Bogged down with swift deaths, and no easy way to scale the learning curve, Splinter Cell's multiplayer offering was a mite inaccessible to the newbie, essentially strangled by its most devout followers.
The spy who loved meh Passionate embrace or deadly neck break? You be the judge.īut - as with so many online multiplayer games - newcomers to the scene often found themselves frustrated and unable to make headway against their more skilled counterparts.
It was a tense, stressful, but ultimately hugely enjoyable component, and one that came into its own once you learned the maps and how to exploit the weaknesses of your opponents - and played it with clued-up team-mates who knew the drill. But at the same time, the spies lacked the powerful automatic weaponry or the close combat-favoured first-person view of the mercs. As a spy, you wandered the gloomy environments in familiar third-person perspective, able to utilise familiar gadgets and use your acrobatic capabilities to access areas off limits to your opponents. The concept of giving players the choice over whether to skulk in the shadows as spies, or wade in all-guns blazing as mercenaries was an excellent one, and extremely well-balanced. Beginning with Pandora Tomorrow, and refined with Chaos Theory, the two-on-two online component that resulted was entirely different from the single-player campaign, and full of superb ideas. Rather than simply bolting endless unimaginative deathmatch and capture-the-flag variants onto Splinter Cell's single-player maps, Ubisoft took the approach of focusing on both disciplines as separate entities - to the extent that entirely separate studios spread across several continents worked on the individual portions of the game. Splinter Cell might be best known for the stealthy acrobatics found in a trio of excellent single-player campaigns, but while the Sam Fishers of the world have been busy snapping necks, concealing bodies and throwing terrorists off lighthouses, Ubisoft has been busily experimenting with and refining one of the most innovative multiplayer components of any game to emerge in recent years.
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