You’ll be tempted to play it with a fork, but use a spoon… to get every last drop

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This article was published 29/04/2010 (6005 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Splinter Cell: Conviction, like a glass of smooth Scotch, is best enjoyed slowly.

The long-awaited fifth instalment in the famed Tom Clancy series is not to be rushed through. While a run-and-gun, bash-and-slash style of play will, in most levels, lead to a sloppy success, the game’s charm is stealthy stalking. When shooting out street lights to creep through the resulting shadows leads to a silent takedown, the game’s true flavour floods the palette. And it’s satisfying.

Originally announced in spring 2007, Ubisoft Montreal’s followup to the 2006 entry, Splinter Cell: Double Agent, was set to launch in fall 2007. Instead, it was placed on hold. It leaped out of the shadows again with a new trailer at E3 2009, and after several delays, the game was finally released this month.

Conviction picks up with aging former secret agent Sam Fisher years after he quit the National Security Agency’s Third Echelon branch to pursue his daughter’s killer. He’s about to fall victim to a hit squad when former Third Echelon colleague Anna "Grim" Grimsdottir warns him and helps him escape.

Fisher soon begins to unravel a big old conspiracy yarn ball and — surprise! — becomes central to its resolution. The story is bread-and-butter Tom Clancy, set in locations as American as apple pie, and involving complicated high-level political motivations.

Conviction has a chic polish to it, with its most unique visual addition being the mission objectives projected in stylish lettering on walls and objects. With objectives literally spelled out and a constant arrow marking the destination, focus remains fixed on the best way to get there.

Some of the game’s glossy finish is muddied by Ubisoft’s method of communicating to players that they’re concealed in darkness: draining the colour from the screen. The method is troubling for the same reason it works — it’s hard to see and esthetically awkward. Adjusting from the real-time colourlessness to colourful transitions takes a while. And just when it begins to seem normal, Ubisoft drops a set of jaw-dropping sonar goggles into Fisher’s lap that allow him to see enemies in the dark and through walls. It’s hard not to wish he had been given them earlier in the game.

Still, Conviction does a good job of introducing new gadgets at a pace that allows players to learn how to use them before unlocking new toys. Those gadgets are part of what makes the game such fun. From those sweet sonar goggles to sticky cameras and new guns, Conviction gives Fisher a lot of ways to take out enemies silently or with a big loud bang.

This is Conviction‘s great dichotomy: the game is schizophrenic. Sometimes it’s hard to tell whether Fisher is the star of Splinter Cell or Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, particularly in the flashback level set in Iraq during Operation Desert Storm.

Ubisoft is clearly reaching for a wider audience by making a trigger-happy approach viable for swaths of the game — which is good business — but the game just doesn’t feel right without a covert strategy. That doesn’t mean blazing through isn’t fun. It just doesn’t seem like Fisher’s way.

— Canwest News Service