As I mentioned in my previous post, I like the Splinter Cell series. I also mentioned at the end (basing the statement on just the first two missions) that if you were looking for a good stealth-action game, you should probably go elsewhere. Now I'm a little further in and I'm pleased to report that my opinion has completely stayed the same.
You see, Conviction isn't really a stealth game. I know, I was surprised as well. But it's true -- Sam Fisher the "greatest stealth operative in the world" is apparently losing his touch.
In the previous games, Sam was never the all-guns-blazing action hero. He was the grey man, staying in the shadows and using diversionary tactics and his surroundings to isolate his enemies. He was a specialist, granted, but his speciality was keeping out of sight and out of reach.
In Conviction Sam is a completely different character. Now he has no allegiances and no rules to follow, so he has no qualms about killing everyone that stands between him and where he needs to be. To make matters worse, he now has the tools to be able to do that without the need for stealth, which breaks the concept of the Splinter Cell series altogether.
Ubisoft have put a few too many tools at Sam's disposal which don't conform with traditional stealth mechanics. As a starting point, the default weapon is a silenced pistol with unlimited ammo, so the question must be asked: why would I use anything else? Well, so far I haven't. You have the option to carry a secondary weapon and upgrade each firearm you pick up but it's all completely arbitrary when you remember that you have a silenced pistol with unlimited ammunition that is pretty much always available to you.
Then you have various creative ways of using the pistol. You can fire the pistol from behind cover, and Sam can blindfire 100% accurately without exposing himself at all. He can fire when hanging from a pipe, he can fire when dangling from a window ledge (which is bollocks, by the way), he can fire whilst using a human shield, and a lot of the time if you angle the camera in the right way he can fire through solid objects.
Sam can also now "Mark and Execute" targets, which essentially means selecting a number of enemies you particularly don't like and pressing a button to make Sam shoot them for you. Each weapon permits a certain number of "marks", and guess which one allows the most? Yeah, the silenced pistol with unlimited ammunition.
To earn the ability to perform this new manoeuvre you must kill an enemy using a melee attack, which is getting in close proximity and pressing the B button. It doesn't matter where you approach from, what type of enemy you're dealing with, how much health they have left, how much health you have left, just one press of the B button and the person dies, granting you the ability to have Sam play the game for you as they do so.
I imagine all this is Ubisoft's method of trying to convey Sam's superior abilities, but it comes across as false. I always liked the character because he was a man sculpted from training and experience rather than just a sprite with semi-supernatural talents; in this game, he has been de-humanized, relegated to just another unbelievable videogame character.
However, just because Conviction is a bad stealth game that doesn't mean it's a bad game overall. To be honest, I'm having quite a lot of fun with it. It has some neat aesthetic quirks, the mechanics work well when you play the game like an action game rather than a stealth game and it has some great new interrogation scenes. It does have some interface design issues which I'll be covering when I get around to reviewing the full thing, but it's still functional enough to provide an enjoyable experience.
I'm not sure how near the end I am, but hopefully before the conclusion there will be at least one level in which I'm not allowed to kill everyone or set off as many alarms as I like. Hopefully they might strip me of the pistol as well, but I suppose even then I've still got the one-button-kill Sam Fisher Special.
In summary, so far it's an enjoyable action game with stealth elements and some careless design issues. It isn't a great entry to the series in my opinion, but if you judge it on it's own merits it isn't all that bad. Definitely not a classic, but definitely not one to completely ignore.
I'll be back with a full opinion when I've beaten it completely.
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