splinter cell blacklist

Splinter Cell Blacklist is the quintessential video game blockbuster. It stuffs in militaristic fetish across a globe-trotting solo campaign, taking in Iran, London, Cuba and the good old US of A . There’s co-op aplenty with survival modes and terrorist hunts. Moral choices: will you kill this man or will you not kill this man? Class-based asymmetric multiplayer. RPG-style upgrades. QTEs. Score challenges on global leaderboards that constantly tell you your friends are much better than you so get to it soldier. It wants to be every thing to every man and stuffs in so much video game that it spills onto two DVDs. It’s slick, violent, bombastic and a lot of fun. But, in trying to please everyone, it’s also a little toothless. 

This is most indicative in its protagonist. When Splinter Cell first arrived in 2002, Sam Fisher --a highly-trained black-ops infiltrator-- was a brilliant character. A wizened ghost the wrong side of 40: cynical, deadly and frightening. In Blacklist, he’s had ten years shaved off his age and that personality has gone with it. Now he’s your generic bad-ass soldier, highly trained in being good-looking and surly while shouting things like “THE MISSION IS THE PRIORITY”. There’s even a fist-bump at one point. If you had tried to fist-bump the original Sam Fisher, he would have choked you out.

New Sam Fisher is the commander of the new Fourth Echelon, an off-the-books US military team based in a giant airship. With their license to kill, Fourth Echelon are tasked with stopping the ’Blacklist’, a series of attacks on American soil carried out by a group known as The Engineers. The core members of Sam’s team are Anna Grimsdottir, analyst and long-time acquaintance of Sam; stoic spec-ops guy Briggs and irritating hacker nerd Charlie. All the characters are straight out of TV’s 24, and Blacklist does a pretty good job of replicating that show’s frenetic pacing and vague incoherence. It rarely makes much sense, but that’s ok, all you need to know is that very bad things are happening and Jack Bauer Sam Fisher is the man to stop them.