one which I have always been meaning to get into. It is often recommended on lists like: "If you like Metal Gear Solid… try this". But I did not own an original Xbox at the time of Splinter Cell's original release. Many years later I eventually acquired them and enjoyed them. I also have the Splinter Cell HD Collection for the PlayStation 3 but unfortunately it is a terrible port of the games and they do not run very well at all.

With the success of the original Splinter Cell in 2002, Ubisoft started the conveyor belt on producing as many sequels and spin offs as they could. In 2004 we got a direct sequel Pandora Tomorrow, which was quickly followed up in 2005 with Chaos Theory and, without wanting to break a trend, we got Double Agent in 2006. It always blows my mind at how fast they were producing sequels in this era of gaming. Splinter Cell Double Agent had two different versions to accommodate the release of the game across Xbox, PS2, GameCube, Will, Xbox 360, PS3 and the PC as well. As is so often the way in the early days of the PlayStation 3, that version was released last, in 2007, presumably because of the issues of dealing with porting the game to the cell architecture.

For a series that, at the time, was often compared with the Metal Gear Solid series I did notice the opening of this game shared some similarities. It starts with Sam Fisher in a plane in his tactical gear ready to jump off, similar to the opening events of Metal Gear Solid 3, you are dropped into the sea where you infiltrate a military base wearing a diving suit - not too far removed from Snake in Metal Gear Solid 1. However these comparisons that I was thinking about were not great for Double Agent as I felt Metal Gear Solid 3, released a few years earlier but for the PlayStation 2, both looked and played much better than the opening of Double Agent.

The graphics are not great. They do get a bit more tolerable later in the game, I don’t think the dark and murky opening level quite does the game any favors, but the textures seem to be to be quite low resolution and there is an overall lack of polish. I will say if the developers favored performance over graphics then they made the right choice as performance in these stealth games is key and for the most part that works quite well. But there are many segments where I do feel like I am playing a PlayStation 2 game on the PlayStation 3. The other review for this issue, Mirror’s Edge, released at a similar time, looks much more impressive.

Being a bit of a stealth veteran and enthusiast, I started the game on Hard mode and I am happy to admit, this was a terrible choice for me. On Hard mode you are discovered very quickly and killed even faster, it turned the game into a much more trial and error play style where I felt your stealth approach had to be pretty much perfect or you would be spotted and killed. This may be OK for some, but restarting the game on Normal created a much more enjoyable experience for me.

Once you get through the opening tutorial level, the core mechanic of the game is introduced. As the game title implies, Sam, who is an agent for the NSA, goes undercover to work for a criminal gang. During the whole game you have two “Trust Meters”. One for the NSA and one for JBA, the criminal group you are working with. The actions and choices you make in the game affect both meters and you have to decide how to balance it. There are certain actions in the game where the choice is a direct conflict between the two. If you decide option A, the NSA will lose trust in you, option B the JBA will lose trust in you. So it’s up to you to balance these out and make the right choices. In the third mission you are hit with, what I felt was, a pretty tough choice straight away and there were many more tough choices to come. The way you balance these out has impacts on the story and the overall end which is fun too.

I was particularly impressed early on when a character wanted Sam to follow him, and when I decided I wouldn’t and I would go and explore instead, the trust meter immediately started to dip and the character started getting angry that Sam was not complying. A lot of games that feature choices like these do so with fairly binary choices that are often presented in a dialogue choice or press X or press O. But here all the choices are in-game, it’s about which primary and secondary objectives you decide to go for and how you go about doing them. The levels have a good handful of options when you consider how you want to play it. Objectives are usually non-linear and you can go about them in any order, and areas have lots of hidden passages, locked doors, grates and other things to interact with and find different ways around. There are also tons of equipment and items to play with.

This game did release with an online multiplayer which is no longer functioning and the game never got a patch for trophies but the Xbox 360 version does have achievements, so it’s a real shame we never got any.

Looking online, there doesn’t appear to be a lot of love for this game in the Splinter Cell community. I think perhaps it doesn’t quite play like a regular Splinter Cell game, it almost plays more like a Hitman game (which is not necessarily a bad thing). That accompanied with some poor performance and graphics is probably what let’s it down. As someone who was not a die-hard fan of the original Splinter Cell games, this didn’t put me off and the central trust mechanic was a really interesting idea.

Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell Double Agent is a definite departure from the series’ typical formula. I personally think the trust system is rather unique and interesting and the game has a ton of different mechanics to engage in. There are moments where the gameplay can be a bit clunky, and areas where it feels like this is a PlayStation 2 game with some PlayStation 3 elements. I wouldn’t strongly recommend this one, but it is fairly cheap, so if you have run out of Hitman and other stealth games on the PlayStation 3, this is definitely one to consider trying out.